Trump rebuked

OBSERVERS across the world have long questioned the utility of Donald Trump’s now three-month-old war on Iran. But a growing number of voices from within the US president’s Republican party are saying that this futile and illegal conflict must end. A resolution calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iran passed narrowly in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives recently, with four members of the US leader’s own party backing the resolution.

The move has expectedly incensed Mr Trump, who called it “unpatriotic”. Since the start of the war, most American lawmakers had only mildly been criticising the joint US-Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic. But now, with US mid-term elections in November inching closer, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers want to avoid the voters’ wrath at the ballot box.

Like people around the world, Americans are also paying high prices at the petrol pump and rising energy prices have sparked a global spike in inflation. Many Americans are rightly asking why they are paying the price — in blood and treasure — to protect Israeli militarism.

Moreover, the feeling that this misadventure must be brought to a close echoes across the American political spectrum. For example, House Democrats have called for an end to the “deeply unpopular and illegal war of choice”, while many conservative Republicans, including the MAGA wing, have lashed out against getting tangled in another ‘forever’ war. Only Israel and its hard-line Zionist supporters in the US have an interest in keeping the Iranian front open. Most other people of the world, including level-headed Americans, want a swift end to the war.

But the problem is that Mr Trump does not seem to have a workable game plan to extricate himself from this quagmire. For three months, he has been unable to bring to heel a militarily and economically much weaker foe. It was clear from day one that this mission was doomed to fail, and the reasons for attacking Iran kept changing. At times it was said that the Islamic Republic was being punished for its supposed crushing of internal dissent, at others it was to keep the world ‘safe’ from the Iranian nuclear ‘threat’.

All of these were flimsy pretexts for what was in reality an imperial mission to punish an unyielding foe, and forward the Israeli agenda for perpetual regional chaos. Mr Trump must listen to what his own lawmakers are saying. Instead of further escalation, he should, in all earnestness, work towards reaching a long-term ceasefire with Iran that Pakistan and other regional states are pushing for.

The deal must promise respect for sovereignty of all regional states, while all the Gulf’s littoral states should work together for a mutual security agreement without the interference of outsiders.

Published in Dawn, June 6th, 2026