Last week, after ordering the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani—who was, according to the Guardian, “widely seen as the second most powerful figure in Iran,” behind Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—President Trump warned Iran not to retaliate. Writing on Twitter, he said that the United States would respond in turn by attacking fifty-two Iranian sites, some “at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture.”
Others have rightly noted that the destruction of sites of cultural but not military importance is a war crime. But why, specifically, fifty-two sites, and what does it tell us about Trump’s aims in this self-created crisis?
Fifty-two is a powerful number in this context.
It may have stuck in Trump’s mind because there are currently 5,200 U.S. troops in neighboring Iraq. (Responding to current events, the Iraqi parliament met in an emergency session on Sunday and voted to expel all U.S. troops from the country.) Or perhaps the number resonates because of the B-52s that would likely deliver the threatened bombs to those fifty-two sites in Iran.
But Trump invited yet another interpretation when he tweeted in his “WARNING” that the fifty-two targets represent the fifty-two Americans who were taken hostage in Iran in 1979 and held for over a year, after the fall of the brutal U.S.-backed Shah of Iran. Linking the 2020 assassination of Soleimani to the Iran hostage crisis would seem to make little sense. It casts the assassination of Soleimani as retributive payback for a past wrong, even though the Trump administration tries to insist it was an act of deterrence rather than aggression—a preventative measure, aimed at stopping attacks it claims were “imminent.”
The explanation may lie instead in a fantasy of poetic justice: the link positions Trump as Rambo, the Vietnam veteran and symbol of masculinity played by Sylvester Stallone, who avenges American humiliation. In the second film of the multimillion-dollar film franchise—Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)—Rambo “launches a bloody rescue mission in Southeast Asia for U.S. servicemen missing in action from the Vietnam War.” Nearly four decades after the first Rambo film was released, Trump seeks the same sort of redemption of the nation. It is no coincidence that he has recently disseminated on Twitter a doctored image of himself as another of Stallone’s characters, the fictional boxing hero Rocky Balboa (about whom Muhammad Ali said: “America has to have its white images”).