Some called it “Operation Grim Beeper.” That may seem clever to adolescents, but there is nothing funny about the promiscuous mutilation of human beings.

On the afternoon of September 17, 2024, thousands of handheld pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon. Their purported target? Hezbollah operatives. Forty-two people, including children, were killed by the indiscriminating devices. More than 3,500 were injured in an instant, the booby-trap blast blowing open abdomens and claiming fingers and eyes.

Although purchased from a Taiwan company, the pagers were produced by a shell company that was part of a Mossad operation, packed with powerful plastic explosives and a detonator that would be triggered at will by Israeli intelligence.

The next day, walkie-talkies similarly rigged with explosives were detonated as well, killing at least twenty-five and injuring over six hundred.

The exploding pagers Trojan horse attack was just one more tactic from an old and well-used Israeli playbook. Thirty years ago Israel targeted and killed a Hamas bombmaker with an booby-trapped phone.

Other pages of the Israeli playbook include brazen denials, false flags, assassinations, phony ceasefires, surprise attacks, and industrial sabotage.

Of course other countries employ the same tactics, including the United States, but they appear to have a privileged position in the Israeli playbook. This we may presume from its oft-cited intelligence motto “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.” As if to underscore this propensity, one of the pager-plotters told CBS 60 Minutes that the people walking around Lebanon with scarred faces, missing eyes, and fingers “are walking proof of our superiority all around the Middle East.”

The problem for Americans is that in the same way that he is infatuated with the pro wrestling circus, President Donald Trump is mightily impressed with the tactics of deception and seeks to ape them. That goes a long way to explain his infatuation with the Israeli prime minister.

Benjamin Netanyahu knows it. He proudly presented Trump with a gold-plated commemorative model of the deadly pagers. “That was a great operation,” said the appreciative president.

Trump is uniquely susceptible to Netanyahu’s entreaties. We learn from The New York Times account “How Trump Took the US to War With Iran,” that in the White House Situation Room in February, Netanyahu laid out a case for “near certain victory” in the latest war:

Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and—with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion—an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime.

That was a stretch. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, called Netanyahu’s assumptions “farcical.” Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio, an inveterate warmonger, said, “It’s bullshit.” Yet the president bought it.

It was to be yet another surprise attack on Iran, Israel’s third in just a year and a half. Trump, ever under the spell of Netanyahu’s tactics, gave the go-ahead. Americans didn’t merely participate in Israel’s plan. It became a U.S.-led operation.

There is something profoundly immature in Trump’s copycat idolatry, immature and unhealthy. It can be seen in the president’s constant threats and apocalyptic brinksmanship: “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before!”; “Your country gets blown to smithereens!”; “Hell will rain down on you like nothing you have ever seen before!”

On and on it goes. “We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong”; “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Boys playing video games online may talk like that. Adults with healthy human consciousness do not.

Trump may fancy himself “a stable genius,” but there is nothing especially genius or inspired about false flags, surprise attacks, luring starving people with desperately needed provisions and then mowing them down, or arranging negotiations so the negotiators can be taken out.

“We negotiate with bombs,” said War Secretary Pete Hegseth. He is right.

“Donald Trump seems proud that he twice deceived the Iranians under cover of ongoing peace talks to launch military attacks against them,” notes Joe Lauria of Consortium News. “But it is not just the enemy that it is deceived. Carrying out an unpopular war of aggression for no legitimate reason usually requires deceiving your own public too.”

Machinations of overweening arrogance, too clever by half, often backfire. Bomb the negotiating table one too many times and no one will negotiate. Pakistan had to deploy fighter jets to protect Iranian diplomats traveling to peace talks in Islamabad; they were justly concerned about Israel’s history of targeted assassinations.

Both Tel Aviv and Washington announce and break ceasefires in one breath or create phony ceasefires with no intent other than to use the pause to rearm, and that will be the end of ceasefires. Keep engaging in surprise attacks and be feared and reviled by the rest of the world.

Is that what Americans of good will want for their country? That its every act should be clouded in suspicion?

When Thomas Jefferson sat down in the hot and humid second floor of a rented Philadelphia room in the summer of 1776 to declare American independence from British rule, he did not just notify King George. He felt compelled out of a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” to specify to the rest of the world the reasons for sundering the relationship.

The United States can no longer claim to have a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. Trust in our leaders is shattered; suspicion of our government abounds. Maybe in the remaining days of the U.S. global military empire, The Empire of Lies that I describe in my new book by that name will stumble along. But as I detail, the empire is coming to an end much sooner than most suspect. I remember discussing this with Dr. Ron Paul years ago. He expressed his concern that when a real crisis inevitably comes to America, perhaps a Richter-scale monetary calamity, there will not be many people eager to come to our aid.

Jefferson’s bill of particular abuses and outrages by King George included this one: “He has incited domestic insurrections against us.” Yet inciting domestic insurrections around the world has become a perennial occupation of the Empire of Lies. We did it in 1953 in Iran when the CIA paid for weapons, hired thugs and mercenaries to swarm the streets, bought off military leaders, and at the moment of maximum chaos flew Reza Shah Pahlavi, accompanied by CIA head Allen Dulles, to Tehran to occupy the Peacock Throne. It was an insurrection that continues to have grim consequences to this day.

We did it again in 2014. The Empire of Lies spent at least $5 billion meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs over a number of years, subsidizing dissidents, and micromanaging of events as they became increasingly violent. The campaign toppled the elected government and installed a U.S. puppet. Carnage followed and continues.

The United States contrived yet another massive civil disruption in Iran, softening the country up before the launch of the joint American-Israeli attack in February. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testified before Congress, the U.S. instigated economic warfare in Iran as part of a Trump-ordered “maximum pressure campaign” to drive people into the streets:

“What we have done at Treasury is created a dollar shortage in the country. It came to a swift and, I would say, grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. The central bank had to print money. The Iranian currency went into free fall. Inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”

There was more to the new insurrection than economic tools. Trump confessed to Fox News, “We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them.”

That the United States was itself instrumental in creating the riots and civil disorder and provoking the predictable government crackdown that cost untold lives in Iran cannot be denied.

Of course Israel was at work in the affair, as usual. Former CIA head and Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tipped the news in an X post at the height of the disturbances. “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.” At the same time an Israeli government minister, Amichai Eliyahu said, “I can assure you that our people are working there right now” to destabilize the regime.

An engineered economic collapse. Guns, lots of them. Foreign agents in the streets. Things that are not designed to make the world more peaceful. They are designed instead to create war and poverty, destruction and death.

Clever? Or too clever by half?

Wouldn’t a good long spell of minding our own business be a fitting way to honor our 250 year anniverary? No more draining the American people’s prosperity with foreign interventions and ever more war spending. No more sending America’s youth overseas only to return bitter and broken in body and spirit. It might even be good for Israel, too. Without a big muscle-bound goon enforcing its every misdeed, it might have to try being conciliatory with its neighbors from time to time. Like other nations do.

That would be better that mere cleverness. That would be wise.