Like most of you, I have been watching in shocked bewilderment the breathtaking stupidity of the Trump administration’s war on Iran, brought to us by the same kind of liars who sold us the same kind of lies about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. United States intelligence agencies have repeatedly concluded that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, and it is obvious that Iran poses no military threat to the United States itself. The U.S. launched an unprovoked war of aggression, and the president announced his genocidal intent to destroy Iran entirely if his demands were not met. There is thankfully now a two-week ceasefire, but war is unpredictable, and there is now a very complicated mess in the Persian Gulf region.
Trump’s unhinged and profane rants about the war have evinced, not only his confused panic that his war has not been going as he expected, but also that he has no shred of human decency in him at all. Speculation about the near future aside, what does it say about this country that we have come to this?
It has been clear since Trump’s first bombing campaign last June that he has come within the orbit of those interested in fomenting war in the Middle East, particularly Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has lobbied extensively for aggression against Iran. In allowing himself to be talked into this crisis by warmongers such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and various media nitwits whose opinion he apparently values, Trump has demonstrated terrifically bad judgment which, at this point, should surprise no one. Iran had no nuclear weapons program, but Netanyahu has been claiming they were weeks or months away from having nuclear weapons since the early 1990s. The U.S. fell for this same nonsense with the Iraq War, which also had no active program, and it took Trump, who has now totally beclowned himself, not to see through this fraudulent sales pitch. Thirteen Americans have now died advancing Netanyahu’s dream of regional hegemony, and whether more may die depends on Trump’s mercurial whims. The U.S. has now been fighting in Iraq again as well as in Iran. We replaced the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan and begat ISIS in Iraq. That’s how moronic this is.
The war’s political objectives are, to say the least, opaque and shifting. It is clear that Trump thought Iran would simply cave to his demands, and that he disregarded the analysis he received about Iran shutting down the Strait of Hormuz in the event of war. Trump has the judgment of a teenager in heat and is clearly ignorant about history and military affairs as he single-handedly disrupts the global economy through impulsive choices. It is terrifying that someone this dumb wields the power of the presidency, an office which our distorted political system has given centralized power that was never contemplated by the generation that gave us the U.S. Constitution.
Trump’s benighted overconfidence notwithstanding, there is simply no way the United States will force a new regime on Iran through air power. The U.S. and its allies carried out brutally destructive air campaigns on Germany and Japan in the Second World War, but it took unconditional surrender and lengthy occupations to form governments in those countries that would be acceptable to Washington. But we know that no matter how much ordinance the U.S. drops on Iran, the regime will remain in place without an invasion and occupation, which would be disastrous. This means the U.S., having accepted Iran’s ten-point plan as a basis for negotiations, will not emerge with a meaningful victory. This is about the worst thing Trump could have done. He probably knows this now, but he lacks the integrity to admit that to anyone.
Part of the meaning of these events, which plainly contradict every foreign policy position Trump campaigned on, relate to the foreign policy establishment inside and outside of government. Military threats and intervention are common tools of U.S. foreign policy. There is a very substantial network of think tanks, funded in large part by foreign governments and defense contractors, that lobby for an aggressive foreign policy and have specifically lobbied for war with Iran.
The Iran war is costing several hundred million dollars a day, and this is good news for those who profit from war. In addition to the outside financial interests and ideological pressure groups who favor aggressive foreign policy, the professional class inside the government is staffed by people whose livelihoods depend on foreign adventurism and intervention. Budgets and prestige grow from cultivating foreign involvement, not from non-interventionism. Principled non-interventionists will not go far in U.S. foreign policy circles, and people with those views are unlikely to be attracted to them in the first place. In a word, you will not find a lot of libertarian CIA analysts.
As a result of these forces driving U.S. foreign policy, there will be pressure exerted on any future president to continue foreign interventions, regardless of what they say as candidates. Trump may be unique in his total lack of political principle, infinite malleability, and brazen mendacity, but in my memory his predecessors have only been a few degrees better. The breadth of U.S. foreign intervention really does not change much from one administration to the next. This is one reason we are not going to vote our way out of this.
A second reason is deeper and more disturbing: about 38% of Americans currently support the war on Iran. While you may be heartened that it is not a majority, this means that tens of millions of Americans support aggressive war and threats of totally destroying another country that poses no threat to them. You may be certain that this same percentage, more or less, was recently claiming that a reason for war was to liberate from oppression the very people they now advocate bombing to smithereens. They are indifferent to the human cost of this pointless war of choice, and that is truly diabolical. This is nearly four out of ten of your neighbors, and they vote.
Elections and “democracy” have not made the United States a force for peace, and based on history, we should not expect them to. This means that we are confronted with a problem that has no obvious solution. One of the soundest arguments against the state is that people cannot be trusted to wield political power at all.
