Yesterday, we talked about the Very Clear Objectives Trump and friends have laid out for our “excursion” to Iran. With that fiction out of the way, let’s talk about the actual reasons we’ve decided to start the world’s stupidest war. They are, I’m afraid, very stupid, very misguided, and/or very downright evil. Like, cartoonishly so.
Let’s get into it:
1. The Neocons
When the neocons occupy your “least awful” spot, you know you’re in for a bad time.
We know what the neocons want because they got it, good and hard, from 2001 to 2021. We are hearing those same arguments again, which I will now explain with all the dignity and respect that they deserve:
I will say this much for neocons: at least the outcome they claim to want is good. The Taliban were monstrous. Sadaam Hussein tortured and oppressed his people. Ayatollah Khamenei was a theocratic tyrant who murdered tens of thousands of protesters. There’s an appealing logic to “Khamenei is bad, therefore killing Khamenei will make the world a better place.” Surely the people of Iran will rise up and…you know. Do something. Take over the government with the weapons they don’t have, displace the Revolutionary Guard, establish Jeffersonian democracy. No way Iran could possibly end up as a failed state or with someone even worse at the helm, right?
For a lot of neocons with actual power, the whole “bringing democracy to those yearning to be free” thing is a fig leaf. War is good for the economy, and they wish to drink Iraq/Iran/Venezuela’s milkshake. But whatever. Stock market’s in freefall, gas prices are doing the opposite of that, and Iran’s completely predictable closure of the Strait of Hormuz combined with a now-inevitable long-term drop in LNG production (which we’ll get to in a minute) is a real buzzkill even for war profiteers, surely.
But neocon delusions cannot explain GWOT II because there are no neocons in positions of power within the administration—not really. Marco Rubio probably comes closest, and even he was careful not to call for regime change outright. Trump’s will-he-won’t-he bullshit about regime change (see yesterday’s chart) is calculated to reassure the doddering former establishment that Iran is business as usual. Just another battle for the hearts and minds of the poor benighted people of…wherever.
2. GWOT 2: No Quarter
On the opposite end of the spectrum we have Pete Hegseth, who has spent the last three weeks yelling at the media for talking about dead soldiers and shouting things like “We are punching them while they’re down, and that’s exactly as it should be,” or “They are toast and they know it.” Say what you want about Pete Hegseth, he has more discipline than most: our Secretary of War has mostly kept both hands above the lectern despite clearly being on his third week of priapism. Someone should probably call a doctor.
Unlike the neocons, Hegseth knows how stupid and awful the Global War on Terror was — he deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as an infantry officer. Anyone who actually fought in those wars walked away with one of two conclusions. People like myself walked away knowing that the problem with GWOT was the mission itself. You cannot bring freedom and democracy at the barrel of a gun. Our efforts to do so destabilized an entire region, killed almost a million human beings and disrupted the lives of untold millions more. People don’t like being told what to do, destroying their infrastructure wins neither hearts nor minds, and any faction too weak to gain power without our help is also too weak to keep it when we leave.
Hegseth’s camp, on the other hand, believes we lost the War on Terror because we weren’t brutal enough. In his own words: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” In this version of history, we lost GWOT because we weren’t allowed to shoot back at people who fired rockets at us. We didn’t crush the enemy, so the enemy took over after we left.
Hegseth isn’t entirely wrong. Our rules of engagement did tie our hands. They did sometimes prevent us from killing the people trying (sometimes successfully) to kill us. But we would have lost just as hard—harder, even—if we’d gone all-in on the old ultraviolence. You cannot brutalize a country into submission long-term, it simply does not work. You are either committing to a forever war so your boot can stay planted on their neck, or you are spending blood and treasure to create a new generation of implacable enemies.1
Hegseth wants revenge, I think, and his desire to kill is wholly incompatible with any kind of liberation for Iranians. “We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” he said on March 13th, and I am not the first person to point out that “no quarter” means killing the wounded and refusing to accept surrender. Fewer people noticed Hegseth’s 60 minutes interview, which I think is far worse: “The only ones who need to be worried right now is the Iranians who think they’re going to live.”
Speaking of which…
3. The Israeli Dream
You’ve seen the Marco Rubio quote. Everyone has seen the Marco Rubio quote:
We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.
Rubio went on to claim he never said this, but he did say it. We cannot talk about the war in Iran without talking about Israel, despite that subject being more of a minefield than the Strait of Hormuz six month from now.
The United States has agency. Israel did not make us do one of the dumbest things this country has ever done, regardless of how much pressure they applied. Israel is also our partner in this war, and what they do clearly affects what we do. There are individuals in our government who align with Israel’s objectives and push that agenda here at home for a variety of reasons. None of this is code for The Jews. We are talking about a nation-state, not a large group of individuals with a wide variety of thoughts and feelings.
Netanyahu summarized Israel’s objective on Day 1 of this war: “The goal of the operation is to put an end to the threat from the Ayatollah regime in Iran.” Ending that threat could mean a lot of things, and one of them, according to Netanyahu on that day, was to free the people of Iran from their oppression:
You, the people of Iran, and the honorable Iranian army, are not our enemies, and we are not your enemies. We have a common enemy — the murderous clique of Ayatollahs that seized control of you through the oppressive forces of the Revolutionary Guards…this is your opportunity to establish a new and free Iran. Take your destiny into your own hands. Lift your heads, raise your eyes to the sky. Our forces are there, pilots of the free world, coming to your aid.
Beautiful words, right? He repeated them on March 11th, and again on March 17th. What a wonderful thing to do for the Iranian people. Truly a beacon of light in the region.
Here are some other words, from a cable from Jerusalem reviewed by the Washington Post. From the article:
If large numbers of Iranians return to the streets, Israeli officials say “the people will get slaughtered” because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s principal military force, “has the upper hand,” according to the cable. The document’s authenticity was verified by two State Department officials.
Despite the grim forecast, Israeli officials said they hoped for a popular revolt and urged the United States to prepare to support protesters if that happens, according to the cable.
Narges Bajoghli, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University, sums it up this way: “One of the ways of achieving [the fragmentation of Iran] is creating more opportunities in which the guns of the state get turned onto the population…The goal is not creating a liberal democracy for the Iranian people. It’s widening the chasm between the society and the state.”
Israel can say all the words it wants; we see what they are doing. The Nation reports that Israel is targeting Iranian border guards along the Iraq border, which would make it easier for separatists to smuggle weapons into Iran. They’ve targeted the building where Mir-Hossein Mousavi, one of the opposition’s few viable leaders, is currently under house arrest. Their goal seems to be complete destruction of Iran’s leadership class, regardless of political affiliation; they’ve killed at least 70 of them so far.
Trump, in his weird way, has repeatedly admitted what a problem this all is:
Well, most of the people we had in mind are dead. So we had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So I guess you'll have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon we're not going to know anybody.
Israel is also striking Iranian infrastructure—not military targets, or even their military-industrial complex, but their ability to produce oil and natural gas (which is the thing that keeps them fed). These strikes started on March 8th, when Israel hit oil storage facilities in Tehran. Here is a video of what that looked like:
This video is straight out of Dante’s Inferno. It is a nightmare. This is what it looks like when you give a city of 9.8 million people health conditions that will afflict them for the rest of their lives.
On March 19th, Israel took things a step further with their strike on the South Pars gas field, the liquid natural gas (LNG) facility that supplies most of Iran’s domestic energy. In retaliation, Iran bombed Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility. Qatar supplies 20% of the world’s LNG. Iran just knocked out 17% of their production for at least three to five years, which means that 3.4% of the world’s LNG supply is gone for the next three to five years.
This is so bad, guys. This is catastrophic to the point where even Trump had to distance himself from the strike, sorta:
“ NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar - In which instance the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.”
God help us all.
All of these developments are bad for Israel, by the way. Much as America’s repeated efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East have failed, so too have Israel’s repeated attempts to destroy their enemies through targeted strikes on their leadership. As the CIA predicted, Khamenei’s replacement is even more radical and hard-line than the deceased Supreme Leader. As former senior Iran watcher at the State Department Alan Eyre explained to the New Yorker:
“[Mojtaba Khamenei] is ‘Putin light’ in clerical garb, and his appointment marks the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the beginning of Iran as an I.R.G.C.-dominated police-military-security state.”
A forever war with Iran is terrible for Israel, but great for Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces jail time for various crimes the second he leaves office. It’s also great for his closest friends in America—the apocalyptic evangelical death cult doing everything it can to push us into the end times.
4. The Apocalyptic Evangelical Death Cult
I am a (NCO rank withheld) in our unit. This morning our commander opened up the combat readiness status briefing by urging us to not be “afraid” as to what is happening with our combat operations in Iran right now. He urged us to tell our troops that this was “all part of God’s divine plan” and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
That’s a quote from a letter to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), which received over 200 similar complaints from 50 different military installations.
This story, shocking as it is, is unfortunately not surprising. People inside the Trump administration tend to view Israel through the lens of biblical prophesy. “[The Jewish people] have returned [to Israel]. For God’s promise is eternal, and it is perfect, and his word is always true,” Marco Rubio proclaimed during a visit to Israel last year. Elise Stefanick, Trump’s onetime pick for UN ambassador, believes Israel has “a biblical right to the entire West Bank.” Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, told Tucker Carlson that it would be fine if Israel took all the land promised to them in the Bible, which stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Jonathan Larsen, who broke the MRFF story, also reports that Pete Hegseth regularly attends a weekly prayer group led by Ralph Drollinger, who believes that “Until Israel returns to the whole of the land, you don’t start the eschatological [end times] clock towards the return of the Messiah.” That’s the same Hegseth who has robust ties to Doug Wilson, an apocalyptic theocrat who does not deserve to be from Idaho, the most beautiful state in the union. Lotta that going around, unfortunately.
None of the people just quoted are Jewish; all of them are Christian. They don’t love Israel out of the goodness of their hearts, but because Israel has to exist for Jesus to return. The most relevant chapter seems to be Matthew 24, in which Jesus describes the lead-up to the Second Coming. Here are some quotes:
7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.
9 Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.
10 And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.
…
29 Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:
30 And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
There are a lot of different opinions within the evangelical community on what, exactly, this (and the Book of Revelations) means. But everyone agrees that Israel has to exist for Jesus to come back, and that a bunch of wars have to happen as well.
This sounds crazy, I know. It sounds crazy because it is crazy, and yet end-times fervor is an enormous driving force within the American government. Evangelicals see Trump as a messiah figure, and Trump loves being seen that way. I have been to a lot of conservative events over these past several years, from CPAC to TPUSA to Lincoln Day Dinners in the wilds of Idaho, and every year the Christian overtones grow stronger. Every year I hear more about how these soldiers for Christ are engaged in a spiritual war against the forces of darkness, and those forces of darkness are you and me. Liberal left-wing lunatics. Trans rights are at the center of our evil plan, by the way: a perversion of God’s way, a direct attack on His creation. We aren’t just wrong. We are destroying the very concept of virtue on purpose, because we are literal demons. They believe this. They’re starting to act on it.
It’s enough to make you miss the neocons.
What Happens Next?
I’ve been working on this damn thing for two weeks: a combination of personal shit, countless rabbit holes, and general despair as everything grows worse and worse. Trump has declared victory, demanded allies open the Strait of Hormuz for him, declared that he doesn’t even care about the Strait of Hormuz, declared victory again, and is now threatening to either bomb or take over Kharg Island if the Iranians don’t open that strait he doesn’t care about. Iran has obviously told him to get fucked, so we’ll find out shortly whether he was bluffing or whether he’s going to order all those Marines he’s sent to the area to go boots on the ground and make everything even worse.
(update: Trump is now saying he’s had great negotiations with Iran and is postponing the Kharg strike, Iran says that no negotiations have taken place and they have no interest in talking; no doubt by the time you read this something even stupider will have happened. Who can keep up anymore)
We are in the middle of a worst-case scenario that makes land war in Asia look downright clever. Trump’s flirted with worst-case scenarios so many times over the last decade, only to pull back at the final minute. This time, it’s probably too late.
I wish I had a happier note to end on. I’m sorry.
Neocons and war bros love to point to Japan as an example of brutality done right. We nuked Japan, Japan surrendered, and now we have anime and reliable automobiles: QED. But Japan could not be more different than Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, or anywhere else we’ve fucked up over the last half-century or so. The Emperor of Japan ordered full cooperation with the rebuilding effort, and had the absolute power to make the order stick. In return, he got to keep his seat; no regime change, no untested leader assuming power with American backing and little else. We didn’t destroy their infrastructure and call it a day, we spent obscene amounts of money on reconstruction and social programs. The Japanese project didn’t work because of the violence, it worked because Japan itself is unique.
First - none of us pay you enough for this type of thoughtful coverage. You are holding the red hot iron of the original sources, with these people, and making sense of it. Not from an addled leftist brain - but just sheer common sense.
There is this odd dynamic tension between the fact that we are living in extraordinary times - times of immense technological acceleration, times of explosive human population growth, times of space exploration. This time requires a new way of seeing the world, humanity, and its interconnectedness.
But "end times" theology can't accommodate the change. They are in a fever dream that the "end times" must be NOW - and they have the tools of destruction to force something. A catastrophe of unimaginable consequence, hoping it will force Jesus to return. (Who has been gone for 2000 years already, btw).
Back in the day, there was a wonderful author named Daniel Quinn. He wrote a book called "The Story of B" and in the book discussed what happens when a cultural story no longer works to make sense of the world. It precipitates cultural collapse.
End times theology is in a state of cultural collapse. It cannot realistically help people cope with the extraordinary moment of human history we are living through. It is trying to prove that it's real at the cost of reason, democracy, sanity, peace, prosperity - everything that matters. It is collapsing, but it going down swinging. And religious fanaticism in one sect is going to inflame religious fanaticism elsewhere. The fanatics are holding the future of humanity hostage because their theology is simply too limited to explain and guide humans through the massive change we are living through.
Thank you for giving me the space to respond to your articles. I have been waiting for your next posts and they are spot on.
"Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:
30 "And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory."
Sounds like nuclear winter capped by one final nuclear blast. The sign of the Son of man is a mushroom cloud.