We’ve been here before. It’s never ended well. It’s never ended, period. A few bunker-busters aren’t about to end it either, whether they have Fordow’s Mount Doom in the bag or not. The opposite always happens in the Middle East the moment Israel and the United States substitute barbarism for diplomacy. Always.
There’s not been a single exception to the rule since 1956, the last time the United States intervened to stop Israeli (and British and French) aggression on a neighbor.
It’s not as if certain Israeli and American administrations haven’t known how to negotiate. They’ve had numerous Nobel-worthy diplomatic successes: Israel’s peace with Egypt, with Jordan, with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its transformation into the Palestinian Authority, and more recent normalizations with Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan and what was the almost normalization with Saudi Arabia. Not least, there was the 2015 deal with Iran, which verifiably stopped Iran’s uranium enrichment until the current president recklessly pulled out in his first term, setting up his flim-flanked bombast last night.
Diplomacy’s been done with greater success than any military intervention since 1956, without exception. Every time Israel or the United States have resorted to war or any type of military option, they have reversed strategic advantages, triggered explosions of terrorism, and fueled extremism. Bombing Iran won’t change that. It’ll open a new and perilous front, one of whose outcomes is the certain acceleration not only of Iran’s but of other countries’ lunge for nukes as they figure–as North Korea has figured–that only nukes prevent attacks.
The president’s boast last night that the attack “totally obliterated” three Iranian nuclear sites had that rhetorical simplicity and clarity his fabrications rely on to make his disciples swoon but for the juvenile vocabulary that betrays a cluelessness his disciples are too clueless to worry about. George W. Bush enjoyed the same sunset glow in his “mission accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, 4,400 American and 300,000 Iraqi deaths too soon.
This morning the Pentagon was qualifying the president’s words to “severe damage,” which in the military jargon of Five O’Clock Follies is as precise as ellipses. Political thorns were clouding the after-action twerking. He’d broken his pledge so endlessly repeated since 2015 never to start “forever wars,” a colossal gamble with little preparation and no legal authority from Congress, on no evidence that Iran was close to going nuclear, and on even less evidence that it was threatening American interests.
“Imagine,” The Economist wrote on June 19, warning against an attack days before it happened, that Iran “now starts to kill American troops and civilians, or that it sends energy prices soaring by blasting Saudi Arabia’s oil industry or blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for oil and gas tankers. Or perhaps it will hit tower blocks in Dubai or Qatar, beginning a stampede of the expatriates who power their economies. Mr Trump would have to retaliate.”
Imagine no more. The president chose to indenture himself to Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloody reign as identically as his predecessor, as routinely as demanded by over half a century of American calamities in the Middle East.
So what, you say, were they supposed to do–let Iran become a nuclear power? The question reflects the either-or simplicity of last night’s show, when it was never a choice between either bombing or letting Iran get the bomb–not with Iran still far from a bomb and diplomacy the best option.
Even so: let’s assume Iran got the bomb. How is it different from conceding that Pakistan and North Korea have gone nuclear? Neither is more stable or predictable than Iran. Even as it successfully blackmailed the United States for billions in aid, Pakistan harbored Osama bin Laden for years in the same city that controlled its nukes while it propped up the Taliban against the 21-year American occupation of Afghanistan, eventually routing the American occupation.
That’s before getting into the more bigoted suggestion that Israel (or the United States, for that matter–the only power ever to use nukes) having the bomb is OK, but Iran having it isn’t. Bigotry joins morally mendacity when considering that war for war, soul for soul, Israel and the United States are with Russia the most destructive forces on the planet today, and the countries with the highest body counts to their names. Israel’s and America’s wars in the Middle East fit the template for what historian Barbara Tuchman called the “march of folly”–how major powers’ arrogance from Troy to Vietnam blinds them to their own crimes (and defeats).
Israel’s spectacular 1967 war, mistaken for a victory, set it up to be the occupying power it has been since for 4 million Palestinians between Gaza and the West Bank. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 on the promised certainty to rid its northern border of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The 1982 invasion birthed Hezbollah, a more lethal, indigenous militia that had its coming out with the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marines’ and French troopers’ barracks in Beirut that killed 299 servicemen and sent Reagan scurrying out of there with his tail between his legs.
Israel reloaded for Hezbollah and launched wars in 1993, 1996, 2006 (the one then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “the birth pangs of a new Middle East”) and 2024. However degraded, Hezbollah hasn’t gone anywhere.
Israel’s policy since its inception has been to deny Palestinians the right to exist, and with the exception of a few more realistic prime ministers, to deny the two-state solution, which became too real a possibility after the 1993 Oslo accords. Fearing a Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank unified with Gaza, Israel financed the rise of Hamas to sow division among Palestinians. It did so with billions of dollars, thanks to American complicity and taxpayers, “all based on the fundamentally flawed assessment that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of a large-scale attack,” as the New York Times reported in 2023.
Israel created a monster it could no longer control. Israel has been the monster American presidents have refused to control. The two dynamics culminated in Gaza. The destructiveness of Israel’s ongoing genocide is indistinguishable from a nuking but for conventional means to achieve the same ends, excused, financed and applauded by a subservient America.
Don’t even rinse. Just repeat. Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak installation in 1981 under the familiar pretenses–that Iraq was building nukes. It didn’t stop the United States from invading Iraq on the lie that it had weapons of mass destruction 22 years later.
Before launching the war, George W. Bush and his amen corner in American media (Thomas Friedman, Judith Miller, Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson, Christopher Hitchens, Fareed Zakaria, David Remnick) made an argument that went like this: “The United States has the prospect of a rare strategic opening. What has for years been a reactive approach in the Middle East can now be transformed into a proactive vision: one that curbs [Iraq]’s malign ambitions and efforts, stabilizes Gaza and lays the foundation for a new Middle Eastern order built on security, integration and peaceful relations.”
The West’s orientalism, a pathology that assumes only the West knows what those dumb Arabs and Persians and Pashtuns need, has penned volumes of moronic words about the Middle East. Those rank in a league of their own. We all know what followed.
The catch: the paragraph I attributed to Bush above was actually written yesterday by Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, who argued in the New York Times why Israel and the United States had to attack Iran. I just substituted Iraq for Iran in that bracket.
Nothing has changed. Israeli and American illusions are as lethal as ever. That’s the definition of tragedy: a catastrophe foretold. That’s what the president started last night, foreclosing on the only viable option there was. The rest is “Mission Accomplished.”
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
Leave a Reply