Days of Infamy

Popular support for war always erodes, but it helps to make a case and sell it. Trump didn't, and not just because he couldn't.

Franklin Roosevelt knew how to sell a war. The key was patience. He waited until Japan attacked the US Navy at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In his speech to Congress, He made it clear that the the attack was deliberate, and came as a surprise. He memorably called it "a date which will live in infamy." He explained that the US was "still in conversation" with Japan, "looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific." The US did not want war, and was only responding to a heinous act of war perpetrated by Japan. He didn't exaggerate the damage done (2,343 US service personnel killed, 960 missing, 1,272 wounded; 151 planes destroyed; eight US battleships sank or damaged). He noted, almost in passing, that Japan had also attacked Malaya, Hong Kong, and other US territories in the Pacific: the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and Midway Island. He asked Congress to declare war against Japan.

In his address to Congress, Roosevelt did not mention Germany, or Europe, or entering the war that had been raging there since Germany had invaded Poland in 1939. Hitler saved him the trouble by declaring war on the US on December 11, at which point all he had to do was to respond in kind. Again, he didn't declare war first, although by then most Americans were also reconciled to a war in Europe they knew they had not sought, but felt they were forced into finishing. And Americans were united in backing the declaration of war, as they weren't before Pearl Harbor, and as they had not been in Woodrow Wilson's 1917 rush into the Great War, or into any war (or "police action," or choose your euphemism) since.

Roosevelt certainly recalled Wilson's failures in selling US entry into the Great War in 1917. Wilson had campaigned on keeping the US out of the war, then in less than a year after starting his second term decided that the loss of some merchant shipping justified the reversal. The war was started by monarchies fighting for empire, wedged into a zero-sum struggle to conquer the rest of the world. The US was safely outside this system, and ordinary Americans had no real stake in the outcome. Wilson worked furiously to whip up support for the war, but the declaration passed Congress with dozens of votes against. Opposition was strong enough that Wilson jailed many critics of the war, including presidential candidate Eugene Debs, and organized civic groups to harass and terrorize others.

While American forces could be counted as winning the war, this came at a cost of over 320,000 casualties. Wilson had hoped to emerge as a world leader, setting armistice terms which would open the colonized world to American business, and arbitration in world affairs. Wilson was rebuffed by Britain and France, who used the war to grab new territories, and to impose penalties on Germany which within a generation would backfire, leading to an even greater and more devastating war. More critically, Wilson lost virtually all of his political support in America — even before strokes ended his ability to argue his case. The Republicans took over for a decade, during which they pursued policies which were later derided as "isolationism" — withdrawing from foreign involvements, while radically limiting immigration — until their economic boom cratered into the Great Depression.

Roosevelt witnessed this, initially as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913-20) under Wilson. While remaining sympathetic to Wilson's internationalism, as president he took a softer approach, ending the military interventions in Latin America, respecting the Mexican Revolution, and establishing his Good Neighbor Policy. He also recognized the Soviet Union, and moved closer to China, which turned out to be important for building alliances to fight the coming war. One may suspect that he wanted to enter the wars long before he did. His unprecedented decision to run for a third term in 1940 reflected his desire to be a war president. But he campaigned against joining, while at the same time preparing the nation for eventual war, and did both without appearing cynical or conniving. He established the nation's first peacetime draft. He built up munitions industries, and exported their products on favorable "lend-lease" terms to the UK, USSR, and China. He imposed sanctions on Japan, limiting their supply of steel and oil. The latter was ultimately a big part of Japan's rationale for Pearl Harbor.

But critically, Roosevelt escaped blame for entering the war, and to a large extent for the hardships Americans endured in fighting it. (More than 400,000 Americans died during the war, and everyone was impacted economically and socially.) He had earned considerable popular trust for his compassionate and diligent handling of the Great Depression. He had acted prudently, with broad public support, in the run up to the war. He offered a principled alternative to the fascist Axis, contrasting freedom and democracy against their tyranny and militarism. He was able to convince most Americans, and a great many more people around the world, that what he was doing was both right for them and for the world. By waiting for Pearl Harbor, American support for going to war rose to an extraordinary 97% (with 90% also favoring war against Germany, just before Germany declared war on the US) — a major shift from 1939, when 94% wanted the US to remain neutral. The contrast with Trump, who started this war with 59% already opposed, could hardly be greater. Wars almost always lose popular support as they grind on, even while a sense of solidarity and determination remains high. Trump is starting in the basement.

But Roosevelt and the US were also lucky, as Germany and Japan were mostly tied down fighting deep front battles in Russia and China. And because the US entered late, only after being attacked so blatantly, few questioned America's own motives, or the racism that was still a major part of America's social fabric, or the raw capitalism that would eventually seek to devour the world, even more than the colonialism that tried to conquer it.[1] And they were able to wrap up the war in less than four years, with unconditional surrenders, a booming domestic economy, and high spirits. Postwar occupation in Japan and Germany was also lucky, largely because their people recognized their own culpability for starting such a disastrous war, but also because the US occupied them with a light hand, one that favored social and economic justice. For instance, the US sought to strengthen labor unions as a countervailing force against the oligarchs who had sided with the warmakers. The America that occupied Iraq and Afghanistan was very different from the one that occupied Germany and Japan.

From Infamy to Ignominy

World War II was unique in American history, not only in how well it was sold, but in how effectively it was managed, in how quickly and completely its goals were realized, and in how very satisfied Americans were with the outcome. Most people would say we "won" the war, but only by overlooking not just the costs but how war changed us as people. All wars generate regrets, because they start in gross diplomatic incompetency, upon which nothing but further harm is piled. Korea lasted half as long as WWII, and ended in a bitter stalemate our leaders have still not come to terms with, but at least it started with an enemy attack. Vietnam started with lies, and only got worse. Same with Iraq and Afghanistan. And while the so-called "small wars" came and went quickly, one always wondered why? What did they accomplish? And why did we think they might ever accomplish anything?

I could digress, but we need to move on to Trump's decision to launch his "major combat operation" against Iran, on the spur of some transient thought without consulting or even informing anyone who might possibly raise a question or a doubt. It's too early to say much about Trump's mindset, but one thing we know for sure is that Trump did none of the things that Roosevelt did in selling his war: most critically, he didn't wait to make sure the US was attacked. He was the attacker, the one who chose war over peace. February 28 was another "day of infamy" all right, but for Iranians. For Americans if was a day of ignominy.

You will hear all sorts of rationales swirling around Trump's war of choice, but the one central and inescapable fact is that Trump was the aggressor. I can think of many reasons why Trump went to war without having tried to sell it first, even to our so-called representatives in Congress — who differ from average Americans in many ways, including that virtually all of them have received campaign donations from defense contractors and AIPAC, and most have been on hasbara junkets to Israel, so they have long been trained to respond to all the usual incantations. The problem is not just that most of Trump's excuses are false, but all of them reflect badly on his moral and political judgment, and that of his staff and cabinet, his administration selected for blind loyalty, and a media core that doesn't exactly serve them reliably but gives them more respect than they have earned.

The first point we should make here is that not waiting until being attacked proves that they don't really believe in the logic of deterrence, or for that matter the slogan they've long used to promote such a huge military: "peace through strength." There is no doubting the "strength" part. The US spends more on arms, and especially the capability to deliver them with pinpoint accuracy anywhere in the world, than everyone else does combined. The theory is that if anyone attacked, the US could survive and retaliate with such force that the attacker would stop and regret their mistake. The theory was developed to deal with nuclear-armed foes like the Soviet Union, and appears to have worked, although one may question whether any of the deterred "enemies" ever wanted to attack the US in the first place.

Arguably, deterrence is still working in Korea, where the balance of conventional weapons between North and South makes the thought of war unpalatable for both — an equation unchanged by North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and missiles. One has to wonder about the wisdom of keeping a nuclear power imprisoned by sanctions, but the US is confident enough in its own deterrence, and in North Korea's rational fear, that it feels no need to act to defuse what remains technically a state of war after 73 years. There's no logical reason why Iran's hypothetical nukes should be treated any differently.[2] There is no way Iran could ever overcome its fear of US nuclear deterrence. Indeed, Israel's own nuclear arsenal is large enough to lay waste to every acre of Iran.

In abandoning the strategy of only responding after a real attack, Trump has destabilized the very foundation of deterrence. The theory only works if both sides are fairly balanced in power, if their leadership is rational and more or less committed to the welfare of their own people, and if they are patient enough to trust in the theory. This falls apart if the sides are unequal: the stronger one may think it can attack with impunity, or use the threat of attack to demand submission. This is exactly what Trump has done: he's abandoned any pretense of interest in peace, while revealing himself to be an insatiable bully, or more pointedly, a gangster. But this also unsettles the weaker side, which can no longer trust that peace is possible, and may even be provoked into lashing out, on the theory that if war is inevitable, maybe you should get your licks in while you still can. A good example here is the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, which were launched not because anyone doubted Israel's retaliation, but because Israel had dishonored its own claims to deterrence by repeatedly attacking Gaza while not permitting any other response.

How Deterrence Becomes Aggression

As the Gaza genocide shows, Israel is an example of all the ways "peace through strength" can go wrong. It wasn't always like that. In 1948, Israel declared independence, and faced real threats from, neighboring Arab armies, concerned that Israel was attacking Palestinian Arabs and driving large numbers of them out as refugees. Israel prevailed, gaining territory and securing a territory that was majority Jewish. Israel continued to build up its armed forces, while promoting extensive Jewish immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, and (later) from Russia. Israel launched wars in 1956 and 1967, not to counter threats but to seize more land. Egypt and Syria fought back in 1973, but were repulsed by Israel without the use of the nuclear weapons they had by then developed. That was the last serious existential threat to Israel, but the effect, especially after a 1979 treaty with Egypt took their strongest potential opponent out of the picture, was not relief and reconciliation but increased arrogance and aggression, directed immediately at Lebanon, but really aimed more at their own people: Palestinians who remained on their occupied lands.[3]

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, occupied a large part of it into 2000, and have periodically bombed it ever since, including this week. Hezbollah may respond with a few rockets, in a vain attempt to deter (impose some costs on) Israel, but Israel just escalates. Israel has also frequently bombed Syria, which doesn't even bother to respond. Israel famously bombed Iraq in 1981, with no real fear of reprisal.[4] When Israel attacked Iran previously, the latter tried to respond in a measured way, to deter future attacks while trying not to provoke more. Israel has exploited every clash to garner further American support, ultimately leading to Trump's war. So while Israel's defenses may have started with an idea to deter attacks, they've long since become cover for launching their own attacks.

The key here is that Israel sees itself as forever embattled against a hostile world, which can only be held off by force — moving beyond Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall" toward a fully militarized society with the freedom and power to strike out at anyone who challenges their power, while ruthlessly suppressing dissent, and perhaps more important by manipulating the psyches of their "chosen people" and an influential coterie of allies in and beyond America. Israel's permanent war machine is a work of remarkable genius, but it depends on American financial, diplomatic, and military support. Why Israelis should choose to live like this is a good question I won't try to answer here. What I find more troubling is why so many otherwise liberal Americans go along with them — especially, as doing so allows the Israeli right to slip ever further into its bigotry and war-mad psychosis.

Less surprising is Donald Trump, who lacks any natural defenses against Zionist adventurism: scruples against violence and the abuse of power, concerns or respect for other people, cautions from study of history, personal integrity, honesty, modesty, even a modicum of manners. He surrounds himself with schemers and flatterers. Perhaps worst of all, he seems to believe in the infallibility of his own instincts. It's easy to understand how he endorsed his war plan: someone presented him with a scheme to kill Iran's Supreme Leader, and he saw that as an instant win; when someone [JD Vance?] pointed out that Iran would take this as an act of war and retaliate, he then approved a massive expansion of the attack. Israel was in on the attack, and probably formulated much of the planning, so the proposal was ready to go. I doubt if anyone else was consulted. (Trump's prayer council came after the fact, and just to bless it.)

Trump had already painted himself into a corner by moving so much air power into the region. As Clinton's Secretary of State had asked, what's the purpose of having this magnificent military if you can't use it? That no one explained that whole point is never to have to use the military showed that even then the debate was gone and "deterrence" had become an old cliché. Trump already tipped his hand when he changed the name from Defense to Department of War. He had been hearing threats about Iran for ages, and knew that Obama and Biden had failed to solve the imagined problem — that is, to satisfy Netanyahu, almost uniquely the source of those stories. He was told that he alone could save the day. All it would take is a bold leader. And hadn't bold action appeared to have worked in Venezuela? Is he not a man of destiny? Normal people might laugh, but not the sycophants Trump surrounds himself with.

The Consequences of War

It is easy to predict that this war will be a disaster for those who started it as well as everyone else caught up in it. It's hard to predict how the disaster will unfold. Perhaps in ancient days you could tally up loot and plunder and declare yourself a winner, but those days are long gone, and that was never more than a partial measure. These days all sides lose, and there is little comfort in the other side losing more than yours, as your losses are every bit as dear. But beyond lives, wounds both physical and mental, the destruction of property and the despoilment of the environment, there is much more to lose: social bonds, trust, community, time, optimism, soul.

The destruction will be most literal (easiest to measure and to comprehend) in Iran, the target of massive bombardment. We shouldn't make any distinction between targeted killings and random ones: the former are mostly intended to dissolve order and promote chaos, the latter to sow terror and despair. Both are rooted in moral contempt, which was assumed the moment Trump started this war (although the propaganda groundwork has been prepared for decades). Israel has pursued both to an extreme degree in Gaza. That will be harder in Iran, given its size and distance. In Gaza, incursions could be used to pinpoint items to destroy (like tunnels, or hospitals). It is possible that US (or maybe Israeli) special forces could be dropped in to secure especially high value targets (like enriched uranium, which even if not usable in a proper bomb could be packed into a terrifying "dirty bomb"), but that will be difficult and dangerous. And if they don't, whatever's left of Iran's leadership could move quickly toward some kind of bomb. The argument that they didn't actually have to possess a bomb to deter an attack has lost its chief proponent (Ayatollah Khamenei) as well as most of its logic.

It is unlikely that the US will try to occupy Iran. Americans have few skills and little taste for running their own country, much less one where they are recognized as Nemesis. Nor will Israel, which pioneered the "mowing the grass" model that Trump seems to have adopted. But they both seem happy with the idea of a demolished Iran swamped in chaos, and may well go out of their way to promote it. In the meantime they're spinning fantasies of the Iranian people revolting against a fractured authority (unlikely, but not impossible) and spontaneously organizing a new government that Trump and Netanyahu will find servile enough (extremely unlikely). Sowing chaos strikes me as not just cruel but stupid: while a strictly regimented autocracy is no doubt bad for the Iranian people, it's better for outsiders to have well ordered enemies, led by responsible parties, than untethered ones.[5]

The big question at the moment is how long the battering of Iran will continue. Trump has estimated anywhere from a few days or weeks to forever.[6] The latter seems to be Israel's preference, but that's partly because they take a fatalistic view of human nature — they still believe that the goyim are incapable of discarding the antisemitism of the 1850-1950 century, so Jews have to be perpetually on guard against future pogroms (even though there is little evidence of this in America and Europe, and much of what occurred in the Arab world c. 1950 was actually orchestrated by Mossad, attempting to drive emigration to Israel) — and partly because they just seem to so relish their role as their small nation's "master race."

How much 93 million Iranians will suffer depends on how long the bombing lasts, how fragmented they are when it ends, and how much help they get in rebuilding and integrating with the rest of the world. Needless to say, the longer Trump keeps this up, the bigger hole he is digging for Iran. And while it's unlikely that the US will want to continue bombing Iran as long or as thoroughly as Israel has bombed Gaza, the US is notoriously bad at holding postwar grudges. (We've held various degrees of sanctions against North Korea since 1953, Cuba since 1959, Vietnam since 1975, and Iran since 1979. Only Vietnam has managed to wriggle its way off that hook, starting in the 1990s when it became a cheap source for foreign factory work. The other three have offered numerous accommodations for normalcy, which multiple US presidents have rebuffed.) Even the storied successes in Germany and Japan took the better part of a decade to get back to normal. South Korea took longer, and only made real progress after they overthrew the US-backed military dictatorship.

With limited and degraded resources, Iran is attempting to fight back — basically, to try to prove that their deterrence plans, which the US and Israel clearly didn't take seriously, still have some teeth. No one expects Iran to return the fight (like, say, the US did after Japan attacked).[7] All they can hope for is to excise some costs for the American-Israeli aggression, hoping that in today's increasingly fragile world a small bit of pain will go a long way. Their best chance is in attacking soft targets of American allies in the Persian Gulf region: Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. (Hezbollah has fired some rockets at Israel from Lebanon, triggering the usual disproportionate response, but their rockets have never had much effect. An Iranian drone did reach a British air base in Cyprus, but that's their maximum range so far, and not a very effective one.) Iran's only real win here has been to shut down oil shipping through the Straits of Hormuz, which has helped push US gas prices into panic mode. While some Americans hope that these reprisals will prod the Gulf States into launching their own attacks on Iran, it's unlikely that anyone involved will blame the attacks on Iranian aggression. Rather, they (and even more so their people) will see this as simply Trump and Netanyahu, and this will make it politically even more difficult to forge ahead with the "Abraham Accords" sacrifice of Palestinian aspirations.

The Gulf States should recover quickly once the war ends — and they will probably lobby for cessation sooner rather than later — but whether they return to the US-Israeli axis remains to be seen. They are basically rentier states, which obtain income from oil, and spend it lavishly to ensure stability for a ruling class which is unpopularly cosmopolitan and decadent, but studded with conspicuous religiosity and clandestine ties to terror groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. This has always been a delicate balancing act, especially as Al-Qaeda was originally designed to challenge Saudi Arabia, before they got distracted by weaker prey in war-torn Afghanistan and Sudan.

The "terror groups" are certain to get a recruiting boost from this war, even if little of it comes from Iran or Palestine. (One big step here would be overcoming the Sunni prejudice against Shi'ism, which crippled ISIS in Iraq.) So it's fair to expect a widespread upsurge in terrorism, especially by outsiders far from the immediate conflict. We've already seen scattered examples, including in the US. But their most vulnerable targets are the Arab states that have aligned with the US (even those that have kept some distance from Israel). There is also the whole arena of cyberwarfare, which hardly needs to originate in Iran to find ripe targets in the US and around the world.

Worser-Case Scenarios

Trump was being naive when he said that the "worst-case scenario" is a future Iran led by someone as "bad" as the Ayatollah he just killed. A much worser-case scenario is a wave of revolution against the Arab (and possibly other Moslem) states that have aligned with the US, and as such are implicated in Trump's war on Iran, and in Israel's genocide in Gaza. What would stop a revolutionary Egypt, for instance, from simply annexing Gaza, and rebuilding it as a Palestinian state? Is that a war that Israel really wants to fight? Especially if it was backed by revolutions in the Arabian peninsula, once again able to threaten Europe with their "oil weapon"?

Even short of that, Europe could decide to negate its dependency on the Persian Gulf by negotiating a peace deal with Russia, with Ukraine as the first deal. A deal along current front lines is eminently doable, especially if Europe could sweeten it by buying oil and gas, and if Putin could see it as a way of weakening US ambitions in NATO. Ukraine, in turn, is more likely to see its own future as tied to Europe than to the unreliable Trump. Europe could go further towards establishing that "rules-based" order they've long hoped for: one where miscreants like Trump as well as Milosevic can be prosecuted for war crimes.

The war is a disaster for anyone with any hopes for the institutions of international law. The UN should flat-out condemn the US and Israel, the ICC should indict Trump and Netanyahu, the World Court should fine them for major damages, and all sane nations around the world should sanction those responsible for this war. Failure to do any, let alone all of that testifies to the utter bankruptcy of current arrangements. NATO should not only refuse to fight Iran but should sever its relationship with the US. Trump is utterly unreliable, not just to defend Europe but to keep it out of America's insane wars. At some point, the liability far exceeds the benefit (which, as far as I can tell, doesn't extend much beyond the greasing of some palms). The importance of this is all the more urgent as Trump creates his own wholly-owned ad hoc ventures, like the Board of Peace and Shield of the Americas, openly mocking the UN.

Netanyahu says he's been dreaming of this war for 40 years, but while it may momentarily put a feather in his cap, it's hard to see how this in any way helps the Israeli people (even if you only count the Jewish ones, which is the standard definition in Jerusalem and in Washington). Iran was never a threat to Israel, and only became moderately critical after Israel turned on it. I won't bother with the details[8] here, but should point out that even if Iran had developed a nuclear weapon, any use of it would have been more than amply deterred by Israel's much larger and more sophisticated stockpile. Iran appears to have hoped that merely being able to develop such a weapon would have sufficed to deter attack (something Israel had previously done to many nations in the region). But for Israel, nuclear weapons are meant less to deter attack than to intimidate others to keep them from responding to conventional attacks in kind. Had Israel been serious about fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon, they would have welcomed the JCPOA, which was carefully designed by Obama to satisfy their ostensible fears without doing anything to reduce America's and Israel's conflict with Iran. (It would have been much smarter to deal with other issues that were ultimately used as excuses to sabotage the deal, as Iran had previously suggested.) But Netanyahu opposed JCPOA, and got Trump to tear it up, setting up this war. That makes him directly responsible for the war and all of its consequences, intended and otherwise.

The immediate impact is that Israel will have to defend against scattered missile and drone attacks, both from Iran and Hezbollah. They may send troops into Lebanon, and I suppose they could send commando teams into Iran for limited operations (but they lack bases from which to operate conventionally, and that's not likely to change). They will suffer losses, which will be trivial compared to the suffering they inflict, but real for those not too hardened to care. Nothing new there, and nothing they haven't learned to live with. Indeed, Israel's wars have been so lopsided for so long that they seem much more bothered by peace than by war. They probably relish this opportunity to rile up the entire region against them, even with an uptick in "terrorism" (which has always been good for their military, and good for milking more funds from the US).

Moreover, this war with Iran gives them cover to accelerate the "ethnic cleansing" of the West Bank, as well as to tighten the screws on Gaza, with little chance of complaint or second guessing from Washington. Absent this war, their agreement to a ceasefire in Gaza might have been seen as a retreat. Israeli political society is so stridently genocidal these days that any retreat by Netanyahu could be interpreted as a sign of weakness, encouraging someone even further to the right to challenge him. (If you look back at Netanyahu's long political career, the one constant you will find is that he never allows anyone else to pass him on the right.) As I've said many times, for Israel Iran has always been a smokescreen, a parlor trick to keep the Americans thoughtlessly committed. The real battle is, and has always been[9], for the settlements in Judea and Samaria, which above all means the marginalization and ultimate removal of the Palestinians. For that, virtually all of Israel's political spectrum is willing to give up every shred of international support and good will the state had ever enjoyed — at least as long as America foots the bill.

Needless to say, the war only further erodes Israel's political support abroad, even in the United States. Or perhaps especially in the United States, where Netanyahu's agitation for the war will be hard to ignore, especially when the MAGA crowd start looking for scapegoats. Israel's reputation among the Democratic rank-and-file has been slipping for some time, as Israel's racism and penchant for violence has steadily increased, and their wars stray ever farther from any remotely plausible notion of self-defense. Even more unsettling is Netanyahu's partisan bond with Trump, which not only tars Trump with Netanyahu's crimes, but Netanyahu with Trump's. We're still far from this having any effect on US support for Israel's warmaking, but as the war sours, the political winds may blow against both Trump and Netanyahu.

Most Americans will be affected by this war, but not much. Gas prices are way up, which is a bonanza for Trump's friends in the fossil fuel industry, but an embarrassment given his anti-inflation focus on energy prices. He's probably right that prices will sink once sanctioned oil from the war is over, especially if you add in currently sanctioned Russian and Venezuelan oil, but that risks making fracked American oil too expensive to produce, in addition to the usual worries about climate change and obsolescence. Arms plants are working overtime, but that (plus guaranteed profits) comes out of the public till. The cost-of-war ticker has passed $10 billion, at present adding another $1 billion/day (and that's just direct US costs, not economic impact, long-term liabilities, or debt interest). That is money that could be used for useful things, which are being sacrificed just so Netanyahu and Trump can parade around as killers.

We've also already seen some terror strikes against American targets, both at home and abroad — some attributed to ISIS, which until now has never shown any sympathy with Shi'ite Iran. Probably not a major concern, but each one that happens will hit someone hard. And defending against such attacks will exact its own toll (as air travelers are already finding out). And even if Iran itself settles down, which doesn't seem all that likely, memory of what the US and Israel has done will not soon pass. We will be less safe, and less secure, and less free as a result. And we should be aware that it's not just foreign threats but our own politicians who are doing this to us. For no good reason.

Further Risks

The longer term effects of the war are even harder to foresee. As an intellectual exercise, you can start with the highly improbable scenario of Trump getting everything he thinks he wants from breaking Iran: an Iranian people rising up against their mullahs and minders, stringing the worst of them up like Mussolini, and pleading to Trump for forgiveness, promising to follow his every whim, allowing him to appoint their leaders, cutting him in personally on their oil business, not to mention a range of luxury golf resorts. Even then, it's not clear that Netanyahu would allow him to just take the win — at least not without Trump's blessing to "finish the job" in Gaza and the West Bank. The higher the specter rises of America-Israeli power, the farther its shadow spreads. Prominent Israelis are already talking about Turkey as "the next Iran." Trump himself has Cuba next on his "to do" list, with Rubio himself penciled in as future dictator. This just goes to show that power is addictive, and absolute power is a boundless obsession. It only stops when it is stopped: if not in Iran, then the next stop, or the one after that.

Trump is gambling that if he wins his war in Iran, he'll be able to consolidate his power in America, establishing an endurable reign of "American greatness," which means oligarchy, corruption, bluster and fury abroad, violent repression of dissent at home, an education system designed to train us to lead small lives and fulfill assigned service roles, patrolled by something very much like Iran's "morality police" (Gasht-e Ershad, or Guidance Patrols). America will become reborn as a Christian Republic (or perhaps they'll call it "Judeo-Christian," keeping our Israeli mentors in mind). Such a state may be unpopular, but laws will be bent to secure and maintain it. Trump already tried to organize a mob to take over Congress. Next time he has greater hopes for the military, which has already violated many laws (both domestic and international) in the war against Iran, and will only grow more adventurous with success.

This would be scarier if Trump showed any competency at running the government, or at expanding his cult of true believers. Or even if his ideas were sound, such that more competent individuals might succeed in his name. But his two election wins are largely explained by the horrible messaging by his opponents, by his own extraordinary torrent of lies, by an amused and very gullible mass media, by voters who respond to his gestures without thinking, as well as by a business class that saw him as a way to make a quick buck. Wars, as I've tried to explain, only get less popular over time. Trump may have gotten elected on his promise to act fast and break things, but the first casualty of his recklessness has been his approval ratings.

Of course, much more likely than a Trump triumph (or a TACO retreat) is a slow, painful muddling through, as he tries desperately to keep his presidency afloat by throwing his most inept advisers under the bus. (Kristi Noem turned out to be the first to go, a surprise given that anti-immigration cruelty was supposed to be Trump's most bankable issue. Maybe Americans won't like living under a Gestapo state? That doesn't bode well for the rest of Trump's agenda.) Of course, the real question is not whether Americans will like living under a state that's run like a mafia racket. It's what they will do about it.

Trump's biggest risk is that he will turn Democrats into a real opposition party. In theory, he could have kept that from happening by selling their leaders (many of whom, including Shumer and Jeffries, have built their careers on being Israeli pawns) on his war plans. In one stroke, he would have broadened his base, and tainted their integrity forever. (Kerry and Clinton being prime examples. Harris, defending Biden and embracing the Cheneys, had her own war taint, which Trump deftly exploited.) But by going his own way, he spared most Democrats such embarrassment. And now, everything that goes wrong will be seen as Trump's fault alone. Democrats still have a long ways to go to turn their Trump aversion and revulsion into a coherent opposition program, but we're seeing signs of that happening already — especially when you start seeing mainstream Democrats running away from AIPAC money (something unimaginable two years ago).

I'm not under any illusion that Democrats can just turn things around: sign a few executive orders, hope the Supreme Court doesn't strike them down, muddle through the wreckage and compliment themselves for economic stats that barely touch on everyday lives. But the physical rubble of war is explicit in a way that FCC rules or antitrust bribes or paid pardons for criminals or even measles and climate change can never quite be. The damaged buildings and economies will be slow to recover. The tattered memories will be long-lived. The lost lives are gone. Sure, one can still work, and hope. But every time you think of this war, you must remember one thing: Trump did this.

Notes

Some points worth mentioning, but not interrupting the flow for. The numbers provide context, but these can be read straight through. Links in the text are few, but I've read extensively, and every sentence could be documented somewhere (although perhaps not with the same phrasing).

[1]: This is an important point, although it is easily forgotten, especially as America's reputation wasn't as squeak clean as many thought, and deteriorated rapidly when the US adopted anti-communism as a strategy for global hegemony. America's Open Door policy was widely seen as fairer than Europe's colonial exclusion. As the US economy surpassed Britain's as the world's largest, business started developing heavily abroad. Roosevelt's wooing of Saudi Arabia was welcomed, especially compared to Britain's control of Iran. Americans never liked Europe's colonial systems, and often weighed against re-establishing post-WWII colonies. (One exception, quite fatefully, was for the French in Vietnam, where anti-communism was held to be much more important than self-determination and democracy.) But in the end, American support for global capitalism was so extreme that it squandered all the good will Roosevelt had built up. Consequently, whenever the US goes to war, one thinks first of the profits, and how little lives matter in their calculation. The propaganda of liberation has lost all possible credibility. With Trump, the warmongers don't even pretend to care.

[2]: We shouldn't even have to dismiss the argument that Iran's Ayatollahs are religious fanatics so bent on killing Jews that they would sacrifice their own lives and their own people just to do so. There is no evidence of this. Perhaps the people making this charge are confusing them with their own religious fanatics, although I doubt even those people are quite so deranged — even the Armageddon cult of Christian dispensationalists, who have supported Zionism in hopes of God delivering such "end times," which is truly a horrifying policy rationale.

[3]: One of the most effective propaganda charges against Saddam Hussein was that "he gassed his own people." The people he gassed were Iraqi Kurds, who he regarded (rightly or wrongly isn't clear) as possible subversives in his war against Iran. But they lived in Iraq, and he ruled Iraq, hence it was fair game to describe them as "his own people," and use this as an example of his monstrous rule. He went on to commit comparable atrocities against Iraqi Shiites who GWH Bush baited into uprising against him after the Kuwait war. Of course, there are many other rulers who don't consider themselves responsible for the safety let alone welfare of many people living in their countries. Israel's systematic mistreatment of its Palestinian wards is merely the most glaring current example, but most nations' elites like to draw a line between themselves and the lesser orders that cohabit their sovereignty. Trump makes many such distinctions, and would like to formalize them further: in this his efforts to rid the nation of immigrants and to restrict voting are only first salvos. One reason he (and much of the right, trad antisemites included) loves Israel is his admiration for how brutally they dominate disgruntled minorities. One small step toward rectifying these injustices is to insist that rulers be held responsible for all of their subjects. If the insinuation pisses them off, so much the better. What goes around, comes around.

[4]: Iraq was at war with Iran at the time. Israel's bombing of Iraq's nuclear laboratory was seen as aiding Iran in the war. Later the US started arming Iraq to fight against Iran, but even then Israel was securely aligned with Iran, supplying weapons and spare parts (some from the US). In an incoherent foreign policy which was more focused on arming the Nicaraguan Contras than in anything like peace in the Middle East, Reagan wound up helping Israel arm Iran while at the same time he was arming Iraq.

[5]: The old joke is that if Hamas didn't exist, Israel would have created it. Or is that a joke? The occupation after 1967 was relatively benign, but by 1989, the agitation of the settler movement and the usual rot of military rule provoked the intifada. Israel's initial response was to "break bones," but after only making things worse, Rabin tried co-opting Arafat, who was in futile exile in Tunisia, and willing to settle for vague promises. Even this was too much of a concession for right-wingers like Sharon and Netanyahu, who supported the efforts of the Kahanist settlers to scuttle the "process," and used every chance to decry all Palestinians as terrorists. Their prime exhibit was Hamas, which had earlier been seen as a more conservative, more manageable alternative to the secular/socialist PLO. Hamas became a magnet for the more militant critics of the PA "sell out," and emerged as the more principled alternative to Fatah when the "peace process" failed and the second intifada broke out. By then, Sharon was Prime Minister, and more focused on dismantling the PA than dealing with the actual "terrorists" in Hamas. When Hamas rose up and took over Gaza, that was Sharon's dream come true: Palestinian leadership he could never be pressured into having to negotiate with, but could bomb with impunity whenever the whim hit him. Netanyahu followed suit, even propping up Hamas with aid via Qatar to keep the "untouchables" in control. Even since Netanyahu vowed to wipe Hamas out after Oct. 7, 2023, even after all their known leadership (especially outside of Gaza) has been killed off, Hamas supposedly survives, if only as reason to continue the extermination.

[6] Of course, Iranians will have something to say about this. One question which I neglected in writing this is how effectively Iran can fight back, and how long they can continue to do so. I exposed my own preferences back in 2003, when I argued that the best thing Iraqis could do was roll over and play dead. If anyone in Iran cares what I think, I could reiterate the point here. But few people actually think like that. When confronted by hostile alien attack, they want to fight back, even if all that means is lashing out senselessly. Since the war broke out, many of the more objective observers of Iran have pointed out two things: before the attack, Iran had decentralized its defense, so that small and scattered groups of Iranians could continue to respond independently even after a decapitation strike; and that killing off the senior leaders tends to promote even more militant leaders. Trita Parsi and Vali Nasr, in particular, believe that these new leaders will refuse to negotiate until they have have made the US, Israel, and their allies suffer costs to a degree that makes them reluctant to strike again. In short, they are trying to reassert deterrence as a basis for peace, something the US and Israel have made a mockery of. How long they can hold back and fight effectively is unclear, but what is pretty certain is that their resolve to fight back is unlikely to wane for quite some while, and asymmetric war tends to favor the guerrillas.

The other thing that should be pointed out somewhere is the extent to which the US and Israel are depending on the Iranian people rising up, taking over the government, and agreeing both to surrender terms and to enforcing that surrender on their own people. That usually requires a massive occupation, and even then success is far from guaranteed (see Vietnam and Afghanistan; Iraq wasn't much better, nor was Lebanon for Israel; but for a closer analogy, consider Turkey, where the Ottoman Sultan's surrender was a meaningless gesture as long as Atatürk controlled the army). The idea that recent demonstrations calling for changes in Iran was actually an endorsement of the US-Israeli demand for regime change is patently absurd. I've been to dozens of demonstrations, some as pointedly against the US president as the taunts about how many kids LBJ has killed today, without ever thinking that what I really wanted was for some foreign mass murderer to take over. One forgets that even Stalin became a hero thanks to Hitler.

[7] One thing that's very unlikely to happen is for some "white knight" to step in and help arm Iran, like the US did for Ukraine against Russia (and the US previously did with Afghanistan in the 1980s, or Russia did with Korea and Vietnam). The most obvious sympathizer is Russia, but they are already tapped out in Ukraine, and are unlikely to take the risk. If China really were the enemy American war planners imagine, they could step in effectively, but I can't imagine they would risk that sort of confrontation. They could also see the concentration of US war resources in the Persian Gulf as an ideal time to invade Taiwan, but again I don't see them operating that way. While China's claim to Taiwan is arrogant, they've never acted on it, and they actually have a fairly civil relationship — unlike, e.g., the US with Cuba or Iran. The most likely arms source for Iran is Afghanistan, which probably has a lot of leftover ordnance, then maybe Pakistan. Trump would be well advised to improve his relations with both countries (and also Turkey, Syria, and Iraq), but that's hard to do when you're killing Muslims for such flimsy reasons. It's also possible that the mercenary arms networks that Qatar and the UAE have set up could be diverted, even without central approval.

[8] Trita Parsi covers most of the details in his 2007 book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. US hating of Iran starts with the Hostage Crisis of 1979, and has never abated. Iranian distrust of the US goes back to the CIA-engineered coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, which installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the dictatorial Shah of Iran, in order to undo nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil monopoly. (It was turned over to a consortium of mostly American companies.) The US backed the Shah throughout, including training of his dreaded Savak police, a 16-year rule that managed to alienate virtually all of Iran, leading to a revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini wound up in control, partly due to his skill at channeling anti-American resentment (which went back to 1953, and continued with Reagan arming Iraq during their 1981-88 war, during which "Great Satan" didn't seem far off base). Israel had been close to the Shah, but deftly switched alliances, and backed Iran against Iraq, remaining close to Iran into the 1990s. Israel then realized that Iraq was no longer a credible existential threat, so they came up with the story that Iran was developing nuclear weapons to annihilate Israel. This story played well with Clinton, Bush, etc., as most Americans still harbored a grudge against Iran for the 1980 Hostage Crisis. Israel needed an existential threat story to keep American arms and finance flowing, and Iran pushed the right buttons. Netanyahu warned of "an imminent threat from an Iranian nuclear bomb" as far back as 1992. He's been a stuck record on the subject, although his predictions have repeatedly failed, and it makes little sense for Iran to develop a bomb.

[9] Consciously since the mid-1990s, as opposed to Oslo. But in the minds of many Israelis, this goes back to the razing of neighborhoods around the East Wall and the reestablishment of Kfar Etzion in 1967, which were based on resentments over losses in 1948. Israel gave lip service to the UN resolutions in 1967 and 1973, but in bad faith. The Allon Plan was always meant to secure the occupied territories forever. The discrepancies between what Israel's leader said and did are well documented in Avi Raz: The Bride and the Dowry (2012). Tom Segev's 1967 makes clear how arrogant Israel's military elite had become, and how deliberately they manipulated the fears of the people. Lords of the Land (2007), by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, is good on the early settler movement, although it has become much more deranged since then. Baruch Kimmerling's Politicide (2003) sums up Israel's post-Oslo attitude to the Palestinians, the only real change being the amount of violence Israel employs (which, to be clear, was considerable even then).

Laura suggested that I cut this last section off as redundant. I agreed that it is not needed, especially given the length above, but I didn't feel like throwing it away, either. I pulled the notes down as well, but perhaps they could be spliced back in above? Both are points I'd like to make, not that I really need them to focus on Trump.

The Future as History

This brings us back to the beginning: Trump's failure to sell Americans on the need for this war. When the US entered WWII, Roosevelt placed previously unimaginable demands on the American people. A record number were drafted. The jobs they left behind, plus many more that were created, were largely performed by adding women to the workforce. Domestic economy was curtailed, with many commodities subject to rations. Price controls were imposed on businesses. The national debt skyrocketed, partly managed by widespread bond purchases. Americans were expected to chip in and do this together. And by and large they did, because they agreed that fighting Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, stopping their attempts to take over the world, and defeating two uniquely inhumane regimes, was the right thing to do. One reason they did that was that they had learned to trust Franklin Roosevelt, to lead them in doing the right thing. As I mentioned above, support for the war started at 97%. That was largely because Roosevelt waited to be attacked. He didn't go to war on a hunch or theory, or in a tantrum or flight of fancy. He only went to war once another country ended the peace. From that point his goal was clear: to end the war, and restore peace. That was something Americans could get behind, because it was the right thing to do.[10]

Trump didn't do that. He created an imaginary crisis, then went to war on a hunch about an opportunity, with little or no thought about where his actions might lead. He ended peace to pursue war. Whether it was for ego or loot or simply because he's the dumbest, most unscrupulous person on earth, may long be debated. What will not be debated is his lack of wisdom in plunging us into this war. We might criticize him for not selling the war before he launched it. Mostly he didn't because he thought it was more important to catch the Ayatollah by surprise than anything else, least of all feeling any obligation to talk to the people.[11] To some extent, each and every person who ever occupied the White House felt some sort of obligation to the American people. Trump is the first and only to feel no obligation to anyone but himself. So we can add two more reasons to why Trump didn't try to sell his war: one is that he felt that groveling before the people was beneath his dignity (he leads us, telling us what to do and what we need to know); the other is that deep down he knew that no one would believe him (that the war is unsellable, and the only way he could pull it off was by diktat).

The result is that this will be clearly recognized as Trump's war, one that he alone enabled, that he alone could have prevented, and that he alone is responsible for. Not that I expect him to take any personal responsibility. When the war goes sour, he will blame others, especially Netanyahu, who misled him and saddled him with bad options, because that's the sort of person he is: a schmuck.

[10] I'm tempted to add that they went overboard, and too many (especially, as it turned out, Democrats) and fell in love with war. They dubbed it the "Good War," and celebrated "the greatest generation." No realistic account would concur, even before you threw in the kicker of two atomic bombs at the end. The US may have gone into the war with notions that "precision bombing" could spare civilians while only hitting military targets, but in the end, the US had become as genocidal as Germany and Japan. But for most Americans, the Good War was a grand old time, which made rearmament and the Cold War an easy project to sell (again, especially to Democrats, although Republicans loved the anti-red angle, which could be used to undermine unions, and to bulk up on the "in God we trust" and "one nation under God" pieties). Analogously, "war" became the model for anything you wanted to get serious about, like a "war on poverty" or a "war on drugs." Even Obama, who was fortunate not to get tarred by endorsing Bush's Iraq War, couldn't help but make a mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize, as he racked up his own tally of targeted killings and reckless surges.

[11] On the other hand, I seriously doubt that Trump could have sold the war if he had tried. Despite a relentless, and extremely mendacious, sales campaign, Bush was far from successful. He did get an ambiguously worded resolution out of Congress, perhaps because some Democrats only thought that he needed it for a bluff (or so Kerry, for instance, said after the fact), he got nothing out of the UN, and NATO allies like Turkey refused him help. After massive demonstrations against the war all around the world, he wound up with nothing more than his self-proclaimed Coalition of the Willing. He got a slight boost when the Army rolled in to Baghdad and toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein (but didn't find the man himself). Remembering the few weeks of elation when the Taliban were driven from Kabul, I referred to that incident as "the feel good day of the war." My suspicion that there wouldn't be another was rapidly confirmed when looting broke out. That was followed by chaos, as all sides sought to settle grudges, and the IEDs quickly followed. By the time Bush left office, his approval rating was down to 34%. (Cheney's dropped as low as 13%. Whatever Harris saw in him is beyond mystery.)