When the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran I wrote that it was a potentially disastrous decision made for the basest political reasons. In the past few weeks, unfortunately, my fears—which were shared my millions of Americans—have been proven right as the war has expanded throughout the entire region. Today I’ll survey several factors feeding this unfolding fiasco.
- The war is inseparable from Trump’s use of his office and policies to enrich himself. In this he may succeed but by any other standard he is an absolute incompetent who revels in violence, chaos, and suffering. Unlike respected military officers throughout American history, he views war as an “excursion” that enables him to strut and preen before a contemptuous world as opposed to a grim necessity of collective sacrifice. Jared Kushner was his main advisor on the war, a man whose chief interest is using war to swing multi-billion dollar deals for their family. Congressional Republicans made nary a peep over the right to declare war that is reserved to Congress by the Constitution. Instead they and the Pentagon, led by Pete Hegseth ranting near-psychotic pronouncements, continue to support a military action without objectives, end-game, or coherent strategy. And it is blowing up in a way that could very well undermine global stabiilty for decades to come.
- That a reputed 30+ percent of Americans indicates that many of our fellow citizens continue their exercise in political sleepwalking. Many are MAGA-lites doubling down on their Trump-rapture while their representatives march in lock-step, choose resignation over opposition, or turn against Trump because he’s not MAGA-enough for them.
Those of us against the war often feel there’s no effective way to express our views, which can lead to malaise born of helplessness. We also are subject to the very human tendency to believe that when things get really bad we think we’ve hit bottom. For example, ICE seems like the ultimate debasement of our fundamental rights as Americans. Yet ICE’s behavior is not yet comparable to Nazi death camps, Stalin’s Gulag, or Iran’s torture chambers, bars so low they’re not really bars at all. ICE’s detention facilities meet all the criteria for concentration camps but are not yet death camps despite the many rapes, beatings, and deaths that occur there. But as history shows, the paragons of atrocity have an approach route to their ultimate destination that ICE is following as if guided by a roadmap.
Many of us also find it hard to imagine what true societal ruin looks like. Civilizations, empires, nations all fall due to some combination of factors we have all grown familiar with: drought, endless war, lawlessness, erosion of economic and social justice, political corruption, toxic environment, internal division, and plague. It makes me wonder whether all the corporate and political leaders cheerleading our headlong rush to nowhere have given a thought to their children’s and grandchildren’s futures. Or does this system simply self-select leadership from the pool of empathy-free sociopaths?
- The war is an environmental disaster. In its first two weeks it released an extra five million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Burning oil fell in a “black rain” on Tehran and is poisoning the Persian Gulf, wetlands, regional water supplies, and farmland. The chemical waste left behind by missiles and drones is substantial. Iran launched 1,155 strikes against the Gulf States, Jordan, and Israel. The majority were intercepted, but intercepts demand an average of two missiles each. So far over 2,500 people have been killed throughout the region and over 25,000 injured. The U.S. struck 7,800 targets, which means a likely multiple of that number of exploding warheads. Israel has hit hundreds of targets at an “unprecedented” rate, likely thousands of warheads.
Israel also bombed an Iranian gas facility resulting in huge fires and pollution. Strikes against Iranian and Israeli nuclear facilities pose a risk of significant radiation release. Just yesterday (Sunday) it was reported that Iranian missiles struck the towns of Dimona and Arad, close to a major Israeli nuclear research facility.
Several nations are concerned about depleting their missile and drone stockpiles, including the U.S.’s Tomahawk missiles, France’s MICA missiles, and Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile interception system so vital to its defense. Rather than winding the war down, shortages may lead combatants to seek more bang for the buck via more devastating weapons, as Iran has already threatened. Israel is not a large country. Despite its military prowess its vulnerabilities pertaining to size and population are far greater than Iran’s.
- As a very secular American Jew who celebrates in his own way his Jewish identity, I have to say that Netanyahu is the worst thing to happen to Jews and Judaism since Hitler. For younger generations around the world the yoked terms “genocide—Gaza” now eclipse “genocide—Holocaust”. Anti-Semitism is becoming more aggressive and pervasive and many Republicans barely bother to disguise their praise of Nazism and disdain for Jews. The slander of anti-Semitism aimed against critics of Israeli policies, so popular among right-wing American Jewish groups and Netanyahu and his cohorts, was immediately used by Trump to attempt to intimidate academia and cripple research. The great majority of Americans protesting Israeli policies, many of them Jewish, are not anti-Semites but simply humane people appalled at rampant slaughter and oppression. Netanyahu’s tenure is already a disaster for Israel even if events since early October 7, 2022 had never happened. And even if he gets his wish and Iran is fragmented by civil war and loss of military power, instability and power vacuums only invite ever more unhinged violence, as ISIS and Oct. 7 show. This war can eventually destroy Israel and, tragically, many will shrug who a few years ago would have been horrified.
- One major motive for this war is the opportunity to assess A.I.’s performance under actual combat conditions. Waging war against weaker opponents is a great way to test new weapons, logistics systems, tactical ideas, and troop readiness. Despite A.I.’s cheerleaders’ promising to end disease and crime and provide everyone with a permanent vacation, its real focus is surveillance, control, and military applications. Today’s warfare is driven by satellite-provided data and analytic software that govern missile and drone use; identification of targets whether structural or individual; intelligence analysis; and real-time “battle-space” assessment and response. Even systems that “behave” well internally will produce terribly wrong outputs because of 1) biased human input based on assumptions built into the algorithms that govern the A.I. engine’s “brain”; 2) uncertainty over where A.I.’s “self-learning” processes might lead in extreme situations; 3) and hacks, viruses, malware, and typical malfunctions at any point along the performance chain. The most frightening example of this is the specter of A.I. run, nuclear-armed satellites being triggered into a loop that initiates full-scale nuclear war.
Currently A.I. companies such as Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Amazon, and Palantir, which Robert Reich calls “the most dangerous company in America”, have been facilitating U.S. attacks in Iran, Israel’s war on Gaza, and I.C.E.’s brutal operations.
- But what about Vlad? Last post, I speculated that Putin would expect a pay-off from the U.S. for acceding to our attack on Iran, a Russian ally. The payoff would be license to seize European territory, a step that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Finland, and Poland are already nervous about. How he’d manage it considering Russia’s military mayhem in Ukraine is unclear but he has threatened the use of nuclear weapons in a European confrontation. A recent Russian video, allegedly leaked, has called Putin’s health into question. Meanwhile Russia has been accused of helping Iran identify American targets; Trump waved that off as a concern. However, if Russian intel leads to American deaths, many Americans may smell treason in the wind.
One disturbing aspect of possible Putin-Trump trade-offs over the war involves the predictable shut-down of the Strait of Hormuz, which led Trump to lift our embargo against the purchase of Russian oil. Russia’s oil income had already jumped six billion dollars in the first two weeks of the war. Now, with the U.S. as a client, that number will soar and Russia’s—or Putin’s—coffers will overflow like a Texas gusher. Can we imagine that Trump, the exemplar of corrupt political deal-making, would lift those sanctions without demanding a cut of the windfall, much of which will go directly to Putin rather than the Russian treasury anyway? One wild card in all this is whether Trump, profits aside, may be playing a double game to get out from under Putin’s thumb once and for all.
In any case, Russia is in a position to spread the violence that has spread from Iran to engulf the entire region. It may occur as Putin aggressively seeks the quid pro quo for abandoning Iran. Or from panic as the combination of failing health and perceived weakness over Iran emboldens Putin’s domestic opposition. Either way, Russia is there, in the wings, and China too, playing its longer game.
Whatever comes next, the only sane action is for the Israeli-American alliance to immediately and unilaterally cease hostilities in the region. Otherwise, we have to admit that in today’s world, no king but madness reigns.
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