Waking to disaster

I woke, took a shower and spent a few minutes outside, drinking tea. I went upstairs to my office, got online and BAM! We’d bombed Iran. Again. 

My first reaction was anger. I should preface this by saying I didn’t vote for our president, but I didn’t vote for his opponent either. I don’t suffer from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). I’ve never been a bitter opponent and actually agree with some of his policies. But I believe our president has lost his mind. Really. I’ll explain.

Keep in mind, I don’t consider myself antisemitic. I’ve been a student of Jewish and Israeli history, and I admire the Jewish people. I believe that all Jews need a homeland, the nation of Israel, which has a right to exist peaceably. 

I do not believe Iran represents a threat to American national security. Until we started bombing them, that is. It can’t be Iranian nuclear bombs we fear, since we were told that Iranian nuclear capacity was totally destroyed last June, or at least set back for a long while. So, before this latest war, how close could the Iranians really have been to nuking the world? Not very. The president’s insisted the morning of the attack that core U.S. national security interests were at stake. Yet, the Iranians don’t have a nuclear weapon or the delivery system for a bomb. So, I don’t buy this.

Both the president and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are promising the people of Iran regime change, which does not equal a core national security interest. Haven’t we seen this show before in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? How did those wars work out?

This is how empires end. The United States is already financially ($37 trillion) and militarily exhausted due, in part, to those failed wars. And we’re doing it again? Insanity is doing the same things over and over and … well, that’s why I think POTUS has lost his mind. 

Precisely whose interests are being served by this war? Whose foreign policy is being advanced? It is not our own. We no longer live in a republic with popularly elected leaders but in a system where votes in Congress are often bought and where political survival depends upon going along with certain interests. Some 73% of Americans oppose attacking Iran and getting involved in another war. And yet, here we are.

If you take the statements of Donald Trump on the morning of the attack (“This terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon”), you will hear echoed the statements of Netanyahu over the last 30 years. 

Who wants regime change? Netanyahu. He’s up for reelection this fall. Trump promised us all no more disastrous Middle Eastern wars. Yet he renames the DoD the Department of War and does exactly the opposite. 

This is not a war for the people of Iran. It is a war against the people of Iran. Let’s not pretend we’re doing this out of the goodness of our hearts. How have these attacks liberated the Iranian people? What good faith did America show during negotiations? Who will trust us now? We fed the Iranians our red lines, which we knew they’d never accept. We wanted their capitulation and fealty, and that’s not realistic.

As I scrolled the night before the bombing, there were reports of a breakthrough in negotiations. Maybe somebody didn’t want that. Maybe somebody wanted to hang on to their political fortunes just a little longer, because war forestalls their legal reckoning. It’s an old and effective strategy. Problems at home? Start a war abroad.

The demands of the Americans (and Israelis) included weakening the Iranian ballistic missile program and the discontinuation of support of Iranian proxies. These are Israeli demands, but Netanyahu doesn’t have the military hardware, so he got us to do his dirty work. 

Will we “obliterate” Iran, as Trump promises? I doubt it. Iran is not Iraq. It is not Libya. It is not Afghanistan, which was a poor, disorganized nation that, despite its undeveloped status, finally kicked us out.

Iran has 90 million people and covers more than 600,000 square miles. Persians, the dominant ethnic group in Iran, are educated and have been around for thousands years. Iran has a relatively advanced industrial base, a resilient infrastructure and a well-integrated bureaucracy, all of which are more robust than those of the other nations we sought to collapse and rebuild.

To misjudge these capacities, to underestimate them, could lead to long-term, regional war with worldwide economic consequences. Yet, we are trying to lay waste to this vast nation with money we don’t have. We’ve tried to topple regimes with air power before, but without a much greater military commitment, airpower is never enough. How many lives did we have to lose in Iraq and Afghanistan to learn that?

Trump said that we are undertaking a massive and ongoing operation, yet he seems to think it’ll be over in a few weeks. Netanyahu promised we will change the face of the Middle East. We’ll change it – just not in ways we intend or can predict.

“Don’t worry,” our leaders tell us, this will not turn into a wider regional war. But it already has. 

– Mike Just, Durango 

Mike Just has a Bachelor’s Degree in political science from De Paul University, with a concentration in arms, security and war, a Master’s Degree from National Louis University and a law degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law. He is an essayist, speech writer and author and has a regular nonfiction post on Substack. He also authored an editorial in the Chicago Sun Times on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan warning that the invasion would lead to disastrous consequences. He lives in Durango. ■