The US And Iran Are At War

This is not the first time that American forces have killed Iranians - a little-known aspect of the Iran-Iraq War, one of the worst wars of the past half century, was the battle fought over shipping in the Persian* Gulf, culminating in American sailors choosing to shoot down Air Flight 655 and kill two hundred and ninety nine civilians. And this is certainly not going to set off World War Three - NATO-Russia, India-Pakistan, North-South Korea and China-Taiwan are flashpoints to watch in a way that this is not. Russia is exhausted elsewhere and Iran is out of allies; no other nuclear powers or major militaries have a reason to come swinging back at America. This may be a single event that smooths back out into an uneasy peace within a week, not a true back-and-forth war as we conventionally understand it.

*Now isn’t really the time for a linguistic nitpick.

Nor is bombing Iranian nuclear sites a decision that, on the barest, most universally agreeable points, taken totally in isolation, lacks any case to support it:

1. Iran is a country with significant peaceful nuclear capabilities. If the regime did decide to develop nuclear weapons, and were not interrupted, it is unlikely that they would fail indefinitely and likely that they would succeed quickly.

2. The Iranian regime is terrible on several metrics even by the standards of authoritarian regimes. The leadership and their enforcers are violently repressive and intrusive, they regularly promote the kind of hawkish and revolutionary rhetoric that obviously goes against the grain of international trust-building, and, most importantly, Iran has been a crucial supporter for violent and destabilising actors across the Middle East - not just terrorist and militia groups, but the Syrian regime, some of the most evil murderers of the twenty-first century. Iran’s government has demonstrated that they are very happy to make lots of people die and suffer to advance their interests.

3. Any nuclear weapon existing is a bad thing in a vacuum. Nuclear weapons invite inevitable risks: anything less than the utmost care in handling them endangers countless numbers of your own people, and no matter how sensible successive administrations are with nuclear weapons, all it takes is one utter madman seizing the helm and anything could happen. This is why almost every country in the world abides by nuclear non-proliferation treaties and why, in the absence of total multilateral disarmament, the reduction of nuclear weapons reserves is good.

4. For Iran to use a nuclear weapon on Israel would be one of the worst things to happen so far this century. Hundreds of thousands of people would instantly die, an incalculable nightmare. Even if you are seriously willing to write off the lives of all Israelis because they benefit from being the dominant group in a racist, genocidal state, hundreds of thousands of oppressed Israeli Arabs would die too, and the radioactive fallout would be a devastating sickness for many more Palestinians for years to come. There is no world in which nuking even the most unfair and unequal states can be regarded as an act of liberation: it would not have been anything but a horror to nuke Cape Town, and it would be horrifying today to nuke Pyongyang.

5. This strike was a limited excursion that only hit nuclear sites.

Taken all together, you can chain together a string of logic that justifies this individual choice. There is a reasonable chance of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, and one of those nuclear weapons going off, causing one of the worst disasters of the twenty-first century. The deaths of a vastly smaller number of Iranians, and some damage to the energy infrastructure that supports the wider Iranian public, were an acceptable sacrifice to prevent that outcome. It is entirely possible that the strikes between Israel and Iran will die down over the coming weeks, and this particular event will go down in history as a controversial decision at the time that wound up vindicated by an ongoing nuclear peace in the Middle East.

So why am I so furious about this? Why were so many people both within and without Iran dreading this outcome, and will now castigate it? What follows is my attempt to catalogue a thorough if incomplete picture of the context that hopes to explain why so many people still regard Israel and the US not as necessary peacekeepers in the Middle East, but as destabilising aggressors launching illegitimate wars. I hope that, by making such a thorough case for the strike, you can appreciate that I’m not coming at this from a dogmatic perspective. I am not the strongest defender of the Islamic Republic; I just want as much peace in the world as possible, and I cannot see this as anything but yet another point of escalation on this wider tableau of disastrous spiralling into conflict.

The first and most important question to ask ourselves is: were Iranian nuclear scientists actually developing nuclear weapons? Or were they exclusively working on a peaceful power program that helps the lives of everyday people? As always with Frozen Peaches, I strive not to simply restate what you can find elsewhere, and there is a large body of argumentation about this that convinces me towards always presuming Iran is probably not developing nuclear weapons. 

What muddies this recent context is that some of the barriers against nuclear weapons have been eroding - the notion that Iranian religious law forbids WMDs is increasingly tenuous, the massive stigma that Saddam’s enthusiastic use of WMDs on thousands of Iraqis inflicted is decades in the past, and, of course, Iran’s alliances and agents across the Middle East have been collapsing across the past couple of years, necessitating some alternate form of defense.

But what sticks out to me most is the in-credibility of the accusers here. On the one hand, you have the Israeli strikes launched based on the promise that Iran was within months or even weeks of developing nuclear weapons. This is a claim that has been repeated by senior Israeli figures such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu literally since the NINETEEN-NINETIES. It would be legitimately impossible to ask of me, or anyone, not to see that as a blow to credibility - that Iranian nuclear armament is more of an ideological narrative than an appraisal of the facts. 

It’s a narrative that perfectly fits the perpetual American and Israeli paranoid crouch against Iranian aggression, an idea with some basis in fact given everything I've said about Iran supporting violent actors abroad, but not a ton given the Islamic Republic has literally never invaded another country. It’s a decidedly hypocritical narrative, given Israel’s own possession of a nuclear cache. And it'd be hard to take the Israeli government's word on anything after several hundred consecutive days of horrific violence against Palestinians. If any government in the Middle East has actually attempted to follow through on its promises to wipe another nation off the map, it is the Israeli government.

But, on a much more mundane level, Netanyahu and all his colleagues are politicians. Politicians who have faced not just searing international scrutiny, but domestic scandals over corruption, the curtailment of the judiciary, and the inevitable horsetrading of coalitions. Politicians like to stay in power. And, as in so many states, getting into crises and winning victories is a fantastic way to boost your popularity and extend your leadership.

So I am left to ask the question: if the Israeli government were to look for a cynical lie to justify starting a new war, would anything else suffice but the allegation of nuclear weapons? It’s plausible that the broken clock is striking right on this day. But we have absolutely zero reason to lend them the benefit of the doubt. Especially when they physically couldn’t eliminate the nuclear sites - they hit important targets, but this entire war was initiated specifically with the aim of dragging in the one country with the bunker-busting bombs that could eliminate the sites: the US.

So, on the other hand, you have the head of the CIA testifying in March that Iran is not on track to acquire nuclear weapons. Tulsi Gabbard is not a trustworthy person, but…who on earth else are we supposed to go to as our source on American intelligence gathering? Or, put another way, are we to believe that if Gabbard genuinely were covering up months of intelligence clearly indicating Iranian nuclear armament, that she would have succeeded in that coverup without leaks or consequences? 

On every question of whether the US should risk a war with Iran or not, the answer seems to be “Donald Trump”. Top secret intelligence argues against war? Donald Trump says it’s wrong, so it must be. The power to start a war only rests with the people’s Congress? Donald Trump decides for everybody in America. Ted Cruz gets roasted for not simply brushing up on the CIA Factbook page on Iran? He immediately pivots back to Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump. 

Just as in Israel, whatever rational arguments we can construct from the outside, they fall apart when you consider how much the decisionmaking of these states actually rests on the fundamentally broken people atop them. Donald Trump is not carefully considering the facts in front of him. And neither is anybody around him, because their chief consideration that Trumps everything else is Donald Trump. He has to win, or else he’ll make sure they lose.

So what’s the alternative? After all, Iran has been given many reasons to mistrust the West. I highly recommend John Ghazvinian’s America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present - while I don’t know enough about Iran to say if the text is a bit optimistic about Iranian dovishness, you should absolutely give this a read if you want a really engaging and interesting look at the many unforced errors made in past diplomacy with Iran, as with many other countries. 

And yet - even after Libya gave up their WMDs and Gaddafi still wound up dead, even after the US lied into war in Iraq - the US, Iran, and other partners still reached the JCPOA, a deal I and many others believe was successfully working in indefinitely ending the Iranian nuclear threat. This makes sense. Iran’s leaders are not madmen like Hitler who would throw it all away for nothing: they are cynical, calculating killers, who have made many ruthlessly pragmatic moves to stay in power. You can make the case that they might look at their current context and evaluate the best way to stay in power is a nuclear weapon. That’s a context that was crafted by actors like Israel. Bringing down Bashar al-Assad was unequivocally good for the world; pager bombings in Lebanon and treating the Gaza Strip like Cambodia under Nixon was not.

And Donald Trump said he would rip up the JCPOA and get a better deal, and Donald Trump ripped up the JCPOA, and Donald Trump did not get a better deal. In fact, on May 28th, he was proudly crowing about how close he was to getting a new deal, and now here he is three weeks later claiming the only way to prevent Iranian nuclear armament is to bomb them. It is absurdly farcical for the president to claim he would keep America out of foreign wars, then to start a war with a country who America has never gone to war with before. Does he want another 9/11?

Because now what do America and Israel do? Do they simply subscribe to indefinitely bombing and assassinating Iranian nuclear operations and operatives, or do they presume they can deter the regime? What other recourse can the Iranian government possibly look to to secure its protection and persistence against countries who attacked it first? We know from examples as egregious as India and Pakistan that mortal enemies can acquire nuclear weapons and see the obvious logic in not eliminating themselves by using nuclear weapons on their enemies.

But the Americans and the Israelis in charge refuse to contemplate the idea that maybe the ayatollah and company don’t want to wipe out the only Islamic Republic in the world and lose all the privileges and power their regime has conveniently allotted themselves just to kill a fraction of the world’s Jewish population and forever supercharge the legitimacy of Zionism. There simply isn't the pool of evidence to suggest that the constant and alarming rhetoric from Iran's leaders is backed up by actually crazy erratic policymaking. If you want to find some of that, you need only look to the ketted-up killers in Washington D.C. finding dollars to kill Palestinians but not even pennies to care for HIV-positive people across Africa.

And this is why the conversation of regime change is suddenly in the air again, plucked out of the constant ambience in the American right-wing discourse - the idea that they cannot make peace with evil and oppressive world leaders, so they must bomb their people to freedom, rightly pointing out how terribly many Iranian men treat Iranian women even as American and Israeli bombs and missiles take limbs and livelihoods off of Iranian women. There is no plan for the long term - it’s reading a social media infographic and deciding to remake the fate of ninety two million people. This is not even like Iraq with thousands of American boots on the ground to enforce a new order.

The reality is that America and Israel and all these actors need to recognise all this past context that produces so much mistrust in them, and act to build trust and peace, even with the worst of regimes, because what matters most is anything that makes life better for people on the ground. That is not happening anytime soon. Instead, propelled by domestic political incentives, the US and Israel are barrelling towards unleashing violently unpredictable forces in the Middle East with no real interest in helping Iranians through the aftermath. The worst part of all is that failed regime change only helps all the elites here - if American and Israeli bombing rallies Iranians around their terrible government, then that simply sustains the ability of all sides to stay in charge by rallying their supporters against their enemies. 

What might come next, in the unlikely event that a massive bombing campaign is enough to bring the regime down? Could there be the best chance outcome of a democracy, powered by a vibrant civil society? Quite possibly! Or there could be a military dictatorship born out of the Revolutionary Guard. Short of  the restoration of the Shah, I say anything’s possible. Hell, The Rest Is Politics were theorising about Iran turning away from the Middle East - where its interests have now collapsed - and towards Central Asia. Iran is simply such a singular country in recent history, with a government like no other, that it’s hard to say.

I can’t say anything for sure on that score. But what I can confirm is two things. One, any expansion of bombing to attempt to bring down the Iranian regime will be a disaster for all the people killed and hurt. Two, if one of the world's most notorious and idiosyncratic regimes, ruling almost one hundred million people, comes down, it will be the capstone of a decade-long run that has transformed the world the most of anything since the end of the Cold War. 

Since the sweep of democracy across the Eastern Bloc and the death of communism as a governing force, we have been waiting to see when the sense of colossal reshaping will return to the world. Compared to relatively ineffectual spasms like the Arab Spring, over the past decade since Brexit and Trump, the American-led international order has collapsed into a surge of far-right populist isolationism, governments have come down across the world, and now the entire balance of power across the Middle East has shifted decisively. 

It is outrageous that the lives and deaths of Palestinians and Israelis and Iranians is, in no small part, decided by the theological beliefs of millions of evangelical Americans convinced that Israel’s success is the necessary prerequisite to heaven coming to earth. And we do not need to scare ourselves with fantasies about World War III to appreciate that every day that goes by, more people are shot and bombed and traumatised, and the cycle rolls on as more are disillusioned and the date of peace is pushed ever further out. But one can hardly deny the sense of living in the end times. Every Rubicon is being crossed. The future has never looked less predictable.