Defensible War, Indefensible Messengers

Attacking Iran's criminals is fair enough, but with the credibility-free Trump and Netanyahu in charge, it's also a gift to conspiracists. Here's how to end it reasonably.

Decades ago I met a nice young woman in Romania who did not believe she was an antisemite. But she did believe that the Jews control the world through shadowy methods outlined in some sort of a “map.” She asked for my copy and was shocked I did not have one. I’m not kidding about this, and neither was she.

Presumably Tucker Carlson is not quite this dumb. But he did actually argue this week that Chabad, an ultra-religious Jewish organization that does works both good and bad, was behind the US decision to attack in Iran. He seems to not be kidding either – though to be fair, with media antisemites you never can tell.

There’s a fascinating paradox at the heart of the current Iran war. An intervention to get rid of the Iranian dictatorship is as justified as any ever. You can be against interventions on principle, including against Hitler, even bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz, and that would make you a little weird, but a pacifist is a pacifist. If you’re not, though, you understand that sovereignty has limits. Until now, interesting, Trump seemed to be a sovereignty maximalist; we all develop.

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Iran makes a great case for being an exception, certainly after its mullahs massacred many thousands of protestors in January. They’re awful, and have been from the start. Rigging the 1979 referendum that established the Islamic Republic, screaming “Death to America” while taking hostages at the US embassy, forcing women to wear hijabs, hanging homosexuals from cranes, and messing with neighboring Arab countries via jihad-exporting, hatred-spewing, death-bringing corrupt mafia-militias. None of it is acceptable.

If there is one circumstance that compels you to leave evildoers alone, though, that is when they have nuclear weapons – like North Korea. That is precisely why Iran seeks nukes, and that is why they must not have them. Also, they should not have long-range ballistic missiles. Ot be permitted to keep funding proxies militias around the Middle East.

It is tempting to seek a deal to achieve this, because war is terrible. The deal that has been on the table for years was no nukes in exchange for relief from economic sanctions – which meant billions flowing to the regime to be diverted into the missiles, militias, and domestic repression while enriching regime goons.

That was basically the deal Obama (and the handful of other “powers”) reached in 2015. It was a lousy deal for the Iranian people, who continued to suffer under the boot of the regime, but a pretty good one for Israel. Even so, the cartoonishly devious Netanyahu convinced Trump to walk away from it in 2018, even as the Mossad and CIA were denying his claims that the Iranians were cheating.

They both had their reasons – Bibi thrives off conflict, and for Trump, anything Obama did must be bad – but it was an extremely stupid act. The only justification would have been to move to crippling the regime that very day – but instead it simply enabled it to resume enrichment and continue arming Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, which brought us to this day.

Now, after the massacres of protesters in Iran, after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 invasion of Israel and the regional war it sparked, destroying the regime is a reasonable choice to make. And most Iranians would be supremely thankful if it works – that much is for sure.

But one can hardly imagine a worse pair of messengers, at least in the democratic world, and actually in the history of the democratic world, than Trump and Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, who is an extremely clever man and a brilliant politician, oddly lacks panoramic understanding of complex situations; he is laser-focused on whatever aspect of a situation he sees, and whatever he thinks might benefit him. Mainly, he has become a classic elected authoritarian, who would essentially stop at nothing to stay in power — most Israelis believe a version of this. Netanyahu sometimes tells the truth, is capable of articulating profound truths, and is hugely eloquent when he does, but believing him as a baseline is utterly absurd.

Moving west, it’s fair to say that no intelligent person could possibly take Trump at his word either. An intelligent person might support him for reasons to do with expected policies or outcomes, but believing him, given his record of systematic lying, is inconceivable. It also doesn’t help that Trump does not seem to have a deep grasp of history (though he does have a genius for manipulating people).

So let’s just say that no one is going to trust these guys when they say their motivation is to save the Iranian people, or even the region. In the case of Netanyahu, at least Israel is part of the region and so that might actually be part of the story. With Trump, however, absolutely no one should be surprised to hear him declaring something cringingly vulgar, like that the US needs access to Iranians oil.

After all, that’s what he did with Venezuela, mere hours after abducting the dictator Nicolas Maduro. Kidnapping a foreign leader is an action of the edge of legitimacy, if to be charitable, so you’d think Trump would keep his powder dry. But that would be so Sleepy Joe! Trump wants the oil and wants you to know it. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and so on and so forth.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu probably has about 60 IQ points on Trump, and that is conservative. So it’s hardly inconceivable that he convinced his intellectual inferior to attack Iran. According to multiple reports, Trump moved in that direction after his last meeting with Netanyahu at the White House in February, and then after a call the week before the attack, in which Netanyahu explained how Israeli intel showed they could assassinate much of the Iranian leadership.

It is a short distance from that to conspiracy theorists like Carlson blaming Jews for the war (Carlson’s argument involved some nonsense about rebuilding the ancient Jewish Temple destroyed by the Romans, which some fanatics in Israel actually do want, but never mind).

For centuries, one of the most persistent antisemitic tropes has been the accusation that Jews manipulate powerful states into fighting wars on their behalf. The suggestion that Israel can pull the US into conflict feeds directly into that. Once such perceptions take hold, they can be extremely difficult to reverse.

But no less an intellectual giant than Marco Rubio seemed to inadvertently feed such notions by suggesting in recent days that the US had to attack Iran because Israel was going to do so “anyway,” and then America would have been a target. “If we stood and waited for that attack to come first, before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casulties,” reasoned the besuited successor to the John Quincy Adams, George Marshall, and Henry Kissinger.

That weirdly suggests American passivity in the face of an Israeli decision that would have endangered Americans. So Trump – who knows when he is made to look like a chump – then contradicted Rubio, claiming that “if anything” he forced Israel’s hand. Forcing Israel to do something Israel absolutely wants is a stretch even for the world’s most powerful social media influencer, but the real lesson is this: Rubio would be wise to tend to his garden for a while.

So here are the implications of all this, and a game plan for making the best of it — indeed for ending it very well.

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