This War is a Good One. Trust Me.

A noxious smell is in the air that is so familiar

I took a break last week from writing. There was to be a post about the ‘No Kings Day’ protests, the horrific immigration raids throughout the country. I had a Hannah Arendt quote all lined up and ready to go. Maybe I’ll get back to it at some point.

But the news of war breaking out between Iran and Israel froze me and if I’m being honest, I still feel very frozen.

I won’t pretend that I’m the best read on foreign policy issues or have the answer to every minutia of an issue. What I try to do is look at these issues very distantly from a narrow and faulty premise of “good country, bad country.”

I’ve mentioned previously how formative the George W. Bush administration was to my overall political thinking. By the time the Bush administration was winding down, I was in the middle of my junior year of high school. The Bush project had been so thoroughly mocked by the end of his two terms, that was likely part of the zeitgeist at the time.

But I think the real reason it impacted me so much is because of how many people speak about the Bush years as if it were an instructional manual on what not to do. You’ll hear people talk about the lessons of the Bush years, not to repeat the same mistakes. Almost like those years are a self-contained message locked up in a black box and meant to be listened to as an urgent warning for the future.

And I hear it right now. The polluted air that the more prescient of our public were pointing to, I can smell it.

It smells so familiar.

Right now we’re being given promises by our media and elected officials (and across much of Western Europe). Like a marching band that is out-of-tune after taking some small break between the fall of Libya to now. But that message now is that war is not only necessary, it is good.

These were the same drumbeats that were rung in the march to the Iraq war.

Pretexts being built (claims of weapons of mass destruction being obtained) to reach their desired conclusion (regime change that turns into a failed state).

And yet, it is different. Different in the most morbidly comical, stupid way possible.

This will sound ridiculous, but evidently we didn’t know how good we had it; the Bush administration had the decency to deceive the American public through a constant barrage of misinformation aimed at swaying the people they are meant to be responsive to.

There was an effort to build a popular majority, a legitimacy, for their war. They seemingly felt to push forward with the paper-thin case to invade Iraq, they needed the public support so that they could point their finger to.

Notice the word felt. What’s absent is the word necessary.

We are in a crisis. Where popular legitimacy no longer matters. What the public wants, what they think, doesn’t matter even in the most superficial of ways.

Your stamp of approval is not only not necessary, they do not even bother to ask you for it.

A new poll came out Tuesday asking what Americans think regarding America taking military actions in Iran. Only 16% of Americans believe we should be involved in the war (to the extent Americans are even aware of how active we already are).

60% are opposed to America’s formal entry into the war.

This comes on the heels of a report from CNN stating that America’s intelligence agencies concluded that there is no evidence that Iran was in the process of or trying to make a nuclear weapon. It also comes at a time when the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is voicing this skepticism behind the scenes.

Trump is seemingly throwing his lot in with Benjamin Netanyahu, a man currently wanted by the International Criminal Courts for war crimes in Gaza and who has been saying for 30 years that Iran is days, weeks, months away from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

I’m not kidding. The Daily Show neatly packaged how Netanyahu has been claiming this for decades with not only no evidence, but also contrary to the findings of the international community.

If you want to go further down the rabbit hole of just how reliable Netanyahu is, take a look at a video of him testifying (for some reason) in front of Congress in 2002, where he backs up the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq attempting to obtain a nuclear weapon and claims that an ensuing regime change war will not only liberate Iraq, but spread democracy throughout the region.

It appears that Netanyahu himself maybe actually doesn’t want the countries he toys around with to ever regain any stability after they are dismantled.

In any case, just consider how asinine this whole episode has turned into. Trump is saying openly that he does not care what his own intelligence community is telling him (again the Bush administration had the decency to lie to us and suppress dissenting voices). He is saying that he doesn’t care what his Director of National Security has to say. He clearly doesn’t care about what the public thinks. And he is following the fictitious claims of man who seemingly keeps finding new places to bomb whenever his governing coalition appears ready to dissolve and he may have to face consequences in his corruption trial.

For all the talk of countries who are rational or irrational actors, do the current leaders of America and Israel sound particularly rational to you?

If for whatever reason you or someone you know has amnesia of what the lead up to the Iraq war looked and sounded like, at the bear minimum consider the idiocy of what this country looks like right now. Nothing matters when we are about to bomb another sovereign state.

And the state in question can’t be forgotten in the equation. Iran has a population size of over 90 million people. How many elected officials or media personalities have you heard talk about this fact? Apparently Ted Cruz, who is salivating over bombing Iran to kingdom come, doesn’t know a single thing about the country he so badly wants to topple.

Think about what happens to a country when there is a regime change and then sudden instability. What happens if (and let’s be honest, when) a country we dismantle then falls into chaos? You will cause sectarian violence, usually stoked by the very actors that contributed to its collapse. When you have societal collapse in a country, you have an urgent crisis of people fleeing violence and death.

Oh, and remember the dismantling of USAID? In the past, we would use USAID to make meager reconstruction efforts in the countries we destroyed. Not much and often very insufficient considering the destruction that was caused. Well, that’s now a thing of the past because of the cuts. So those countries will only get the destruction part and not any of the meager reconstruction going forward.

We then have that followed with a refugee crisis, I’m sure much to the delight of the right-wing reactionaries of the world who then use this reality to fearmonger, scapegoat them for all the world’s problems, and then assume power in the vacuum of true accountability.

That is what we are staring at right now.

As of writing, America has not formally started bombing Iran (as far as we know). Which means maybe, however small that is, there is a chance that this can be avoided.

My optimism isn’t high, but we need to be persistent in this moment in not allowing the primal, hollow screams of the monsters among us win without a fight.

We need to fight for a movement that is anti-war, anti-atrocities, and pro-diplomacy.

And we need to do it fast.

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