Trump and Israel's War On Iran
What history tells us about the future of conflict in the Middle East
On Tuesday 17 June, around 22:00 hours, I wrote the following:
I’m about 70% convinced the US will join Israel in striking Iran in the next 24-48 hours.
Of course moving aircraft carriers and other assets could be part of pressure tactics to get Iran to cave and agree to humiliating US-Israeli demands; the same goes for Trump’s aggressive rhetoric, his dramatic threats against Tehran and against the Ayatollah himself.
But it’s also clear that Trump smells blood.
Trump thinks Israel have done the hard bit already, both militarily and diplomatically. The Iranian response hasn’t caused enough damage to Israel to restore any kind of deterrence, and all the ‘sensible’ countries of the G-7 have done is to cynically justify Israeli aggression with their cringing statements about ‘Israel’s right to self-defence.’
Trump knows China and Russia don’t care enough to get involved beyond selling some extra weapons to Iran in the short term. Neither stands to benefit from the collapse of the Iranian regime, but that’s still a long way off. In the meantime, China would benefit from the US withdrawing its forces from East Asia to fight yet another war in West Asia, while Russia is already lapping up extra profits thanks to the already extreme oil price spikes that Israel’s attacks have prompted.
So now Trump’s thinking that maybe all he needs to do is send a couple of bombers in to ‘finish the job,’ wipe out Iran’s nuclear facilities, and he’ll have scored a rare, total ‘victory’ for the US in the Middle East - and for himself, no less - with none of the longer-term entanglements his MAGA isolationist allies are so suspicious of. Meanwhile it’s clear the neocon members of his bloc are already popping open the champagne.
It’s classic short-term reactionary thinking of the kind that Trump is all about.
The ‘ultimate deal.’
A situation where Israel take the flak for anything that goes wrong, while he gets all the credit if Iran either fold under the pressure, or get taken out by superior US forces on the grounds that they had a chance to surrender and refused.
Potentially it’s just the Gulf states, above all the Saudis, who stand in the way of this happening tonight.
And who the fuck knows what their calculations are right now. I guess we’ll find out soon.
Since I wrote the above, my imaginary 48 hour timer has gone off and it turns out my worst fears were wrong, at least as far as the timings of any American attack go.
Which is always the way with history. It’s only with hindsight that one can know whether a particular prediction or other piece of forward-looking analysis was right or wrong (or, in the many, many cases of such things being way less binary than that, how right or how wrong exactly it was).
At that point, of course, it will be obvious that whatever has happened, was always going to be what would happen.
As all good historians know, hindsight is a bitch.
That's not to say, however, that history cannot help us to think through what's happening right now, and what may be about to happen, and how, and why, etc.
And even if such things never really get beyond the world of betting-shop odds and punts and (gasp) journalism, well, who ever said that good scholarly historians were beyond engaging in a bit of punditry from time to time?
Especially if the history of the world up until now might help those who know a bit about it to shorten those odds and come up with some better predictions than, say, the complete and utter fucking idiots who pass for western politicians these days. That's right, Ted Cruz, I'm looking at you.
So… On the basis of all of the above, I think it's safe to say that we are living through very dark times right now.
Even if the US doesn't attack Iran in the next couple of days or weeks, the largely unconditional support of the global north for even the most disgusting abuses committed by the genocidal Israeli war machine over the past 18 months has upended all of the remaining, fragile, often hypocritical but, at the very least, vaguely and genuinely well-meaning international legal safeguards constructed in the wake of World War II in a way that will, inevitably, result in serious blowback.
And if the US does attack Iran, historians might even end up calling it a ‘watershed’ moment a few years from now. A parting of the ways. A point of no return. A moment when the Orwellian double-speak of ‘self-defence’ as a synonym for ‘surprise attack’ became standard usage and ‘democracy’ was revealed to be a completely empty term good only for the vilest propaganda rags that the two-bit oligarchies of the western world had to offer.
For the US, the combination of Trump giving up on his first and most sincere promise in the realm of foreign affairs - to abandon the cynical and costly Middle Eastern wars that have defined the past twenty-five years of America’s ‘War on Terror’ - with the domestic crackdowns that his regime is so aggressively pursuing in cities like Los Angeles, really could be the inflection point in the country’s downward slide into full-blown fascism, defined by the great Guy Debord as:
a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader.
Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism.1
Even if Trump doesn’t bomb Iran, it’s clear that as though the invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring, Islamic State’s decade-long rampage, the fall of Gaddafi and, most recently, of Assad’s regime in Syria weren’t enough, Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, brutal occupation in the West Bank, and demolition of Hizbollah in Lebanon is re-shaping the Middle East.
But when it comes to the optimism I promised would be part of this whole Future / Conditional experiment…
Well, it seems reasonable to assume that American fascism will not, in the long-term, be any more sustainable than it was in Italy, Germany or even Spain. Not least because, even if the technology in which the atavistic macho cult of the apeman comes dressed up in is more advanced than anything that the Nazis could ever dream of, it’ll be no match for the combination of social, environmental and health crises that are already tearing the country apart at the grassroots and are all set to be further exacerbated by America’s fascist turn.
Not to mention that a country under the cosh of heavily-armed, racist misogynists who are already too obese and opioid-addled to function properly doesn’t, to my mind, look like the best place for a happy, successful, not-at-all violent and disruptive AI revolution to take place, especially given that companies like OpenAI are actively aiming to destroy what’s left of those jobs that survived the de-industrialisation of the 80s and 90s…
Meanwhile, for all that the continued and worsening slaughter in the Middle East is literally keeping me awake at night and has me weeping regularly for the Gazans - and now the Iranians - who won’t see tomorrow because of the weapons my government refuses to stop sending to the Israelis…
Well… I guess I have nothing particularly optimistic to say. Other than to point out that the region (with the exception, again, of Iran - and maybe Syria?) was completely screwed by Ottoman and then British and French and then US and now Israeli imperialism and has never been properly decolonised (hence all the recently-established western-backed monarchies all over the shop), and that maybe what’s happening now will be seen, in the future, as a part of that process?
A process that, like all decolonisation processes, is tragic and bloody and involves millions of innocents paying the price, in blood, for the vagaries of old empires, but that, once it’s shaken up the region, will also straighten shit that was always crooked, with positive outcomes in the long, long, long term.
If the world survives that long, of course.
And as for Israel…
Well, what I can say with all of the certainty of someone who's read a lot of world history is that some of this blowback, at some point, and even if it takes a good few more years or even decades (which, talking as a historian, I can assure you is not all that long ‘in the scheme of things’), is going to rebound on Israel, too.
It’s just not realistic to think that you can go on bombing and shooting and crushing and destabilising your neighbours forever without some kind of reckoning.
This might well not come at the hands of its current Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian and now Iranian victims. What seems just as likely, at least in the short(ish) term, is that Israel suffers a series of escalating internal crises, caused by religious-secular conflicts, tensions over conscription, a drop-off in ex-Soviet migration to a place even more dystopian than Putin’s Russia, and above all by the brain drain of clever liberal Israelis tired of eternal war, economic crisis, and the extreme right-wing nationalist takeover of society.
Current Israeli policy might make the country bigger, physically, thanks to genocide, annexation, invasion and occupation; but that doesn’t matter if most of its total area is ever more completely dominated by deranged far-right sheep herders and date-farming zionist rednecks who no longer have anything to offer Europe or US, at the same time as global memories of Jewish victimisation during the Holocaust have faded and been replaced by images of the so-called Jewish State’s own butchery of tens of thousands of innocent children.
Running out of water in the face of the climate crisis and abandoned by their erstwhile international allies, the far-right Israel of the future wouldn’t be particularly well-placed to hang on in a region where literally everyone hates their guts.
For all that Israeli politics and society in general is increasingly dominated buy a bunch of deranged, bigoted religious fundamentalists, the far right has been skipping their bible study or at the very least massively over-privileging all those conveniently gung ho bits of the Torah over the more nuanced bits of Hebrew scripture, not least this little gem from the Mishlei, which if you’re a Gentile like myself you might also recognise from ‘Proverbs’:
יח לִפְנֵי-שֶׁבֶר גָּאוֹן; וְלִפְנֵי כִשָּׁלוֹן, גֹּבַהּ רוּחַ.
Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.2
King James Bible, Proverbs 16:18
Thx for putting that all so eloquently, I wish I had solace to offer :( What a lovely line from the Mishlei/Proverbs!
Great article Nat, nicely sums up the horrors.