Five Uncomfortable Truths About War with Iran
Alongside many others, I predicted the US would bomb Iran again, unleashing hell from the skies, and yet I’m finding it hard to process.
A few words to help make sense of this and where it’s going.
First, there is no “national” (US) purpose in war with Iran. It’s what the Israeli government wants, and US foreign policy pretends that Israeli primacy in the Middle East is good for US global dominance. That’s a farce, but it’s also official policy. If the US were a real democracy, this would not be happening.
Second, they (the US and Israel) don’t want regime change; they want Iranian state collapse. Trump and Netanyahu both now say they’re hoping for regime change, and indeed these latest strikes have decapitated the regime. But if that’s what they sought, they wouldn’t be targeting hospitals, schools, and critical infrastructure. These were not solely counterforce (ie, military to military) strikes.
Additionally, there are claims circulating widely on social media that Israel has been targeting leftists in Iran, in hopes of destroying any coherent political force from cohering in the country. Israel has also definitely targeted the building where the leader of the Green Movement, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has been under house arrest since 2011, which would further support that claim. What that illustrates is the degree to which this renewed air war against Iran is not about national security in any normal sense. It’s also a repudiation of the safety and political will of “the people,” whether American or Iranian.
Third, this war must be understood as a sign of imperial decline. It was on that basis that I predicted it. And as my friend Spencer Ackerman rued this morning:
launching an unprovoked war to overthrow a longstanding enemy under cover of negotiation to resolve a pretextual crisis is the sort of aggression typical of empires in, at a minimum, steep decline. Overthrowing the Islamic Republic addresses none of the compounding social and economic crises the United States faces. Accordingly, from a certain rot-at-the-heart-of-decisionmaking perspective, such a war looks like an opportunity, in the sense that it defers addressing such crises.
Fourth, one of the casualties of imperial decline is the credibility of the empire itself. You might have noticed that over the past decade or so, foreign governments stopped believing American threats and promises. When they make deals, it’s in deference to power, not credibility. US counterparts always hedge their bets. It’s almost like American words don’t matter. To that end, Trump has now twice used diplomacy for the sole purpose of deception to wage illegal war on Iran. This makes US diplomacy little more than toilet paper. Indeed, a senior Iranian official told Drop Site News,
Once again, diplomacy has been reduced to an instrument of deception, and international law has been openly disregarded by the United States.
As a village idiot once said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”
Fifth, the part of all this that even many smart people seem not to get is that imperial decline is not randomly happening, and it’s not happening because the US state is run by politicians with poor judgment. Neither is it because America’s political leadership are evil. The root source of imperial decline is a crisis of capitalism that gets managed through zero-sum patches, improvisational fixes that sacrifice others…and that aim at sustaining oligarchy. How oligarchic capitalism sustains its wealth- and power-hoarding is through the permanent war economy. Oligarchy cannot survive the tendency of the declining rate of profit within capitalism without pouring resources into the permanent war economy. And the permanent war economy requires a permanent war footing.
The parlor game of “Will Trump strike this specific country?” misses the point that the US state must be in conflict in many places to sustain its form of governance, which is oligarchy + elections. Iran is downstream of that, but even if caprice led the US to not strike Iran, it would need to bomb a dozen other places anyway. The US will seek out reasons to police others by force on behalf of those who benefit from the imbalance between the forces of capital and the forces of labor. That’s why Trump committed to $1.5 trillion for the military against the advice of his own advisers, who admit they have no idea what to even spend that ungodly sum on. The real humane promise of “great-power competition” for so many liberal national security wonks was an illusion that they could perpetuate the trillion-dollar war machine without having to bomb brown people on a fortnightly basis. Sure, they were prepping for World War III, but they also told themselves nice stories about how laying down the tracks for war was the best way to avoid it. Joke’s on them, because now we’ve got World War III prepping plus bombing brown folks on a fortnightly basis.
The thing I can’t shake in all this warmaking is the personal angle of the cogs in the machine. If that’s you, how do you sleep? If you work for the US national security state, you’re complicit in a system of habitual war crimes. Can you deny that? What good do you think you’re doing?
And if you’re an ally of the US state, you’re an enabler of a dying empire that can’t stop killing people illegally. Can you deny that? What good do you think you’re doing?
In whose interest is any of this? Not the people, that’s certain.
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