More Reflections On The Current Mess
The United States of America, in its hapless Keystone Kops war of whim against Iran, had two alternatives for pursuing its non-mission, based on the real-life demonstration of modern warfare being played out for all the world over the past four years. She could have chosen the Ukrainian model — innovative, adaptive, cost-efficient, resourceful, sleek, dogged, and backed by a nation fully engaged in the fight right down to the last grandmother and granddaughter. Or she could have chosen the Russian model — bloated, slow, strategically unfocused, determined by unjust material acquisitiveness, reliant on the long-term psychological effects of sinfully inhumane acts of destruction against civilians and civil infrastructure, and pursued without any national mandate or engagement even from among the listless and conflicted fighters themselves. Naturally, America, being the rotted-out hull of a ship of state that she now is, and led by the weakest and most unmanly commander-in-chief in her history, has gone all in on the Russian model. For Donald Trump loves Vladimir Putin exactly as a modern twelve-year-old girl loves her favorite boy band — that is, Trump loves Putin with the love of one who feels small and inferior and who worships her dream hero from afar in a pitiful grasp at identity, loving him all the more ardently and submissively as she desperately seeks to evade the inevitable realization that her idol (and hence her identity itself) is a complete fake.
Trump now says — not for the first time, mind you — that if Iran does not agree to a deal to end the war and open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours (by Tuesday, April 7th, for the record), then he will “blow up everything,” specifically meaning a general bombing attack on that country’s power plants and bridges, effectively causing civilian hardship on a catastrophic scale far into the foreseeable future. In a social media post, the utterly unhinged president, ranting like a hysterical girl screaming at a world that dares to defy her birthday party plans, wrote:
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F****in’ Strait, you crazy b****rds, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
This kind of doomsday threat and petty insult is Trump’s idea of a negotiating tactic. Leaving aside the degenerate vulgarity, it is a tactic that would strike many sensible people as outrageous and disproportionate even if the United States itself had been attacked and were fighting to subdue an ongoing assault against its population. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan would be the closest parallel in American history, and those bombings were an attempt to subdue an inhumane aggressor, as well as being undertaken by a U.S. president who fully understood, and was prepared to accept moral responsibility for, the terrible consequences of his choice. Trump, by contrast, is merely a reality television tyrant, a cowardly fool intoxicated with the image of personal impunity and invincibility that he has imbibed through decades of admiration for his idol in Moscow.
Israelis, to the extent that their nation may be identified with the methods of their demagogue prime minister, seem to be succumbing at last to the irrational and soul-devouring logic that, having been the victim of systematic assaults on their very existence over the past century, they are thereby justified in adopting a similarly systematic life-denying attitude toward their enemies, which they increasingly appear to identify with entire populations: in effect, “We can never be safe as long as any of them are left alive near our borders and thereby permitted to scheme against us.” A kinder reading of Israel’s current approach, in Iran and Lebanon, is simply that Benjamin Netanyahu personally needs the chaos to continue and expand, for reasons analogous to those that have caused Trump to expend so much political capital, national treasure, and blood to distract everyone from the Epstein files.
