Sight Unseen

True Lies: Disinformation and blatant political tampering, pre-dictatorial in texture, have come to define these times. Israel, for many decades among the world’s toughest but fairest countries, has slid into the darkest corner of reactionary thinking. It speaks of decimating the “murderous” Iranian regime while making no mention of its own bloodletting in attempting to create a Greater Israel from Gaza and the West Bank, a Jewish political project dear to Benjamin Netanyahu’s proudly extremist government. In Italy, whose Giorgia Meloni is no more than a charming version of Marine Le Pen, voters are being asked to support a referendum that would give political parties sweeping control over the judiciary, another far-right nirvana. Why all this now? Because the American ruler has set a shiny new example, irony intended, and many wish to strike while the iron is hot. For those who missed the insidious rise of Fascism and Nazism, here’s a latter-day primer.

Trickery: The Iran war continues to supply paradox, contradiction, hypocrisy, and deceit, as if its western players refuse, like adamant children, to accept how combat works. A case in point is Britain’s angry accusation that Iran was unfairly “lashing out” after it fired long-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean island with British and American bases. So far, so good. But wait. The attack, a failure, came a day after Britain formally gave the United States permission to launch combat missions against Iran. That is what Tehran responded to, and in terms of warfare, it was entirely justifiable. But in this conflict, double standards and trickery are the norm. The American ruler sends jets to rebomb a nuclear plant he claims was “obliterated” in raids last June. One day he suggests he might deploy U.S. ground troops to secure the Strait of Hormuz, the next he shrugs that off by saying “we don’t use it,” clearly inviting Europe, which depends on the strategic seaway, to protect its own interests — a backhanded way of getting it to enter the conflict. If this war is indeed a video game, it is badly in need of those better able to program it, preferably one or two schooled in the outbreak of World War I.

Nuts!: The American president is furious that his European allies have failed to deploy their own warships in support of his Arabian Sea flotilla. This from a leader who has for more than a year been berating both the European Union and NATO. A president with designs on Greenland as well as a new cozy rapport with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Europe’s sworn enemy. Before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell, the critical actors in this drama, worked for months with Europe, NATO, and the United Nations to achieve a pro-war consensus. Most eventually agreed to back Washington, though with reservations. Now a president who does as he wishes, dodging his own Congress, wants Europe to cheerlead him. Europe should do no such thing. It should behave as American Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe did during the Battle of the Bulge in the waning stages of World War II. His troops surrounded, he was served with a note from a German commander demanding he immediately surrender, to which he famously replied with a single word: “Nuts!”

On War #3: Persians are not Arabs. Just ask Cyrus the Great, whose pre-Christian empire stretched to the Mediterranean. The misconception makes a mockery of complaints by Saudi Arabia and the Emirates (by now American sycophants) that Iran is behaving unfairly by targeting their lands and closing the vital oil corridor known as the Strait of Hormuz. Any Arab with a sense of history could have seen this coming. The Islamic regime existed for 50 years until the United States and Israel entered into an illegal and unprovoked war, though the concept of international legality is by now long-gone. For that same half-century, post-Revolution Iran made it no secret that it disliked the presence of American bases so near its soil, something a Saudi Arab named Osama bin Laden also detested and created Al Qaeda as a response. The bad blood in the region is notorious and noxious, something a trigger-happy American ruler and his Israeli ally should have taken into account before kicking up a maelstrom that will take decades to repair.

America’s new troika of priorities — isolationism, protectionism, and militarism — will, I believe, produce unsettling consequences. Here are some that come to mind, oversimplified in the extreme: 1. The United Nations, admonished recently by the U.S. State Department to “adjust, shrink, or die,” will in fact die, unable to muster needed funds. The Cold War is dead, and unilateralism is inimical to global diplomacy. UNICEF, UNHCR, and UNESCO are all likely to perish, private agencies doing the possible in their absence. Perhaps the Trump family will acquire the elegant U.N. Headquarters and transform it into a luxury hotel. 2. Though the European Union may survive in name, major states such as France and Germany will rearm, the latter in time becoming a nuclear power. European tension will eventually lead to internecine threats, all the more so as far-right, nationalist parties grow in stature and sway. This, ironically, is what NATO was in part created to prevent, but with Russia intensifying its ambitions, Europe will further burnish creaky muscles. 3. Russia will in the end make uneasy peace with Ukraine, but not before Washington has compelled it to relinquish sovereign territory as both Europe’s NATO contingent and Britain are shoved to the sidelines. 4. China will seize Taiwan sooner rather than later, and the United States will almost certainly order Beijing to cease and desist. But such demands will go nowhere because the U.S., witness Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, and Cuba in the wings, has lost all moral authority. Ultimately, the U.S. will not deter China, nor limit its growing Pacific Rim potency. 5. In the next British general election, Nigel Farage’s vehemently xenophobic Reform UK party will outstrip expectations, forcing a coalition government to adopt stricter anti-migration policies and perhaps even turn to deportation. 6. Barring an unlikely peace agreement, the United States and Israel will win the Iran War and usher in a Washington-friendly government of national reconstruction that will rely heavily on American imports. These are educated guesses based above all on intuition. As the hackneyed bromide goes, only time will tell.

On War #2: More than 150 years have passed since the United States fought a war on its own soil and fully faced its destructive savagery. That of course was the Civil War, which pitted Americans against Americans. Since then, it has been involved in half-a-dozen major conflicts, but none lapped over onto U.S. territory. There were hideous surprise attacks, one at Pearl Harbor and the second in New York City and Washington. Both lasted only hours, though the death tolls were high. Otherwise, the hundreds of thousands of American casualties came “over there.” Americans as a result have no notion of what domestic combat is like. They have no bombed-out Detroit or Los Angeles to recollect. No occupying troops have patrolled its landscape. What has happened in Gaza since 2023 and what is happening in Iran now are psychologically unfathomable. Americans care only that they not lose soldiers or aviators, and leaders oblige them by doing their destruction from the air. But there are souls beneath these warplanes, and many, whether they liked or disliked the Islamic regime, will struggle to forget and forgive what is being billed by some as a “liberation.” Parts of Tehran are in flames. People of all stripes are dying. Perhaps one sad day in the future, America will come to understand what it means to be exposed to relentless bombing. For now, however, Iran is merely some godawful place that needed to learn a lesson, as Americans more than 5,000 miles away make their spring plans. All’s fair in love and war, goes the saying. If only that were true.

On War #1: The massive air campaign directed at Iran is a bastard child of postmodern warfare. It is an invasion, not quite. The idea is to so decimate the Islamic regime, which lacks air defenses, that it hoists a white flag. It is what much-decorated American Air Force General Curtis LeMay had in mind when he suggested all that was needed to win the war in Vietnam was to “bomb [North Vietnam] back into the Stone Age.” (In 1968, he would run for vice president with George Wallace.) Bombings of Hanoi did follow, but the North remained steadfast. Moreover, the U.S. already had troops on the ground. That makes the Iran strategy all the more an aberration. If only the U.S. and Israel had armed avatars at their disposal. But we’re not there yet. And stubborn Iran holds on by the skin of its teeth, daring its adversaries to transform a video game into actual combat in which flesh-and-blood soldiers put their lives at risk, a theme I will elaborate on tomorrow.

In the postwar era, countless Hollywood actors have portrayed the American president. A full list would take up pages. Most have endowed the role with commanding authority, wit, severity, and firm-but-fair moral purpose, the latter to rise above partisanship. There were occasional spoofs — Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove” and Jack Nicholson in “Mars Attacks” come to mind — but these were few. My own favorite is Henry Fonda in the 1964 film “Fail Safe,” a Cold War classic. American B-58 bombers have missed a recall signal and will soon detonate an atomic weapon over Moscow. In a spartan White House room, he and his Russian translator, played by Larry Hagman, have the grim task of explaining the situation to the Soviet premier. Fonda is austere, lucid, and devastated but fully in charge. He tells his Russian counterpart that in order to avert an all-out war, he will do to New York City what American planes have erroneously done to Moscow. His reasoned approach seems outside human reach given the circumstances. These days, forced to endure a president who is beyond the scope of caricature and who makes a mockery of American exceptionalism, my mind’s eye often returns wistfully to Fonda. I hope, as my life ebbs, to wake to a Fonda-like figure in the White House, a prospect that for now seems dim.

In 1940, Hermann Göring told boss and friend Adolf Hitler that his Luftwaffe would bring England to its knees in a matter of weeks. His bombers were too swift and his bombs too big to resist. Instead, an underdog RAF and a resilient population, personified by bulldog Winston Churchill, vexed the prediction. In the end, Hitler’s refusal to dispatch an invasion force while the bombing continued cost him dearly. In Iran, American and Israeli air power are facing similar resistance. By refusing to send troops to back up its aerial bombardment, the two righteous powers are giving Iran’s ferociously committed Revolutionary Guard reason to hope. Even Iranians who despise their regime can applaud the grit of their own flesh and blood. Nazi Germany sought both capitulation and humiliation. But arrogance produced a miscalculation. A miscalculation may also be in the offing among those who foresaw an Iran cakewalk. All this because neither Washington nor Jerusalem is willing to let troops die in the name of what they insist is a noble cause — a cowardly outlook. In war, gain sometimes requires pain.

A quarter-century ago, footage of the mortally wounded Twin Towers hypnotized viewers the world over. Many felt compelled to watch this lurid spectacle again and again and again, absorbed by the thrill of disaster. Some wept, others fell silent, and still others suffered breakdowns. What seemed like a sci-fi Hollywood preview left them haunted. But also bleakly entertained. Not surprisingly, the American bombing of Baghdad had a similar effect, as if to solidify the 1960s quip, “the revolution will be televised.” Voyeurism, in sex and violence, is as old as moving pictures. Yet the Iran war, played out in a gaming age, is upping the ante. There is no question who will win this war, but when the Israeli military chief of staff speaks of “surprises ahead,” real war takes on an in-game feel. All is abstract and can be seemingly controlled through a console. Imagine a “surprises ahead” game in which you could both destroy and rebuild the Twin Towers, as well as place bets on, if not concoct, the next attack. September 11th viewers had no such luxury. So it is that this war, more than any before it, speaks to an age mesmerized by its own dark amusements, falling skyscrapers its 21st-century snuff.

The response of wealthy Arab states toward besieged Iran reminds me of Elon Musk’s recommendation to bureaucrats in the early days of this president’s second term. Those who wished to make things easier on themselves should simply send an email to his streamlining department with a single word in the subject line: RESIGN. That is just what the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and others want to hear from Tehran, followed by similar surrenders from Hamas and Hezbollah. The Arab world long ago lost all patience with Persian Iran. It cares only about the deepening of business ties with the United States and Israel. The plight of Palestinians is no longer of any interest. Nor does it take issue with Israel’s empire-building leaders. If Jerusalem wants all of the West Bank and most of Gaza for settlement, so be it. This is the 21st century. Trade deals and tech-sharing come first. Islamic hard-liners are a blight. Let them take up residence in Afghanistan, which incidentally is at war with Pakistan. But who cares? Let them all send in their resignation notes. This new state of affairs would make Nasser die a second death. William James, watching the ascent of Wall Street in the early twentieth century, worried with foresight about a time that would be ruled by a conscienceless “bitch-goddess,” whose name was Success. It is She who now rules the Middle East.

What do Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei have in common? For starters, both exerted a loathed dictatorial hold over their countries. In addition, both have been dealt with by this administration, the first through abduction, the second through assassination. The other important trait that they shared is that they lorded over oil-rich nations. Now that this president has eliminated the green conspiracy, oil is again a triumphant commodity. He has already seized existing Venezuelan reserves, and when the time comes, and it may be a matter of days not weeks, he will all but control Iran’s. This is a businessman-president who has always been inspired by the trappings of wealth and gilded luxury. Those who assign nobility to his actions, both in Venezuela and Iran, should pause and take stock of the matter of oil and its pathways, which assume primary importance now that the green “distraction” is over, at least in America. In effect, the man with dominion over all or most of the oil also has dominion over most or all of the world. To repeat my mantra, welcome to the New World Order.