Sight Unseen

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.

The Iran war has plunged its chief aggressors into a funk. Or into what my father called cloud cuckoo land. They are furious that Iran is firing back at them. Let’s recap. The United States and Israel, miffed at the slow progress of nuclear talks, decided enough was enough and launched preemptive strikes on a nation that lacks a functional air force and depends almost exclusively on missiles and drones. Good-guy warplanes bombed the capital and assassinated the country’s longstanding Islamic leader. According to the cuckoo land script, a stunned Iran should have immediately capitulated and allowed for the creation of an America-friendly government. Instead, mean old Iran has done the unthinkable. It has defended itself and even dispatched missiles into Arab states with close U.S. ties. But listen up, ladies and gentlemen: This is called war. It’s no video game. Imagine California attacking Texas to then become annoyed when Texas, its governor killed, fights back. Most nations have pride and emotion. Few invite sworn enemies to a cookout. Russia has sought to break Ukraine’s will for four years and has so far failed, losing at least 200,000 men in the process. In all likelihood, this Iranian government will eventually be overwhelmed by superior firepower, and when that time comes, the aggressors will claim “Mission Accomplished.” But until then Iran has the right to fight in any way it can. To think otherwise is to take up residence in the cuckoo’s nest.

As a young and ambitious real estate developer in New York City of the late 1970s, Donald Trump had little love for an American president, Jimmy Carter, who seemed to him timid and indecisive. This annoyance turned to rage and mockery when the new Islamic state took 52 American hostages they would end up holding for more than a year. To the New York businessman, the idea of spending more than 400 days talking to a hostile regime that labeled the U.S. the “great Satan” represented unforgivable incompetence. The United States, he knew, possessed both the military and economic tools needed to bring Iran to its knees. None of them were used. There was a botched rescue attempt in April 1980, when the hostages had already been in captivity for half a year, but little else was done because the Cold War still raged and neither the U.S. nor Israel could take wider liberties, at the risk of Soviet intervention. Carter could not assassinate Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the way recent attacks have eliminated his successor. Thus the circle is now squared, from old impotence to big strike force. The real estate developer–turned president has evolved into a minor Shiva, a small destroyer of worlds. The impotent Carter legacy has been set aside. As have been the efforts of Barack Obama, who reached a tortuously negotiated 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that this president repeatedly described as “horrible.” Mr. Trump craves the role of hero and liberator — both now in the offing — no historical strings attached.

If any doubt existed before this writing, international law and diplomacy are dead and buried. Ironically, the culprit is the United States and its 51st state, Israel. Israel’s deeds are well-documented. In a disproportionate reaction to a 2023 terrorist incident, Jerusalem spent 2 years reducing the Gaza strip to rubble, with an estimated 70,000 Palestinian casualties. The U.S. then followed suit. Over the course of 6 months, it has abducted a Venezuelan leader, threatened the sovereignty of Greenland, attempted to fold Cuba into the United States by starving it of resources (it may succeed), and now assassinated the Iranian head of state in a move Russia’s Vladimir Putin, now an American “friend,” rightly called “a cynical murder.” Is there any end in sight? No. When big-power politics and military brawn come front and center (as well as a lust for oil), there is usually no turning back. It is this kind of militarism that precipitated the two most recent world wars. Let it be clear, however, that the U.S. has opened a Pandora’s box of the kind that cost it nearly 15 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The murder of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may mean little to Americans, but he was an important and symbolically weighty Shia leader. Domestic reprisals may not be imminent, but they will come. And they will be, in their way, justified. What is happening now, is what every American president since 1970 has sought to avoid, namely openly stoking the flames of anti-Americanism. The post-9/11 wars were at least, in part, justified by terrorist attacks on the United States. Here, there is no such justification, aside from one president’s impatience over slow going on the diplomatic front. In a nutshell, this cauldron of bombardments and bloodshed, provoked astonishingly by a man who created a self-styled Board of Peace, was not at all necessary. In the long run, woe to those who cast the first stones.

The kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie and the response of her television-personality daughter, a combustible mix of sadness, dread, longing, and resignation, has the effect of reminding me, at least in tone, of my mother’s quiet-but-poignant lamentations regarding the unresolved wartime disappearance of her Polish father, a man she adored. From the little that was known, he had escaped the Warsaw ghetto and managed to secure clandestine passage across the Vistula, away from the Nazis and toward the encamped Russians. But something apparently went wrong, and he was shot dead by a contingent of German troops who had also crossed the river. What haunted her, and she spoke of it in the same manner as Savannah Guthrie, was that her father was never found and therefore never buried. My mother’s dramatic, mystical side imagined his soul as still at large, unmoored and drifting in the ancient tradition of the unburied. I was mostly silent when she spoke of the story, and it was rare that she did. What she sought was what many Americans now call closure, which at times sounds more like a demand than a wish. But my own truth, now that my own mortality is tangible, is that more often than not, there is no clean final chapter, no explanation or even a longed-for resolution. Sometimes all that remains is acceptance, the book’s last chapter read again and again but with final pages always missing.

The U.S. president has finally begun his long-awaited military and political cleansing of Iran, which will march forward with Israeli help. The war is unprovoked, an act of Russian-style hubris rationalized because it is for the “good.” Bad people will be routed and replaced with leaders more to the White House’s, and presumably Iranians’, liking. Again, there is no surprise here. America’s new bully-pulpit arrogance has no limits, nor does it need congressional approval, propelled by a man who toys with the world like rubber ducks in a tub — and I am no radical leftist. One can only hope Iran’s Islamic regime folds as soon as possible so as to let the victory parties begin, dastardly ayatollahs placed high atop the ash heap of history. Call this Operation Righteous Rubble, gentiles and Jews united in a 21st-century version of a Nazi blitzkrieg.

Should the United States succeed in toppling the existing Iranian regime, an increasingly likely outcome as it intensifies both economic pressure and gunboat diplomacy, the man most mentioned as a leader-in-waiting is Reza Pahlavi. Long exiled in Washington, he is the son of the late Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, shah of shahs, king of kings, himself deposed by Islamists in a year-long revolution that began in 1978 and ended early the next year with the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from his own Paris exile. The revolution and the brutal theocracy that followed were not spontaneous events. Since 1967, when the king of kings was himself crowned in a lavish ceremony that at the time was rumored to have cost a billion dollars, Iran’s merchants, rural residents, Islamic clergy, and even its growing middle class had grown restive. Many believed the new and mostly secular Iran had sold out to the west, the U.S. in particular. The shah proclaimed himself a devoted capitalist and anti-communist, a stance that enticed Western support. But as doubt and income disparity grew, he responded in much the same way as the Islamists who would replace him,  encouraging a secret police known as SAVAK to arrest and detain at will. Many were tortured, some killed, and others simply vanished. In September 1978 came a massive earthquake: 25,000 died, and the slow, seemingly uncaring government response incited the whirlwind of dissent and fury that would ultimately force the monarch to flee. When Khomeini made his stern-faced return from Paris, millions thronged the streets to welcome him. Finally, the tyrant shah was gone. It is now 50 years later, and all seems set to swivel again. This is called history, and because of its fickleness, it is constantly teaching paradoxical lessons. Best to sit down, pocket your smartphone, pay attention, and take smart notes, lest it surprise you again.

Since the development and deployment of the first atomic weapons in 1945, the original members of the so-called Nuclear Club — the United States, Soviet Russia, and communist China — have fiercely guarded the inner workings of their weaponry. After all, they were and still are rivals. Leaks remain severely punishable. The popular spy-novel phrase Top Secret emerged from all this forced mystery. The newest twist on Top Secret is not top secret at all, but is as potent as a bomb. All have come to know it, and many to depend on it, as AI, the seemingly harmless acronym for artificial intelligence. Like the web before it, AI is poised to open a vast frontier. But there are risks. Even Sam Altman, one of its godfathers, has pointed out AI’s potential dangers because, unlike any tool before it, it can extrapolate and improve on human knowledge. In the wrong hands, it could be used to develop pathogens, chemical poisons, and possibly nuclear-grade explosives. Make no mistake. The madding crowd includes chaos-minded actors. Imagine, if you will, a real-life Goldfinger or Darth Vader. Checks and filters are therefore vital. To which the White House says “halt!” Never mind an AI conscience, there is big money to be had. If any regulation is necessary, the Board of Peace CEO-president or his successor will take that responsibility. Unfortunately, none of this comes close to monitoring advances that will very likely change the complexion of the planet. If AI is Superman, the world needs some sort of kryptonite, but given the stakes involved, no fail-safe seems near at hand. As my father once said with an unsettling prescience that now seems apt, “If you can see it on the horizon, it’s already too late.”

Twice in the last six decades, the American judiciary, foremost the Supreme Court, has intervened when it believed a president exceeded his authority. Richard Nixon now has company with the twice-impeached incumbent. The specifics of the tariff case matter less than the conservative court’s strong message that presidential decorum had been violated. This leader despises those who stand in his way, and, like a petulant child, he responds vindictively as if caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His tormentors — he said in crass language of a kind never before directed at a Supreme Court — were “fools and lapdogs,” the most disgraceful of anti-American enemies. Democracy and the rule of law should apparently not constrain the “lust for unbridled power,” a no-nonsense phrase assigned to him recently by a Texas judge regarding an ICE deportation order. The president has already imposed a new 15% global tariff to defy the court’s ruling. But in both legal and symbolic terms, and they matter, the president-felon has been warned he has exceeded his authority. It is not America First but Democracy First. Kick and scream as he might, he has finally been rebuked, the fools and lapdogs, some of whom he appointed, ultimately doing the nation a brave favor.