Addicted to war

I breathed a brief sigh of relief yesterday when I opened the New York Times app and saw this headline:

Anyone who remembers Trump’s last term noticed the key phrase: “in the next two weeks.” “Two weeks” has been Trump’s trademark delaying tactic for a thing he doesn’t want to do and wants everyone to forget. Long-promised Obamacare replacement plan? He’ll let us know in two weeks. New sanctions on Russia? He’ll decide in “about a week and a half, two weeks.” Two weeks, he discovered long ago, is long enough to outlast most Americans’ attention spans (and his), and thus tantamount to never.

The Times noticed that too. But instead of sighing with relief, they went to work:

That’s right, the old Iraq War gang is together again, this time for something even stupider and potentially more dangerous. Fox News is more conflicted this time, torn between a chance to robe the Glorious Leader in the Mantle of a Certain and Sacred Victr’y and the isolationists in his base (and their viewership), who will only support wars if they are assured that only foreigners will die and/or they’re against Godless Commies.

Still, if Trump decides to go all in, most of his supporters will likely go along, at least until the first body bags come back. And while the leftish part of the Democratic coalition is trying desperately to pump the brakes, they find themselves facing the larger and more entrenched National Security, military-industrialist, and Israel hawk establishments, whose instinct when confronted with a potential war is always “Why the Hell Not!” (until the inevitably harsh morning after). It’s the latter who have the ear of the Serious Journalists on Eighth Avenue (and some of the less-serious ones on Sixth).

The main thing to note here is how half-assed and completely unnecessary all of this is. The pretexts for this impending war-of-choice are Iran’s allegedly advanced nuclear weapons program and continued strikes on civilian areas of Israeli cities. The problem with the first claim is that the Trump administration’s own Office of the Director of National Intelligence declared in March: “We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so.” They added that Khamenei “continues to desire to avoid embroiling Iran in an expanded, direct conflict with the United States and its allies.”

In short, our spies believe that Iran doesn’t want a war with us, nor that they are — however much uranium they may be enriching — building a bomb. The White House knows this, as evidenced by their deceptive editing of DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony in March, which removed the key part of that assessment from a social media post¹ . This despite the fact that Trump singlehandedly destroyed the hard-won 2015 anti-nuclear proliferation agreement that Obama hammered out with Iran — a deal Trump is also supposedly intent on recreating, albeit in what given the time and erosion of trust would inevitably be shittier, less-effective form.

Some of you may be banging the table, asking me if I read the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report from earlier this month. That report found that Iran was no longer complying with monitoring requirements under the deal, highly enriching uranium (though whether to bomb-making strength was unclear), and stockpiling concerning amounts of it.

I did, but using that as justification for war has several problems. First, we abandoned the nuclear deal seven years ago under Trump, so it’d be weird to hold them to it now, at gunpoint or otherwise. Second, while the IAEA’s inability to confirm Iran’s nuclear program is “exclusively peaceful” is concerning, this falls far short of Trump’s claim that Iran is “very close to having” a deliverable nuclear bomb or Netanyahu’s assertion that his “preemptive strikes” are necessary to prevent a “clear and present danger to Israel's very survival.” Finally, if Iranian hardliners were actually pushing to restart the nuclear program while being restrained by Khamenei, then joining Israel’s campaign of bombing Iranian cities and assassinating senior military leaders would be an effective way of convincing the Supreme Leader to remove those restraints entirely.

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