The fog of war has set in, dense and potentially acidic.
Nobody on the American side seems to know or care to explain why they decided to ignite the most unstable and potentially deleterious intra-regional war of the 21st century. Iran was building nukes, they say, even though Trump assured us their program was “obliterated” during the 12-day war last June (every moderately credible source concurs that Iran was not pursuing a weapon, and U.S.-Israeli bombs just assassinated the Iranian leader who had long opposed the construction of nuclear weapons. If there was a formula for ensuring the surviving leadership feel compelled to build a bomb, this is it.).
Iran was threatening to attack U.S. bases, they say – a justification which was lazily and meekly defended over the weekend by American regime functionaries… that is, until Marco Rubio admitted on Monday that the “imminent threat” posed by Iran, and which therefore justified a “preemptive strike” (one of those ideas dripping with American-Israeli exceptionalism, which was naturalized by government and media figures during the War on Terror and is now accepted as a legitimate tactic) was the threat of Iran responding to Israeli attacks by attacking U.S. bases. A toddler’s logic: I hit you because I was about to hit you and I know that you would’ve hit back if I hit you so I had to hit you first.
Trump, his top generals and his War Secretary Pete Hegseth have contradicted each other numerous times, most notably over the “regime change” goals of the strike. In a short interview with the New York Times (which allegedly lasted less than 6 minutes), Trump both referred to the kidnapping of Maduro as a model for the assassination of Ali Khamenei (remove the country’s leader and hope that a pliable successor will be cowed into accepting U.S. hegemony) and expressed the mutually exclusive hope that the Iranian people would rise up and overthrow the regime. Hegseth subsequently denied that regime change was the goal of the operation, while sarcastically quipping that “the regime has changed.”
This is a distinctly American spectacle of an unfamiliar variety. During the last eighty years of American global hegemony, not once has a President taken the country into a large-scale war involving American troops without attempting to convince the voting public of the war’s necessity. George Bush famously spent over a year seeding fake stories to a pliant press corps, lobbying and coercing allies, and making his case during the State of the Union and at the U.N., before invading Iraq. Early polling indicates that roughly 25% of the country supports Trump’s Iran war, which would be easily the lowest initial level of support for an American war of this scale (the majority of the public initially supported U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (first and second), and Afghanistan). After a campaign in which Trump ran on a platform of “no new wars,” he has dragged the (seemingly underprepared and flat-footed) U.S. military into a potentially nuclear conflict – and he has hardly bothered to explain why it was even remotely preferable to diplomacy. Rubio’s stunning admission that the U.S. was forced to join the war by Israel’s intransigence may be the most honest answer we will get, but it's hardly a satisfactory explanation to most of the American public. A basic analysis, yes, but the question has to be asked: if only a quarter of the country support a potentially apocalyptic war, yet the war is still proceeding, what kind of political system are we living under?
Meanwhile, liberal and conservative media alike are throwing their support behind the exiled Rezah Pahlavi (a known recipient of CIA money and at the very least the beneficiary of Israeli digital astro-turfing campaigns), the son of the brutal U.S.-backed Shah who was installed after the CIA and MI6 deposed Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. His supporters in the Iranian-American diaspora very literally refer to themselves as monarchists, and yet he is being propped up on 60 Minutes and Fox News as a benevolent democratic savior – the people of Iran never forgot the Shah, they secretly pray for his return, keep photos of him hidden under the mattress, etc. The campaign is somehow more cartoonishly hypocritical and implausible than Ahmed Chalabi’s attempt to parachute in from exile and lead Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
The information ecosystem is no less confused than the Trump administration. To go on X/Twitter is to be bombarded by AI videos of missiles pummeling Tel Aviv, and real videos of missiles pummeling Tel Aviv; OSINT accounts claiming Iran is on the brink of collapse; OSINT accounts claiming Israel and the Gulf States are in mortal danger due to a perilously low stock of interceptors. Mass censorship by all parties makes it impossible to assess the state of the war. Fox News has returned to the Iraq War playbook, pumping near-pornographic footage of Israeli and U.S. airstrikes over the airwaves while ignoring the unprecedented and humiliating abandonment of U.S. bases in the Gulf. CNN and CBS News straddle a line between flaccid and cursory criticism of Trump’s conduct (if only he had asked Congress!) and barely concealed bloodlust directed towards Iran. (It is not conspiratorial to say these outlets have been compromised by Zionist interests; they will both soon be under the control of Larry Ellison, one of the richest men on earth and the largest private donor to the IDF. CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss is a dedicated Zionist activist.)
As massive bombs rained down on Tehran, an NBC News anchor asked the Iranian foreign minister why he felt they had the right to attack U.S. bases. The minister visibly restrained himself from laughing at the comical hubris and lack of self-awareness on display from the best and brightest American journalism has to offer. One has to wonder how Americans would respond if a foreign nation upended their fragile democracy 75 years ago; installed a dictator who ruled for decades via repressive secret police and pledged his unwavering allegiance to foreign business interests; responded with open hostility when the American people overthrew the dictator; built dozens of military installations and bases on the Canadian and Mexican borders; stationed aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Mexico and the Long Island sound; supported a nearby enemy state in covertly obtaining nuclear weapons, then threatened to bomb you for considering developing your own nuclear weapons; brutally sanctioned your country and devastated the economy; then finally launched full-scale war, assassinating the head of state and most of the country’s senior leadership — while news broadcasters asked American officials why they felt they should be allowed to defend themselves. I don’t think many Americans would be amenable to this arrangement.
Portions of the terminally online American public have responded to the war with a rancid form of self-centered spectatorship. Oh yeah, you “really wish you weren’t living through major historical events right now?” American soil hasn’t been attacked by a foreign nation since 1941 (or since 2001 if you assign blame for 9/11 to certain intelligence agencies, of the dancing variety), and American civilians by and large will feel no immediate consequences from this war. Others have theorized that the U.S.-Israeli attack is an attempt to “distract” from the ongoing Epstein scandal, ignoring that U.S. and Israeli military planners have been attempting to start this war for almost half a century. Mia Khalifa assures her followers she is “monitoring the situation.”
This phrase (“monitoring the situation”) has been popularized as of late, as the American left-liberal public by and large embraces this cynical form of spectatorship. In fairness, it is hard to imagine ourselves as political agents when every major ruling class transgression in our lifetimes has gone unpunished. Bush illegally invaded Iraq, legalized and carried out a mass program of torture, authorized domestic surveillance on a previously unthinkable scale – and retired to a comfortable life of painting veterans of the wars he initiated. Wall Street crashed the world economy and the bankers were not only spared jail time, but got trillions of dollars in bailouts and bonus checks. Our country’s public health system was so unprepared and mismanaged during a global pandemic that over a million people died; no repercussions for the ruling class on that front either. Nor have there been any serious consequences after the discovery of a transnational pedophile ring with concrete connections to the current President, a former President, various titans of industry, the British royal family, and the Mossad (amongst other luminaries).
What conclusions can we draw from this clusterfuck?
(1) The American public sphere has constricted, political agency is being circumscribed, we are being reduced to spectators and memers, content to process the prospect of armageddon through irony. The online public, at least, seems paralyzed by the speed and quantity of information, misinformation, mass death, lies, half-truths, memes, analyses, mass death, and AI videos being shoveled down their throats on a daily basis.
(2) Trump is murdering and burying whatever remains of the “manufacturing consent” paradigm. He has no interest in the charades which his predecessors so carefully arranged. Whereas Obama or Bush relied on lies and appeals to a somewhat coherent (if nakedly hypocritical) vision of imperial benevolence, Trump has entirely different strategies. Confusion, misdirection, information overload, incoherence – deliberate or not, these are the signature style of Trump’s information warfare. We saw the same pattern play out in Venezuela; within hours, the original, remarkably flimsy accusation that the country had developed into an insidious narco-state were cast aside in favor of old-school imperial honesty: “we’re here for the oil; we’re here to make an example out of those who resist American hegemony.” What does it mean for an empire when it abandons its own mythology, the stories which it has used to justify its status as an empire? Symptoms of terminal decline, perhaps.
(3) At the same time, the legacy media outlets most committed to the paradigm of “manufacturing consent,” most historically enthusiastic about carrying water for any President’s serious case for war (i.e; the New York Times), seem baffled by Trump’s unwillingness to present a coherent argument. There is no shortage of animosity towards the Iranian regime in the Times newsroom, no shortage of willing propagandists (i.e; David Sanger, any number of the half dozen former IDF soldiers or close family of IDF soldiers currently working in the Times Jerusalem Bureau) ready to propagate whatever shoddy intelligence American spies feed them – they just simply have not been called into action. The Times, like Rachel Maddow or any nominally liberal news source, are stuck between their hardly-concealed joy that Iran is being carpet-bombed and lamenting the fact that Trump didn’t even dignify their profession by trying to lie to them. Once again, we can observe that the aesthetic quality of war and empire are what most concerns a certain segment of the media class.
(4) Gramsci taught us that hegemony operates on a spectrum, ranging from consent to force. When the ruling classes abandon the pretense that the public consents to their actions, force takes center stage. One reading of Trump’s informational strategy is that he is an idiot; another (not necessarily mutually exclusive) is that he and his team understand the new terms of the game, or are attempting to impose new terms. Trump’s worldview, echoed in his sadistic immigration policy and disregard for America’s traditional alliances (the bedrock of the so-called rules-based international order) is a simple pitch: if you are of the deserving classes (typically American, white, male, although not exclusively) get behind me. I will protect you from the terrors lurking in the dark. I will protect you from the savages at our gates, and the liberal enemies (the woke, the trans, the paid protesters, the college students) of America who wish to open those gates. This is fortress fascism 101: in order for the Chosen people to live, the racialized Others must suffer and die.
(5) It is possible that Libya, not Iraq, has become the model for U.S.-Israeli war strategists. With reports that Israeli bombing is concentrated on police stations and border patrols (the weakening of which would allow militias to enter through the Iraq-Iran border), one has to wonder if fomenting civil war and balkanization are not unintended side effects, but rather central war aims. If we take seriously the idea that Trump and his political bloc are building a form of fortress fascism in the U.S., a political outlook which abandons the pretense of American moral leadership – and especially in the context of accelerating global heating, mass migration flows and rapid technological upheaval – then the open-ended destabilization of Iran may be the goal, and the blueprint for future wars of aggression.
The past week or so, I’ve been reading:
Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck (five stars, highly recommend)
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale Scott
Watching:
Hypernormalisation
West Beirut
Cruising
La Haine
Listening to:
In The Aeroplane Over the Sea
For Emma, Forever Ago