Trump’s Iran War: Worse Than Expected, But Better Than Hoped?

35 days into this four day war Americans remain confused, disturbed and frustrated. Trump’s illegal February 28 attack on Iran in the midst of fake diplomacy has gone from four days in-and-out to no “winning” in sight. Less well-reported is Netanyahu’s bloody land grab into Lebanon, Israel’s violent expansion everywhere in the West Bank, and its continued encroachment of Gaza, where medical care, food, gas, and mercy for genocide survivors has been nearly eliminated. Trump’s so-called Board of Peace is on pause.

Like most Americans, I need some copium.

Let us examine the silver linings of a US strategic disaster so stunning the White House is forced to rewrite history as it happens.

Many Americans now know that the US government lives for war, is owned by Israel, and is completely beholden to and integrated with the military industrial complex. Politicians and their friends brazenly demonstrate their uninhibited ability to invest on “insider” war-related information and soon-to-be announced policy. They happily trade service to constituents for re-election campaigns funded by a few generous Israel-backed donors. Confucius said, “the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.” The Chinese philosopher was right, and we the people are beginning to become wise.

FoxNews and other state media face steady view-shrink and increasing ridicule. Global and homegrown media – other state’s media, plumped by global independent media, fueled by AI and massive layered communications connectivity, and sparked by individuals able to share both fact and interpretation, from Lego cartoons, rap, vignettes of actual events and personal messages is literally everywhere we are, in real time. Boomers lament that people don’t read, forgetting that our simplest values are at once innate and transcendent. We don’t need to know the history of canines to understand that he who mistreats a puppy is our enemy. We don’t need to raise sheep or goats to understand that he who kills the lambs and kids of his neighbor for fun and terror is our enemy. We don’t need a psychology degree to understand that abuse of children by our governing elite and titans of finance is a crime requiring swift exposure and punishment. We don’t need to understand global power shifts, imperial life cycles, European colonial history, the petroleum trade or state financial vulnerabilities to understand that the world has already changed course.

It is enough that most of us have memorized the Ten Commandments, and can recall most of the Seven Deadly Sins; some can repeat the 23^rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. We consume more sheer data in a day than our grandparents did in a month, our great-grandparents in a year – yet understanding right and wrong remains simple, intuitive, automatic. We have not lost that capacity. Our exposure to the broader world increases our understanding of what we have in common, enhances our sense of humanity and nature, and strengthens our sense of being part of both. The data we have access to also helps us understand that the biggest enemy of nature and humanity is war and the state’s war whores. We see that the US system of tyrannical cronyism demands we pay for the last war, this war, and the coming war. The only thing hypersonic in the US military inventory is the profiteering. Can we lament war in general, suffer its economic costs, pay its moral price, and yet continue to meekly submit to our warring, wasteful, destructive and arrogant government? Not for much longer.

Kinship – biological, contractual, ideological – is the new black. In the dead broke and dis-united States, most Americans sense this. We have not begun to contemplate exactly what dead broke and disunited really means, but that process has already been ignited. Kinship is also a valuable global commodity, as DJT discovered when he demanded NATO to join his idiotic attacks, and militarily open a trade route he himself had “closed” through aggressive stupidity. Meanwhile, France joined Russia and China in preventing a UNSC discussion of the Bahraini proposal for expansion of the US-Israeli war, as her ship sailed safely in the open-for-friends-and-friends-of-friends Strait of Hormuz.

There is good news emerging from Trump and Netanyahu’s war. Beyond the silver lining of a clear-eyed popular condemnation of the US Congress and the executive state, Americans of all ages hold in growing contempt a certain tiny warmongering political ethnostate – implicitly preferring liberty, decentralization, and morality. Beyond these generalities, there are at least ten other “benefits” thus far, in just over a month. In no particular order, they include:

• By assuming responsibility for the Strait of Hormuz, Iran – in one decisive act – obliterated US sanctions, military threats, and western colonial habit. It did so to instruct a respected enemy rather than to destroy him. Sun Tzu would approve, because the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

• Lego animations that entertain, educate and troll are becoming a cottage industry. State – and anti-state – education will never be the same.

• The Pentagon has fallen. 80 years of feeding that Colossus produced a lot of fat guys (right, Pete?) and a massive stinking pile of expensive junk. The whole world sees this, including investors and military strategists. Trump’s ask of $1.5 trillion is desperate theater.

• The Pentagon will rise again, ultimately with a budget that looks more like Iran’s, consuming less than 2% of GDP and oriented around a layered and decentralized defense. The bases destroyed and damaged in the Gulf won’t be rebuilt, not by us, nor by the host nations we betrayed and insulted. They also won’t be needed under the new multinational regional security architecture that is already forming in that part of the world.

• The US house of financial cards has now been fully mapped, and will be exploited. Investors and dependencies can all see where this map leads, and are heading for the exits. Americans will have more chances to End the Fed, and replace it with nothing.

• For the 10^th time we have been taught the lesson of Tom Woods – no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain. The emergence of a faithful, hopeful, America First, anti-war voting block took decades to articulate, and less than a year to be decisively slapped down by its pseudo flag-bearer and his corrupt cronies. The life cycle of state betrayal is rapidly compressing, and we the people will even more quickly “find innovative ways to mitigate risks and capture emerging opportunities.”

• The whole world now understands that Israel is not only a problem, but strangely, the main problem. Not energy, fertilizer, helium, or freedom of navigation, but a panicked, aggressive, racist nuclear armed mini-empire wanna-be going nuclear. Two or three Israeli city-states clustered inside the pre-1967 borders, unarmed and denuclearized, will solve this problem. As Yumna Patel writes recently, “Virtually every person I know, from my leftist comrades and colleagues to my MAGA high school classmates, is saying the same thing: they’re tired of Israel’s shit.”

• US military leaders and service members now have clarity as to their expected roles, and as a result, are relinquishing command, withdrawing their consent, and forbidding their offspring from making the same mistake.

• The mask of the state has fallen, thanks to this disastrous illegal war for Israel against a country no one inside the beltway bothered to investigate. DC is revealed as the frightened farcical f^&*-up it has been for most of my life, and this is both disturbing and liberating. It is also important to recall that in state lingo, “liberate” means “kill” as in Trump’s “We are liberating the Iranians” by “bombing them to back to the Stone Age.” Whether you love him or hate him, Trump speaks for the state and the state is preparing for war at home, which always happens when empires fray and disintegrate.

Tragically, each reverberation and after-effect, each open window through which to see a more peaceful and abundant future for all countries, peoples and nations, is being purchased by the blood of thousands of men, women and children around the world. Only aging psychopathic tyrants wielding the vast power of their soulless governments would demand such death and destruction in lieu of their own humility; these dying maniacs use war to fluff their résumés, believing they are incarnations of Jesus. Hell awaits them.

Photo by Jonny Clow on Unsplash