Iran and the Illusions of War

 

For whatever reason, our president has been sucked deeply into just the variety of foreign entanglement that he campaigned against. While he and his absurdly gung-ho “Secretary of War” assert that they are not bent on nation-building like their supposedly hapless and woke predecessors, they sure seem to be trying to build an Iranian state with whom we can “peacefully” coexist—by killing as many potential Iranian leaders as they can.

It is not going to work. Neither America nor Israel will become more secure in the long run. If anything good comes of such so-called (and despicably named) “mowing the grass,” I’ll eat my hat.

Sweet Jesus, our benighted species does sometimes seem awesomely stuck on stupid. Here we are a quarter into the 21^st century with two world wars and a series of futile superpower “excursions” into Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan behind us. Russia remains bogged down in the middle of a brutal and cruel “special military operation.” Ahead of us looms a global climate emergency wherein the minimum terms of global survival will be the mass adoption of solar, wind and other renewables. Yes, the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz has demonstrated the significant continuing demand for oil and other essential commodities, but the era of fossil fuels is clearly winding down, notwithstanding the president’s ostrich-like denial of climate and obligation to the oil execs who helped pay for his re-election.

In order to keep on assuming that adventures like the cooperative bombing of Iran by the U.S. and Israel will result in anything positive at all, let alone unalloyed positive good, it is necessary to cling rigidly to a series of illusions. A few are listed below, along with their equivalent counter arguments.

•Massive firepower has the capacity to permanently erase ideology, collective resentment and a desire for vengeance. (Nope. This campaign has intensified Iran’s hatred of Israel and America in a way that almost inevitably will carry into further generations.)

•Massive firepower has the ability to obliterate all of Iran’s war-making capacity, including its capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons. (Nope. A resentful angry regime will only bide time, rebuild, and hit back down the road. It is impossible to uninvent nuclear weapons. It may even be impossible to stop the sale of a nuclear weapon by one country to another, or the smuggling of same into “enemy territory.” And if God forbid a nuclear holocaust results, we will finally realize that all the wars humans have been fighting are really civil wars. We, we the human species, have become our own worst enemy. All territory is either enemy territory or an occasion for people to wake up and realize that everyone shares an overarching interest in survival—a deep potential bond with “enemies.”)

•America and Israel are totally good and Iran is totally evil. (Sorry, nope. At this point in human history every schoolchild needs to be taught the rudiments of shadow work. It’s now two thousand years since a wise teacher said: “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” Yes, evil is real, but it is not all over there in the “other.” We have a far better chance of dealing creatively with evil if our brain is not addled by projected blame and fantasies of vengeance and omnipotence. Iranians remember vividly the 1953 British-American coup against them as a gross illegal attempt to de-legitimize a democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mossedegh.)

•Violence permanently resolves conflict. (Nope, it’s exactly the opposite. Violence perpetuates conflict—all the more when we “make a devastation and call it peace.”)

It is long past the moment when we need to think creatively about where such stubbornly-held illusions and simplifications are taking us. A brief catalog of different models of thinking that might help move war from our immediate go-to reaction to our absolute last resort:

•Recognizing my own capacity for blame, indifference, and moral simplification.

•Acknowledging the pull of vengeful feeling without allowing it to govern action.

•Seeing my own capacity for harm, and the shared human condition beneath conflict.

•Understanding that ideas and resentments persist beyond physical destruction.

•Acknowledging that survival is uncertain in a world where others are not secure

•Accepting that militants cannot be cleanly distinguished from civilians—including children— in modern war. And most of all learning to put myself in my adversary’s shoes, in order to listen for common ground. It is easy to destroy. It is much harder to painstakingly push for diplomatic solutions that have the potential to prevent the expense, waste and horror of war. An even more radical way to define our challenge is a line from W.H Auden’s great poem “September 1, 1939”: “We must love one another or die.”