Happy New Year, n'est-ce pas? Or, perhaps more appropriately, WTF? I’m getting too old for this shit, and I didn’t sign up for it in the first place. In the old days, like December 31, 2019, one of the harshest, and truest, charges against Vladimir Putin is that he carried out the assassination of people who crossed him. How can we deal with such murderous behavior, howled the neocons? This man is beyond the pale of civilization!
Well, such thinking is so one week ago. The rapture on the right—not just the far right, but the anti-Trump right as well—who hold forth at such fledgling sites as The Dispatch and The Bulwark, who generally think that Donald Trump should not be president but that murdering people we don’t like is cool, particularly if they are Iranian.1
What’s striking—as in “strikingly offensive"—is how quickly the discussion of the official rationale for the murder of Qassem Soleimani, that it was necessary to thwart an imminent threat to the lives of American citizens, quickly fell by the wayside. He was a bad man! He was a very bad man! And, anyway, Iran is a bad country, very bad. Remember the hostages? Case closed, case closed!
The bloodlust virtually the entire right entertains for Iran continues to stun me. These people say they don’t want war, but they do. They will push and shove Iran “until they negotiate”, because it’s well known that anyone will do what you want them to do if you just harass them enough. As I have frequently (and that’s putting it mildly) pointed out, this didn’t work when George Bush tried it with Saddam Hussein and it didn’t work when Obama tried it with Muammar Gaddafi. Strongmen may not in fact be very strong, but they prefer to die with their boots on. I can only assume that all Iran-hatin’ conservatives are cowards, and simply can’t imagine preferring death to surrender. Live on my knees? Well, sure, if you insist! I can have a pillow for my knees, can’t I?
And yet, amazingly, what they really want is war. They are tired of peace, which is all about compromise, and working things out, and they are tired of that. They don’t want to sensible or responsible or considerate or practical. They want to have some fun. They are hypnotized, as George Bush and his gang of bad boys were, by the promise that war brings, the promise of absolute freedom, of being able to do absolutely anything you want. We have seen how illusory this promise is, and yet they can’t get it out of their heads. What fools these mortals be.
There are a few who stand apart—that is, they stand apart and say nothing, and live with neither praise nor blame. Dan Drezner, whom I often find “provocative”, but, you know, wrong, is just a coward on this one. Says Dan
there are several factors that make me hesitant to opine with any confidence. The first is that we still do not know an awful lot about how this went down. The second is that the greater Middle East is its own special policy morass, and I am loath as a non-area expert to enter those waters. The third is that the variance of possible outcomes going forward is huge.
Well, when in doubt, aka “ wallowing in lily livered pusillanimity”, quote without comment someone who will say what you want to say, thus both accomplishing your goal and preserving your most cherished chastity. In this case, Dan quotes someone I never heard of, Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a thinktank set up to hawk hawkishness on behalf of Israel in the Middle East. According to Mark, “If it’s true Suleimani is dead, this is bigger than bin-Laden. Bigger than Mugniyeh. Bigger than Baghdadi. For two decades, Suleimani has been the most powerful, savvy & effective terrorist on the planet. He’s enjoyed full backing of powerful terrorist state. Irreplaceable.”
In other words, Wonderful News! Imminence? Imminence, schmimminence! We murdered a bad guy! Which I guess is what Dan wants to say, but somehow lacks the nerve. As I’ve previously pointed out, the Post was eager to let us know just what a stinker Suleimani was, and it seems Dan felt the need to be a team player, though without the disagreeable necessity of getting his uniform dirty.
Also suddenly shy was generally stalwart anti-Trumper Jay Nordlinger, phoning in a bizarre post to the effect that being president is a really, really tough job. Yes, it really, really is. Well, that’s all for this time! See you guys later!
Gee, Jay, what happened? Did your wife send your balls to the cleaners without telling you? Because you sure seem fresh out today!
David French, who served in the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army in Iraq, and is a strong evangelical, who files with the aforementioned Dispatch, somehow forgets that murder is both illegal and immoral, and also warns us not to jump to any conclusions—“It’s still too early to say where Suleimani’s killing will lead us.” Well, other than to Hell, maybe, eh, “Christian”?
But, unsurprisingly, the cake-taker in the moral evasion contest is Ross “Cake Man” Douthat, who serves up some heavy chin-stroking in his latest rumbling, “Andrew Jackson in the Persian Gulf”, largely praising Trump for committing cold-blooded murder, but faulting him, just a little, for maybe not having an adequate follow-up strategy: “But so long as Trump is working within an inherited Hamiltonian-Wilsonian strategic framework, his Jacksonian tactical approach — in the Suleimani case, picking the most surprising and dramatic option on the military board of retaliatory options — is unlikely to serve his official goal of escaping endless Middle Eastern entanglements.”2 See, Donny, you just have to cast off that Hamiltonian-Wilsonian strategic framework, and then you’re in like Flynn! Murder? Murder, schmurder! It was surprising and dramatic, and I like it! But you need an act two, and I don’t think you’ve got one!
Still, Ross assures that we shouldn’t worry too much: “it’s important to stress that the fallout from the Suleimani gambit could be less dramatic than the panicked punditry expects,” though one could, with equal justice, rewrite that sentence to read “it’s important to stress that the fallout from the Suleimani gambit could be more dramatic than the panicked punditry expects.”
Ross is, ostensibly, a Catholic, so I think it’s only fair to him to give him, via Dante, a preview of what’s in store for him, and all those who chose to stand aside: a dreary plain, just outside the gates of Hell, where they’ll “live”, wandering in circles, shunned by God and Satan alike:
There sighs and plaints and wailings uncontrolled
The dim and starless air resounded through;
Nor at the first could I from tears withhold.
The various languages and words of woe,
The uncouth accents, mixed with angry cries
And smiting palms and voices loud and low,
Composed a tumult which doth circling rise
For ever in that air obscured for aye;
As when the sand upon the whirlwind flies.
The Inferno, Canto III, lines 21-30, translation by James Romanes Sibbald
1. A striking exception to this stunning reversion to form is Jennifer Rubin, who I once dismissed as being so kneejerk it was silly to make fun of her. But now Jennie is commendable, and almost unique among her former comrades in arms, in holding that murder and deceit are the very opposite of the ideals engraved in our Constitution, which most “conservatives” seem to have banished from their thoughts in their zeal for fresh blood.
2. In his discussion of how Trump might abandon the “Hamiltonian-Wilsonian strategic framework”, and, basically, not worry too much about the great neocon bogyman of Iranian “hegemony”, Ross sort of forgets to mention the State of Israel. Israel? Is that in the Middle East?
