One hates to see crime rewarded, but that’s what seems to be happening in the Middle East. The outrage over Trump’s outrageous assassination of Qassem Soleimani has been half drowned in the justifiable outrage over Iran’s destruction of a Ukraine International Airlines jet, killing all 176 individuals on board. The Iranian people are mortified by their government’s incompetence, and no one can blame them.
But, frankly, I’d rather talk about our government’s crimes, which were intentional rather than accidental, and the fervor with which official murder has been embraced by never-Trumper folks like Jonah Goldberg and David French. What is most dismaying is the clear longing—the desperate longing, really—for a real, honest to god enemy, someone we can hate and to whose destruction we can proudly dedicate our lives. As folks like Dan Drezner have frequently pointed out, our 40-year obsession with Iran is absurd. Iran has a brutal, repressive, reactionary government,1 but it’s far from the worst government in the world, it’s no threat to the United States at all, and the whole notion of Iranian “hegemony” is a fantasy, pure and simple. Iran is not the Soviet Union, and the Shiite variety of Islam is not communism, but people like Mr. French and Mr. Goldberg don’t care. They want their goddamn Cold War and they are goddamn well going to get it, no matter how ridiculous it seems, no matter how many trillions of dollars we waste, and no matter how many thousands of innocent people we kill.
Afterwords
Many commentators have remarked on the endless string of lies emanating from the Trump Administration “explaining” Soleimani’s murder. The constantly shifting rationales, the complete absence of any real threat to Americans, it’s all eerily similar to the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Of course, at that time, no one had the nerve to say that the Bush Administration was lying. So I guess we’re making progress, of a sort.
1. If Margaret Atwood had set The Handmaid’s Tale, not in the U.S. but Iran, it would have been far more accurate—though not, one supposes, nearly so “correct”.
