Beating swords into craniums, Part 1
While essential to a free society, the American antiwar movement has embraced delusions, mystical thinking, and dishonest framing long before the Iran airstrikes.
Since Ron Paul launched his 2008 presidential campaign, I considered the antiwar movement to be the balancing factor in America’s political system. In the post-9/11 era the Bush Administration with the full backing of the bipartisan establishment was able to turn what should have been an initiative to capture Osama bin Laden and defeat Al Qaeda into a quest to reshape the Middle East. A lot of people throw in Israel as a key instigator of the side seeking to get the US to invade Iraq, and to be sure Benjamin Netanyahu’s congressional testimony on that matter remains a stain on his record, and unfortunately Israel’s too by extension. Unfortunately at this juncture I think that the voices opposing the strikes against Iran have discredited themselves and are opposing the war because it’s a default principle rather than using a well crafted case based on the available information. I still would have preferred the US stay out of the Iran conflict.
As such for the past 17 years I have leaned toward supporting the libertarian non-interventionist position against war, whether it was regarding Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and yes, even Iran. This is notwithstanding my service in the IDF and the cloying demands of pro-Israel advocates and sympathetic American politicians like Lindsey Graham and others. I remember in 2019 there was a notable incident when an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone was shot down over international waters by Iran and there were voices like Ben Shapiro’s who were trying to coax the first Trump administration to bomb Iran. In January 2021 as President Biden was being installed into office (like a McDonald’s ice cream machine for all you Ian Carroll fans), I wrote a lengthy article bemoaning the disappearance of the antiwar Democrats and then in December following the Afghan withdrawal another article predicting that he would bungle the US into the Ukraine conflict. I didn’t vote for past neocon presidents or candidates like George Bush and John McCain.
So with that baseline established why is the current situation with Iran causing me to think differently? To put it simply, Iran’s sponsorship of proxy conflicts abroad and its plainly demonstrated desire to become a nuclear armed power should be seen as a major destabilising influence not only on its main nemesis - Israel, of course - but on every other neighbour from the Gulf Arab monarchies to the western Mediterranean Arab states Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan. After Oct. 7, 2023 when the conflict between Israel and the Iran dominated “Axis of Resistance” (AOR) deepened, Iran’s neighbouring governments have sat by passively and watched them trade blows. Today a year and a half afterward it is possible to say that the AOR is still a threat but much less potent than it was in 2023. Even Hezbollah, the keystone of the alliance outside of Iran itself, has refrained from retaliating against Israel after ten days of Israeli direct strikes in Iran thanks to its defeat in direct fighting with Israel last Fall.
But let’s get to the heart of the matter. It wasn’t only Hezbollah’s role as a deterrent that was defanged by Israel, Iran’s own deterrence has been completely exposed. With the opening attack on June 13, the IAF has been Mossing them both in the air and on the ground and hasn’t stopped, killing very senior members of its defence, political, and scientific elite and destroying major pieces of its infrastructure. With innovative new tools Iran’s drone aircraft attacks have been rendered completely ineffective. Iran’s most effective tool, its ballistic missiles, are being depleted by air strikes notwithstanding the casualties and damage to Israel, which unfortunately has thus far been confined to civilian targets.
So how has the “geopolitical analyst” brain trust on X absorbed this? I listened to a long X Space where Mario Nawfal interviewed Scott Ritter, and recommend you do too. If you want to know what the truth is just listen to what Ritter says and then do what Mario does and conclude the exact opposite. This is because Ritter basically had to deny everything:
Ignoring the fact that Iran’s obsolete 1970’s era vintage air force has been largely a non-factor or presented itself as ground targets. It remains today the only air force that still operates the F14 Tomcat, with “operates” defined as leaving on the tarmac to be destroyed. The F14 was the aircraft used in the original 1986 movie Top Gun and was retired from the USAF in 2006.
Pretending that after ten days of continuous unabated bombardment of Iran, that it is Israel whose deterrence is compromised, while it is Iran’s that has been restored.
Acting as if it was the desirable outcome all along for the AOR that Hezbollah would no longer be an armed fighting group, when less than a year ago he was portraying them as untouchable and saying Israel would not dare attack them and risk a quagmire
Expect more of the same from similar voices. Saagar Enjeti, the Tucker Carlson cutout who pretends to be the “right populist” half of the leftoid Breaking Points podcast, issued a tweet where he meekly accepted that WWIII might not actually be happening.
There was a big difference here: It was not a simple US intervention. Iran over the past two years has gradually been exposed, first through their failed proxy wars that they declined to actively take part in, then through the Israeli airstrikes against Iran itself that elicited weak counterstrikes operations True Promise 1 and 2 (April and October 2024), and finally the coup de grace of Operation Rising Lion that softened them up for the short US airstrikes that were Operation Midnight Hammer.
This is not an issue of 4D chess or the US having super weapons. Anyone paying attention since 2023 should have recognised the pattern of Iran using proxies to do their dirty work, abandoning them when the going went rough as happened in Lebanon and Syria, and then being incapable of mounting an effective response when the war was brought home. Their alliances with Russia and China were always ones of mutual interests and convenience, and now that things are going rough in Tehran their allies in Moscow and Beijing are crying crocodile tears, as they see their alliance with Iran being of lesser importance than their relationships with the Gulf Arab states. And what were they supposed to do?
As mentioned, Iran operates a large but mostly obsolete conventional military and dedicates much of its resources to proxies and their nuclear programme. For all the Ritter boasted about their preparedness for this war, maybe he should have addressed this along with their total internal security incompetence. Maybe the rest of America’s antiwar Twitter chorus has to acknowledge that while it is good to oppose war, it is also incorrect to act as if the situation today is identical to Iraq in 2002 and instead craft an argument more akin to the current situation like Senator Rand Paul does by offering rational criticism and persuading war supporters rather than raging out. Like him, I oppose active US involvement in regime change in Iran, and I continue to admire his work but sadly he is no longer hardcore enough for the antiwar movement. Perhaps it’s their job to be irrational in the hopes of making us follow suit and ignore sane voices like his.
In the second part of this newsletter I will profile some of the most insane reactions to this now hopefully concluded Iran intervention.