In installment #13 of this series, “Reality Bites,” I identified four egregious falsehoods or outright lies at the heart of the Trump Administration’s case for escalation against Iran.

1. Iran is the aggressor; we’re merely responding to their aggression.
2. Qasim Suleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, which obliged us to respond to the threat he posed.
3. Suleimani’s assassination was an attempt to forestall an imminent attack on American facilities.
4. There were no American casualties after the Iranian missile attack on Iraqi/U.S. bases in Iraq.

The first two claims stand as written. The second two have been reinforced since I wrote them. Re (3): An “imminent attack” took place weeks after the assassination (“imminent,” at any rate, just before it happened). Assassinating Suleimani did nothing to stop it. Re (4): there were in fact dozens of American casualties after the Iranian missile attack, not none.

In the mental fog induced by impeachment, no politician, whether Democrat or Republican, has managed even the minimal candor required to clarify the issue at stake: we face a proxy war that we must either fight or abandon; fighting it will be costly and pointless, which ought to be enough to persuade us not to try. Continue reading →

You’ve probably seen that meme of the couple in bed, where the woman suspects that the guy is thinking of other women, and the guy is lying there thinking about video games or whatever. That meme is a perfect encapsulation of the communicative relationship between Iran and the American people. The Iranians are trying to tell us, “Hey, our proxies have hit your embassy after weeks of trying!” And we’re sitting there, fixated on Kobe Bryant. The attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad took place last night, but wasn’t reported in The New York Times until 5:15 this morning. I mostly read about it in obscure foreign outlets. A helicopter crash that kills a former basketball star is a breaking story, but a direct missile attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad isn’t. Priorities.  Continue reading →

Last night, I wrote this paean to Code Pink, in anticipation of an anti-war demonstration that was supposed to take place today at noon in Hinds Plaza in Princeton, New Jersey. I regard Medea Benjamin, the founder of Code Pink, as one of the great heroes of the twenty-first century.

Code Pink’s opposition to our government’s wars has been more consistent than any of the rationalizations the government has offered in defense of them. If you’re in Princeton on the 25th, and oppose war, consider standing with us (in the rain) at Hinds Plaza. Voting isn’t enough if your vote is just a vote for war. Our representatives need to know loudly and unmistakably that it isn’t. (But yeah, bring an umbrella.)

It was, to be sure, a chilly day with a pouring rain. So I drove down to Princeton, parked my car, walked over to Hinds Plaza, and encountered this scene… Continue reading →

In an earlier post, I insisted that “our” war with Iran was not yet over. And it isn’t. You may have forgotten all about the war we started with them. But rest assured, they haven’t.

Exhibit A: Saturday’s missile attack on a government military base in Yemen. The New York Times, a bit behind the times in this case, lists the casualties as rising “to at least 76.” That was yesterday. Seven hours ago, it was 111. I’m guessing it’ll go up. Continue reading →

This abstract presents a slightly more formal, structured version of the argument I gave in the second installment in this series. Comments welcome.]

The Iran War of January 2020 (hereafter, “the War”) was widely justified by way of the following morally loaded question, addressed primarily to an American audience:

(Q1) If you had certain intelligence of an imminent threat to American lives, would you use military force to stop the person responsible for that threat?

Typically, an interlocutor hoping to defend the War would pose Q1, demand an unqualified “yes or no” answer to it, and take the “yes or no” to be an exclusive disjunction. Continue reading →

Back in 1950, during the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur was famously (“famously”) invited by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) to give a speech at one of their annual conventions. Given the exigencies of war, MacArthur was unable to attend, but accepted the invitation and sent the VFW the text–we’d call it a “hard copy”–of his speech. The speech, an instance of saber-rattling of the kind for which MacArthur was famous (and is still admired today, at least by conservatives), flatly, obviously, and  deliberately contradicted the official policy of the U.S. government at the time on Formosa (Taiwan). MacArthur sent it to the VFW as a kind of provocation, and succeeded in his aim, putting Truman in a quandary about how to respond. Continue reading →