The idiocy and futility of conflict with Iran.

I’ve been trying to talk about current events less on this blog than I used to, but today I feel compelled to speak out.

Yesterday (June 21, 2025), our President, who is demonstrably insane, took it upon himself—apparently with little to no consultation either with our allies or even his own defense and national security advisers—to launch attacks against Iran’s supposed “nuclear sites.” This behavior is entirely consistent with the historical pattern of fascist rulers, who usually begin striking outside their country’s borders with aggressive attacks when they grow tired or bored of consolidating their power at home. Mussolini did so with his attacks against Ethiopia and Albania; Hitler obviously began World War II in Europe in 1939. Until recently Trump has seemed more interested in using the U.S. military to kill Americans he doesn’t like, but it was inevitable that he would ultimately turn to attacking perceived enemies abroad. Whether this leads to a wider Middle Eastern conflict or one even wider than that, it’s utterly futile, idiotic and immoral. Every American should oppose it.

The proffered justification for the attack is an extremely old, tired and unconvincing trope that’s been around since the Bush II era: “We can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon!” John Bolton, one of the more incompetent and deranged of the rogue’s gallery of criminals and incompetents who advised George W. Bush, has been flogging this dead horse since before he came to public prominence in 2005. The evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons is underwhelming. If they’ve been at it 20 years and they don’t have the bomb yet, what makes anybody think they’re actually going to achieve it? Furthermore, what if they do? Nobody in power even wants to ask that question seriously. Iran’s regime is not uniquely irrational or dangerous—certainly no more so than regimes that Trump likes and supports, like Putin’s Russia and the North Korean dictatorship of Kim Jong-un, both of whom have had nuclear weapons for a long time now. Bolton is disgraced, having fallen out with Trump in 2019, but his drumbeat for war against Iran remains a zombie idea that captures and terrorizes what passes for policy thinking on the far right.

Trump’s attack on Iran seems to have a lot more to do with Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu than it does with any substantive fears of a nuclear-armed Iran. Netanyahu, like Putin and Kim Jong-un, knows how to skillfully manipulate and railroad Trump, who is totally ignorant of how international affairs work and whose crippling narcissism leaves him uniquely susceptible to being manipulated and controlled. Israel has been conducting an unconscionable genocide against the people of Gaza since October 2023 and a conflict with Iran perfectly serves his purposes of not only continuing his campaign of wanton extermination of the Palestinians, but committing Trump and the United States to aid and abet that crime even more forcefully and completely than we have thus far (including under Biden). A war with Iran, whether limited or protracted, puts the U.S. on the side of a state that’s actively committing genocide. That’s not going to end well.

What happens when Iran retaliates? They will, somehow, somewhere, whether conventionally or not. Expecting them to sit still and take it is the same sort of delusion that American leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, have bought into since the Vietnam era. To the extent there ever was any genuine concern about Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, the best way to prevent them from doing so would have been to make a deal. That’s now impossible. If the Iranians are working on nukes, we can be sure their operations are buried in deep underground bunkers which are invulnerable to air attack. They’d be insane not to do that. I don’t think this is really about nuclear weapons, but if it is, this attack has probably increased, not decreased, the chance that Iran will eventually get them.

No American stands to gain anything from a conflict with Iran—not even Trump, upon whom this move will backfire spectacularly, somehow, probably very soon. The conspiratorial trope popular on the left that “greedy defense contractors” will benefit is a thought-terminating cliché as vapid as “we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon,” because I don’t think they’ll gain much in the long run anyway, and there is no historical evidence that defense contractors have had any significant influence on the kind of large-scale war and peace decisions that people often credit them as having. If this widens into a major war, Americans will die in large numbers to accomplish nothing, as they did in Iraq and Vietnam. Why haven’t we learned this lesson of history? If there’s one thing I know as a history teacher, it’s not only that people do not learn from historical mistakes, but they don’t want to learn and usually actively resist doing so.

This is a bad move. Whatever it leads to, it will blow up in the faces of its architects, whether Trump himself, or Bolton or Netanyahu or whoever’s idiotic idea it was. This is not who we are. Nobody with an ounce of sanity or common sense or a moment’s reflection wants this. I’m ashamed and appalled that my country is supporting genocide and inviting more conflicts that serve no human purpose. I won’t go along with it, and I hope the American people make it clear that they won’t either.

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