Could a war that began with the bombing of the girls’ primary school in Minab, in Hormozgan Province, southern Iran, have unfolded differently? There were 180 victims, most of them little girls, mercilessly killed in the name of blind and inhuman hatred.
As the Iranian response has progressively intensified — coinciding with the destruction of the most advanced long-range radars at the U.S. disposal and the gradual, evident depletion of anti-missile interceptor stocks — even Donald Trump’s arrogance has officially shifted, reaching bombastic levels.
The famous post on X about the total destruction of Iranian civilization followed shortly after the firing of several generals in key Pentagon positions and Attorney General Pamela Bondi, while the head of counterterrorism, Joe Kent, had already seen fit to resign a little earlier, thus abandoning what must have seemed to him a ship steered by a madman.
I don’t believe Donald Trump writes the posts he publishes on his social media platforms himself, but something must have gone wrong in media communications if such an extreme post ended up in the public eye. Perhaps a hallucination of an artificial intelligence? But AIs feed on data gathered from the web and process it using machine-learning algorithms: the software must have “thought” that those crazy words were in line with the author’s true state of mind.
The final nail in the coffin was the failure of the operation to seize Iranian enriched uranium, which took place just as the two American pilots shot down in their F-15 by Iranian air defenses were being recovered.
The request to seize more than half a ton of enriched uranium in the midst of a full-scale war and near targets obviously guarded by well-armed and trained forces — this request must have seemed incredibly absurd, yet the U.S. military nonetheless produced a plan that predictably failed. Perhaps they feared being fired or facing a court-martial for refusing.
Trump caved in immediately, proposing a two-week ceasefire and apparently accepting the Iranian 10-point plan — which amounts to an unconditional American surrender and places the Strait of Hormuz under Iran’s military and fiscal control.
Does anyone really believe this “ceasefire” will be followed by a lasting peace? It smacks of retreat and regrouping. But it benefits both parties, not just one.
In this recent interview, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin describes Donald Trump’s personality in its most narcissistic and savage aspects: an excessive sense of social vindication that leads the current U.S. president to view the rest of humanity as a means rather than an end. It is well known that Donald Trump’s father was a chronic alcoholic and a negative, totally absent figure, who had a devastating impact on the life of Trump’s younger brother, Fred Jr., who died of alcoholism in 1981 at the age of 43. This set of circumstances drove The Donald toward an illusion of a Godzilla-style life.
However, it is Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat and former MI-6 agent, who provides us with some additional details:
In an earlier incarnation, a younger Trump – desperate to be admired as a star in the world of Manhattan real estate – took New York Attorney Roy Cohen to be his personal mentor. “The latter notably was also the lawyer for the city’s five big crime families – who had, with connections such as these, earned for himself the reputation as someone not to be messed with”, Israeli military commentator, Alon Ben David relates:
“In most cases, all Trump needed to do was to introduce Cohen to the other side of the deal, so that the latter would agree to his terms. Sometimes Trump was also forced … to drag the other side to court, where Cohen would bare his teeth to the judges and win. But that was always Trump’s bottom line: win. Not to make the pie bigger, not a win-win for both sides, but a victory for him alone – and preferably with the other side’s surrender”.
Time moves on, and today, as Ben David writes, the U.S. military juggernaut serves as Trump’s ‘Roy Cohen’. He presents the American military might for display to the Iranians in the expectation that they readily will capitulate; else he, Trump, will let go of the leash. Trump complained to Witkoff after the armada of U.S. naval vessels had been assembled off the Persian coast that he was ‘puzzled and confused’ as to why the Iranians had not already capitulated on sighting the collective naval power assembled.
However, Shi’ite eschatology rests on at least two pillars: the death in 661 CE at the hands of Ibn Muljam of ʿAlī ibn ʾAbī Ṭālib, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet of Islam and the first Imam of the Shi’ites, and the Battle of Karbala, in 680 AD, which saw the remnants of the Shiite forces — previously defeated by the Sunni Umayyads — slaughtered by the latter and thus transformed into eternal martyrs.
The mistake in Trump’s mind was therefore to believe he was dealing with a group of New York property developers and mobsters, his natural social milieu, manageable through dynamics he had always been accustomed to. For Trump, diplomacy was bargaining using street-thug methods, and the ensuing confrontation was war pornography meant to lead to the inevitable recognition of his role as the dominant alpha male over all the other betas (sic).
But for the Iranians, the issue was from the very beginning on an eschatological plane and not merely human, political, or economic: all the treacherous killings before, the bombing of the school in Minab with the killing of its innocent souls later, all the arrogant and frankly insane proclamations that have accompanied these two months of war — all of this has confirmed to the Iranians that they are on the path of Imam ʿAlī and on the path of Karbala. That is, on the path of a destiny that tends toward God.
This feeling also applies to those Iranians who may, from a certain point of view, be understandably weary of a government of clerics: it is the entire Iranian society that has been forged and steeped over the centuries in Shi’ite mysticism, not just a sclerotic part of it.
Then there is the relationship between Donald Trump and Israel: Tel Aviv has always used Washington as a proxy to consolidate its power in the region, but it is only under Trump that calls for open war against Iran have found a receptive ear in the White House.
It was Youssef Hindi who correctly explained the relationship between Israel and Iran as well as Russia in terms of an eschatological war, since, according to certain interpretations of the Talmud, Iran and Russia are the lands of origin of Gog and Magog, thus posing an otherworldly existential threat to Israel. Eliminating this threat appears to be the primary duty of Netanyahu and his inner circle, but the difference with certain American and Western elites lies in the order of priority, not the final outcome.
I do not believe that the current ceasefire and the upcoming negotiations in Islamabad under Pakistan’s auspices will lead to a lasting and stable peace. The Second Iran War, currently on hold, strikes me as much as a Second Punic War set in the 21st century. Let us therefore expect a third, just as harsh and bloody as the previous ones. Perhaps even more so.
No comments:
Post a Comment