Bibi's Iran Goals Are Not Necessarily Trump's Iran Goals (Director's Cut)

But first: religious wars

Edited by Zeteo

BEFORE WE GET TO my latest Zeteo column—about important divergences of interests between the Great and Little Satans—let's heed the words of Secretary of State-plus Marco Rubio.

"Listen, let me explain to you guys this in simple English, okay?" said a clearly calm Rubio, handling an obvious question about the legal justification for the war with effortless aplomb. "Iran is run by lunatics—religious fanatic lunatics. They have an ambition to have nuclear weapons." 

No, I'm not going to take the easy bait and point out that having an ambition to have nuclear weapons is the thinnest of pretexts, especially when it was Trump and not Iran that broke the 2015 deal that stopped Iran's capabilities for nuclear weapons. I am focused instead on the "they are religious fanatic lunatics" question. 

Because it turns out that a servicemembers' church/state-separation watchdog (sorry, I don't know how to describe them without redundancies with their name), the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), has received "200 calls from more than 50 military installations across all the services" describing commanders who frame the Iran War for their soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen in terms like: "President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth." [As a Christian I just want to point out that the signal fire imagery is not from the Book of Revelation but from the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies.—Sam]

Jonathan Larsen broke the story, and quotes MRRF's founder-president, Air Force retiree Mikey Weinstein: "Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end of the world eschatology."

REIGN OF TERROR has much more on the millennarian Christianist subtext of the War on Terror, which is vital context for the growth in such uniformed pronouncements. It's been a live wire that the Pentagon wanted to pretend didn't exist and definitely has not wanted to touch. Now that Pentagon has been purged by a guy with Deus Vult and Jerusalem-cross tattoos who has a history of yelling out things like "Kill all Muslims" while drunk. And these religious fanatic lunatics have nuclear weapons.

Also, I have no idea how serious this reported CIA outreach to turn the Iranian Kurds into a regime-change ground army actually is. But I note that Amberin Zaman of al-Monitor, who has excellent sources throughout Kurdistan, reports that the Iranian Kurds would seek in return the sorts of things that would keep the U.S. military in Iran for years to decades: "The sources said that the Iranian Kurdish coalition is asking the United States to establish a no-fly zone over the Kurdish areas to provide air cover for potential future operations and, above all, to prove its commitment, the sources added." Audacious especially for the CIA to make requests of the Iranian Kurds right after Trump delivered Rojava from the Kurds—who won the ISIS war for the United States—to the al-Qaeda veteran who won the Syrian Civil War. Interest, desperation, circumstance and ambition can surely trump trust when it comes to war, but damn, remember who cleared the field for the Turks in 2019? 

Finally, if you oppose this horrific war—which Drop Site reports this morning has already killed 1000 people—call your representatives and demand they vote yes on the War Powers Resolution. Any doubts about this mechanism are less important than your representatives being afraid of the antiwar fury of their constituents.

OK, now the paywall and the column. Don't like seeing the paywall? Want to read this instant-classic of a column? I sure wouldn't want you to miss out on it.