I Guess We're All Just Supposed To Be OK With Bombing Iran Again

Edited by Sam Thielman

THIS WEEKEND BROUGHT a sense of dread. Drop Site reported on Friday that the U.S. had quietly told a crucial Gulf ally—probably Qatar, because of the al-Udeid airbase; but maybe the Emirates—that an attack on Iran could come as early as Sunday. 

It didn't, but not because the prospect of war has receded. The strike group of the USS Abraham Lincoln is in waters near Iran. U.S. Mideast-plus-Ukraine envoy Steve Witkoff is in Israel today to coordinate with Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli security services. Witkoff and Jared Kushner are scheduled to meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Friday in Turkey (or possibly Oman, which Iran wants). They plan on presenting Araghchi with the same three demands that Iran has long considered nonstarters: no nuclear fuel enrichment on Iranian soil; reductions to Iranian ballistic-missile stockpiles; and an end to what remains of the Axis of Resistance. Teheran is getting the surrender offer that Trump is said to have offered Nicolas Maduro ahead of the Jan. 3 Caracas raid. And that's the alternative to war. 

You can read what amounts to an order of battle (the size, composition and positioning of a military force) for a buildup of Iran-relevant U.S. military assets in the Middle East in today's Washington Post. It's smaller than before last year's bombing campaign. Dana Stroul, who had the Mideast portfolio in the Biden Pentagon's policy directorate, tells the Post that the array lacks a "discrete objective," which is an insult to everyone's intelligence. "This isn’t about the nukes or the missile program. This is about regime change," a former senior U.S. intelligence official told Drop Site. It looks like Tara Kangarlou's big truck is on its way. While Sam was editing this piece, news broke of the Lincoln strike group shooting down an Iranian drone.

As I wrote recently, I have to be careful not to step on a magazine piece that you won't read for a couple weeks. But it has been haunting to watch the frictionless way Trump appears set to enact or hasten some form of regime change in Iran. Much like in the buildup to the Iraq invasion, the elite political reception and the media coverage of what will be a Huge Fucking Deal—an unprovoked act of aggression against a major regional power, with the intent of destabilizing its regime—reflect something between normalization and avoidance. 

As Drop Site describes, the expectation is for the U.S. to attack regime targets, at which point the long-suffering Iranian population is supposed to take matters into their own hands. Well, not really their own hands, since Netanyahu "'is hoping for an attack,' the former senior intelligence official said, 'and assuring Trump that Israel can help put in place a new government that is friendly with the West.'" If you want a second source, scroll down to the bottom of this al-Monitor piece, where you'll find a similar assessment, sourced to Turkish officials. 

We are talking about the United States, aided by Israel, attacking a country of 90 million people – Iraq's population in 2003 was around 26 million – whose complexities and history the U.S. government prefers to demonize rather than understand. The specific course of action the U.S. is preparing to undertake has failed as profoundly as it is possible to fail. The last time the U.S. overthrew an Iranian government, it empowered a vicious and erratic ally for 25 years, and then the Islamic Republic took his place, leading us to the point where we're seeking to overthrow an Iranian government. Iran sits atop massive supplies of oil but even larger supplies of blowback. 

You would not know any of this from watching Congress. I am anything but a pearl-clutcher about congressional warmaking powers, as we are well after the Cold War and then the War on Terror eviscerated them and remade the presidency into an elected kingship. But for there to be near-total congressional silence as the U.S. is on the precipice of such a fateful decision—Lindsey Graham's sick enthusiasm being an exception—is simply an abdication of responsibility that exemplifies the decadence of what passes for American democracy. Now, the Iraq War debate of 2002 should have already taught me to be careful what I complain about, since chances are a more involved Congress would just vote to let Trump annihilate Iran. But still. 

There isn't a "Countdown: Iran" cable-news drumbeat this time. But most of the coverage is concerned with tactical considerations ahead of an attack. "Before Any Strike on Iran, U.S. Needs to Bolster Air Defenses in Mideast," reads a Wall Street Journal headline from Sunday. Once again, the press is focused on the modalities of war, not what happens should it succeed. Meanwhile, a Jerusalem Post editorial during last June's Twelve-Day War urged "Iran's partition." A large and multiethnic country, Iran's territorial integrity is hardly assured once its prime regional and superpower enemies begin attacking it. The Jerusalem Post wants Trump to "[o]ffer security guarantees to Sunni, Kurdish, and Balochi minority regions willing to break away." Not only can the U.S. repeat the agonies of Iraq, it can layer onto them the agonies of Syria. 

Ever since 1979, there have been warmongers in the United States calling for overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Those voices got much louder after 9/11, and the success of the Iranians in bloodying the Iraq occupation layered a desire for revenge onto the preexisting and cultivated sense of humiliation following the hostage crisis. As FOREVER WARS noted in 2024, once the Israeli assassination campaign against the Axis of Resistance decapitated Hezbollah, the prospect of redrawing the balance of power in the Middle East became dangerously enticing to the foreign-policy Blob. The Blob never wanted to learn any lessons from the War on Terror, which it supported until that stopped being fun. I'd say that they seem to want to learn the hard way again, but no one in Washington who supports the bombing will end up paying the human cost. 

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN'S been doing some very valuable reporting on the Department of Homeland Security assembling databases of people who oppose ICE operations and accessing many other databases containing Americans' information. A detail in his latest story stopped me in my tracks: A DHS data portal called the Intelligence Reporting System - Next Generation (IRS-NG) provides access to "at least 28" databases. One of them? The "National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS)."

If you don't remember NSEERS, it's the original U.S. database of Muslims. Before the Department of Homeland Security, the immigration-enforcement apparatus was in the hands of the Justice Department, which after 9/11 was in the hands of George W. Bush's attorney general John Ashcroft. NSEERS compiled biometric and other data from noncitizens from 24 predominantly Muslim countries (and North Korea, as insulation for legal challenges) who entered the United States. Registration was "voluntary," but many with lived experience of the immigration system—particularly after 9/11—surely felt that there would be reprisals for not "volunteering." Sure enough, some 14,000 "volunteers" were hauled into deportation hearings. 

NSEERS was the source of massive civil-libertarian outcry during the Bush administration. Readers of REIGN OF TERROR know what happened next. When Barack Obama was elected president, he stopped NSEERS. But he didn't have DHS purge its data—data on 84,000 people. 

A DHS document Ken links to about IRS-NG indicates that NSEERS data is "historical." That should be cold comfort when highly revealing data about Muslim noncitizens is accessible to a kidnapping force that shoots inconvenient Minnesotans in the forehead and the back. Thanks, Obama! 

ANOTHER TOOL DHS is repurposing also derives from the early days of the War on Terror. The Washington Post reports on the agency's expanding use of administrative subpoenas, a non-judicial order to compel service providers to turn over records on customers. As the piece mentions (but doesn't develop), the PATRIOT Act's expansive authorities for federal agents to compel the disclosure of such "third-party" records are what supercharged the use of the administrative subpoena. At the time, the expansion of such surveillance authorities was justified as a measure to investigate and prevent terrorism, not that they have much of a track record of utility in that regard. As you'll read in the Post piece, now DHS is using it to intimidate its critics. 

A DIFFERENT PIECE I’m working on—not the one I mentioned up top and in a prior edition—concerns Gaza during the false "ceasefire." That's all I should say about it for now. I bring it up because the false ceasefire, and surely the ownership change in the U.S. version of TikTok, has cratered focus on the survival of Palestinians, about 500 of whom in Gaza have been killed by Israel since it began. 

Counteracting that disinterest is The Nation's cover package today, which centers on Gaza; Reuters' recent excellent reporting on the Biden administration's suppression of unmistakable early warnings about the genocide from USAID ("Everybody who followed this issue from inside the U.S. government—whether it's the military, the intel world, the State Department, USAID—was fully aware of not only everything that was happening in terms of destruction and civilian deaths in Gaza, but also the expected consequences and expected trajectory of the Israeli campaign in Gaza," Harrison Mann told me in 2024); and Alex Kane's Jewish Currents reports on resignations at Human Rights Watch stemming from a suppressed report that called Israel's denial of Palestinian refugees' right of return the crime against humanity that it is.