The Many Fathers of The Murder of Iran

As Trump threatens that "a whole civilization will die tonight," remember that he didn't get here by himself

Edited by Sam Thielman

"A WHOLE CIVILIZATION will die tonight.” "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day or Bridge Day… Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell – Just Watch! Praise be to Allah." 

Forgive me if this is the most emotional edition of FOREVER WARS in the nearly five years we've been publishing. But tonight we face the prospect of a madman in the White House ordering something that ranges between mass war crimes and the destruction of a civilization that can trace its roots back before the Bronze Age Collapse. Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth was supposed to hold what passes for a press conference in the Pentagon this morning but last night abruptly cancelled it. After seeing Trump threaten the murder of "a whole civilization," I find myself taking seriously the prospect that tonight we could see the United States use nuclear weapons for the first time since 1945.

If it does, it will do so in a conflict pretextually predicated on stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. 

I don't really know what to do with myself today as something this horrific approaches. "Fire and fury" taught us that Trump can back down after initiating a conflict whose escalatory spiral he can't control. I would like to look back on this edition as a hysterical overreaction. I would like this evening to look stupid, to look like an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome—or, if you prefer, American Empire Derangement Syndrome, for reasons I'll get into in a moment. Because it will mean the people and heritage of Iran will have survived. 

But if Trump does this—and it doesn't have to be a nuclear detonation to be unforgivable, it just has to be Power Plant Day or Bridge Day or any other Day of Destroyed Civilian Infrastructure Because Trump Lost A War And Cannot Escape The Trap He Set For Himself—this mass murder will not be his alone. There is an entire political, security and media apparatus that brought us to this point. 

The Bush administration, with the braying approval of influential neoconservative media figures like Bill Kristol who believes himself to bear no responsibility for Trump and now postures as his opponent, rejected the Iranian government's post-9/11 olive branches. Its decision instead to place Iraq on the "Axis of Evil" and surround it with U.S. ground forces prompted the rise of Iranian power region-wide. The effect of that included the agony felt by hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq dead and thousands more wounded once the IRGC lent material support to the Shia insurgency. Such bloodshed understandably generated more elite political hostility against Iran rather than an appropriate reconsideration of what the United States was instead incentivizing Teheran to do. The few foreign-policy practitioners who argued that the Islamic Republic would be open to a recast relationship while a non-recast one would ultimately lead to war, like the former diplomat Flynt Leverett, were portrayed in conservative media as unserious people. Mainstream and liberal media offered little defense, fearful of seeming pro-Iranian. Sheldon Adelson, the late billionaire GOP megadonor, faced no censure when he casually suggested the U.S. should threaten to nuke Iran.  His widow has faced more censure for her role in trading Luka Doncic!  

Then Barack Obama did the best and most courageous thing his presidency accomplished and negotiated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPCOA), informally the Iran nuclear deal. Immediately the JCPOA met furious opposition from the right—a crucial moment in the rise of Marco Rubio—as well as opposition from Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and tepid support, the sort intended to preserve hostility to Iran as a load-bearing plank of U.S. Mideast policy, from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. That bipartisan opposition to a deal that would have verifiably ended the nuclear threat—a deal the United States desperately wishes was still on the table today—seeded the bed for Trump to violate the deal in 2018. Trump did that, and he deserves the historical blame for doing it. But he did not get there on his own. 

All this opposition to the most farsighted U.S. diplomatic effort of the 21st century was not about getting a fantastical "better deal," which is how resistance to the JPCOA was framed by warmongering charlatans like Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Such resistance was about cutting off any option that could deescalate U.S.-Iran hostilities and prevent the war he and his ilk longed for. 

You could also perhaps add to this the absolute refusal across the U.S. political spectrum to process the unexpected joint force against ISIS that united U.S. airpower with a ground force comprised of Iran-sponsored Iraqis, many of whom fought the U.S. occupation. That could have been a pathway to deescalation. Instead, Trump, backed by CIA Director Gina Haspel, whom the national-security potentates of the #Resistance took a break from criticizing Trump to support, assassinated Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad and then threatened to blow up Iran's cultural sites. 

To this list you can add the Biden administration, which bowed to this longstanding bellicose consensus, operated more in line with Trump than Obama on Iran, and didn't resurrect the Iran deal. Biden became a willing accomplice of Israel in the genocide of Gaza and accompanying Israeli escalations against the Iran coalition regionally, particularly the assassinations of the Resistance Axis that produced the first-ever direct exchanges of fires between Iran and Israel. I wrote in March 2024 that the U.S. had to negotiate with Iran or the region would burn. Instead, the pro-Israel and anti-Iran coalition in both parties got a sense that this could be the moment to finally destroy the Islamic Republic, and sure enough, the region is burning. 

If Trump does something in the neighborhood of what he is threatening, there will be many with blood on their hands who will rush to declare Trump an aberration, that they certainly never intended for this to happen, that they had a wiser, tougher, more effective approach. Such protestations will deserve nothing but contempt. Only by reckoning with the decades-long ease with which elite politics (as opposed to popular politics) has embraced unrelenting hostility toward Iran and punished the meagerest of efforts to end that hostility can we even begin to shatter this cycle of horror. It is already too late for between 2000 and 3500 Iranians. May it not be too late for the rest. 

I want to end with this, from A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy. Several years ago it occurred to me that since 1979 the United States has lost whatever sense of the long and rich civilizational history of Iran it possessed before the Islamic Revolution. I certainly consider myself ignorant of the bequests to human history made by one of the world's truly great civilizations:

The first such mention [of the Medes and the Persians] is in an Assyrian record of 836 BC – an account of an extended military campaign by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III and several of his successors that was waged in the Zagros mountains and as far east as Mount Demavand… The accounts they left behind listed the Medes and Persians as tributaries… Within a century or so, however, the Medes and Persians were fighting back, attacking Assyrian territories.

But we can go farther back still, to the earlier inhabitants of the land. Much farther back. 

[B]y 5000 BC agricultural settlements were flourishing in and around the Zagros mountains – the area to the east of the great Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia. Excavation of one of these settlements, at Hajji Firoz Tepe, has produced the remains of the world's oldest-known wine jar, complete with grape residue and traces of resin that were used as a flavoring and a preservative, indicating that the wine would have tasted something like Greek retsina. Before and during the period of the Iranian migrations, an empire – the empire of Elam – flourished in the area that later became the provinces of Khuzestan and Fars, based in the cities of Susa and Anshan…. Elamite influence spread beyond the area usually associated with its empire. An example of this is in Tepe Sialk, just south of modern Kashan, where a ziggurat – an ancient Mesoptamian temple– shows all the forms of an Elamite settlement. This ziggurat at Tepe Sialk has been dated to around 2900 BC.

This is what the United States of America, at the behest of by Trump but not by Trump's hands alone, is threatening. May none of it come to pass. 

HEY, IT’S SAM stopping by briefly to say that if you need some counterprogramming today I’ve published a piece I worked on for quite a while at the New York Times Book Review. It's about a child soldier for Mussolini who became a prisoner of war and grew up to be one of the greatest cartoonists to ever live. His name was Hugo Pratt. I focused on his early life, when he fell in love with Africa while his dad tried to defend the race for Mussolini.

In 1937, when Hugo was 10, Rolando moved the family to Ethiopia to take a job in the Italian office of labor production, which administered the regime’s forced labor camps. As Italy began to lose its hold on the country, Rolando joined the Italian Army on the front lines and forced Hugo, a gregarious boy who preferred to read comics and draw, to join the motley, polyglot Italian African Police (P.A.I.) in 1941.

A photo of father and son in Pratt’s memoir, “Avant Corto,” shows the jut-jawed Rolando in parade dress standing at attention behind Hugo and gazing heroically into the middle distance. Hugo, swimming in a gigantic P.A.I. uniform and a frankly hilarious pith helmet, stares mortified at the camera.

Hugo was only in Ethiopia as part of his family’s quest to acquire some of Mussolini’s promised glory, but instead he idolized the household servant, an older Ethiopian boy named Brahane who taught him Amharic. While his father read Mussolini’s magazine of racial purity, La Difesa Della Razza, Hugo and Brahane joked in a language Rolando refused to learn. After Italy fell to the Allies, Hugo polished his English while hanging out with Afrikaner pilots.

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