MUSCLE FOR BRAIN

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR >

  For reasons that are not mysterious
The weak are sent to the wall
They have reservations in heaven
Down here, they’re not so fashionable
Save me from the people who would save me from my sin
They got muscle for brains

– Gang of Four, “Muscle for Brains”

The Iran war is a war of choice. But that doesn’t tell us much, does it? All wars are wars of choice. The questions are: was it a necessary choice? Was it a good choice? Was it a rational choice? Were the consequences considered? Who made the choice and why? We still don’t know the answers to these questions.

The Iran war is a war of aggression, launched by two nuclear powers against a non-nuclear nation that has been weakened by years of economic sanctions, targeted assassinations, industrial sabotage and cyber-attacks. This is a war of aggression that was initiated during bad-faith negotiations by the US, where diplomacy was used as a cover for a looming bombardment. The gloating over the ease with which US and Israeli airstrikes decimated Iran’s leadership was appalling, given the circumstances under which it occurred. Wars of aggression are crimes. But who is left to enforce international laws? If you can get away with a genocide, as the US’s war partner has done, every conceivable atrocity is fair game. Israel turned Gaza into rubble and still the bombs fall.

What is the objective? To destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities? To kill the Ayatollah? To topple the Islamic Republic? To emasculate the Republican Guard? To de-industrialize Iran? To wreck the Iranian economy? To “liberate” Iranian women? To spark a revolution? Who knows. Probably not Donald Trump. He claims he’ll “feel it in his bones,” though surely he meant his bone spurs.

The US generals don’t seem to have much of an idea, even though nearly 40% of the US military is now zeroed in on Iran, burning through billions of dollars of weapons every week. If we take the bombastic Pete Hegseth at his word, it’s to “rain death and destruction” on Iran and Iranians without much, if any, discretion on who is being killed or what is being destroyed. That sounds about right to me.

The timid Democrats have criticized Trump for not having a “plan,” as if having a plan would legitimize his criminal war. But they do have a plan and the plan is maximum destruction. The plan is for a spectacle of bomb-blast light shows and mass death. One of the first kill shots was an attack on an Iranian girls’ school that murdered 200 people, including teachers and students. Helluva way to liberate women.

Trump tried to blame the girls’ school strike on the Iranians, saying they’d somehow acquired a US-made Tomahawk cruise missile. Even the Pentagon wouldn’t back up this murderous lie. The school was on the target list. Bad intelligence? Not if the intelligence came from the Israelis, as it likely did. As we know from Gaza, the Israelis targeted schools as if they were ballistic missile batteries.

US airstrikes destroyed Iran’s Russian-supplied air defenses within the first couple of days of the war. Since then, the US and the Israelis can bomb at will, the only risk being an F-35 encountering a little rain or wind that might send it into a tailspin.

Every bomb now is being dropped on a defenseless population. And every bomb from now on is likely to turn that population, even those violently opposed to the rule of the Mullahs, against the bombers. For a war waged by two hyper-nationalist countries, the attackers don’t seem to realize that nationalism cuts both ways, that each bombing of a school, hospital, mosque, factory, desalination plant, or historic site solidifies the bombed in support of their country. And this isn’t just any country: this is Iran, this Persia, this is one of the oldest, proudest and most sophisticated civilizations on the planet. It’s a nation with a long cultural memory and it won’t soon forget the day the US and Israeli missiles hit four oil refineries and the skies of Tehran rained Black Death over a city of 13 million people.

Pete Hegseth boasted that there “will be no quarter given.” What does that mean? It means prisoners of war will be killed. It means the injured will be killed or left to die. Hegseth is a creep, but his fustian outbursts provide clarity on the sadistic objectives of the war. “We have only just begun to hunt,” Hegseth crowed. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” Close the door, put out the light! Hegseth dismisses war crimes as an artifact of woke lawyers and seems eager to have the troops under his command commit every one on the books. No wonder he wanted to court-martial Sen. Mark Kelly for appearing in that video advising US troops to disobey illegal orders.

Trump has never spent much, if any, time considering the consequences of his decisions in business, sex or politics. In fact, he brags about going on his gut. But making a bad bet on a steak company, mail-in university (diploma mill), porn star or casino is one thing. Wrecking the global economy by dismissing the likelihood that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz if attacked reflects a kind of hubristic madness that makes Hitler’s decision to invade Russia seem sound by comparison. But Trump learned in business that the costlier his mistakes, the more likely he was to get bailed out. He’s rarely paid a personal price for any of his blunders. Now he’s in the position of begging countries and leaders that he has ritually humiliated and deprecated as part of his tiresome political schtick to come to his rescue and help calm the chaos his impulsive and criminal war has set in motion. He may well find he’s bombed himself into a crater this time so deep there’s no clear path out, no easy fix, no insurance policy to shield him against the political and economic shockwaves he has unleashed.

The blowback from this war will be intense and is likely to last for decades, assuming the planet has that many years left. The war has already spread across the Middle East to Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Yemen. The oil shock from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has jolted an already wobbly global economy. Soon, refugees will be pouring out of Iran and Lebanon. In choosing to go to war aligned only with Israel, the US will inherit its pariah status across the Muslim world and beyond. Trump doesn’t seem capable of learning lessons, but he may soon find out that it’s easier to impulsively choose to start a war of aggression than to decide when and on what terms the war ends.

COUNTERPUNCH