IN A week of confusion about the war on Iran, there was one great moment of moral clarity. It was delivered by the RC Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blase J. Cupich. More of that later.
There was more to the confusion than the fog of war. Incoherence is central to President Trump’s political style. One moment, soaring oil prices are a “small price to pay” for US-Israeli assaults on Iran. The next, he declares: “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.” His messaging swung constantly between deal-making and destruction.
In fact, President Trump must now choose between escalation and seeking a quick exit. His temperament, and political interests, suggest that he will — to the chagrin of the bellicose Benjamin Netanyahu — move to cut his losses.
Mr Trump had been looking for a quick win, as he had in Venezuela (9 January). (Iran and Venezuela between them own 31 per cent of the world’s oil reserves.) The attacks on Iran have burned through expensive US munitions at an alarming rate. Pentagon estimates suggest that $5.6 billion has been spent. The total bill could reach $65 billion — more if the war drags on over two months.
The political risks are obvious. Only 29 per cent of Americans approve of President Trump’s assaults. Mid-term elections are approaching in November, and an open-ended war in the Middle East is hardly a winning electoral strategy. Mr Trump must desire a deal to end the conflict before it becomes a political liability. He will then redefine the outcome — Ayatollah Khamenei dead and the armed forces destroyed — as the victory that he intended all along. All talk of regime change and surrender will be forgotten.
But events may not bend to this narrative. Western media suggest that the Iranian people are overwhelmingly opposed to the 40-year Islamic Republic. Yet the regime can still muster large rallies in its support. Despite the killing of senior commanders and heavy bombardment of infrastructure, there is still little evidence of fractures in the repressive institutions that sustain the theocracy.
Bombing a nation into submission may turn out to have bombed it into defiance. The regime’s election of the Ayatollah’s son as the new Supreme Leader is a direct rebuke to President Trump’s declaration that he would choose Iran’s next leader. It is hard to imagine that Mojtaba Khamenei — whose father, mother, wife, sister, daughter, and niece have been killed by the US and Israel — will now prove compliant with Mr Trump’s will.
This brings us to Cardinal Cupich. The Archbishop vehemently protested after the White House posted a video of scenes from popular action movies intercut with actual footage from its war on Iran and captioned it: “Justice the American way.”
“A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game — it’s sickening,” the Cardinal said. “Hundreds of people are dead, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, including scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school that day. Six U.S. soldiers have been killed. They are also dishonored by that social media post.”
War was not a video game. Prioritising entertainment over empathy, for the titillation of smartphone scrollers, risked robbing us, he said, of “the most precious gift God gave us: our humanity”.
