It is said that the first casualty of war is truth. Perhaps so. But consider the compensating benefit: the humor to be found in the frantic, self-infatuated verbiage that gushes in to coddle the lies and float the narrative.
The propaganda press has been working overtime since February 28, when Donald Trump determined to end the war that Iran started in 1979.
Many connoisseurs of political pathology have commented on the presence of aggravated Trump Derangement Syndrome in the coverage of the war. There is certainly no shortage of TDS in the fabrications that the media have been passing out about the war. But behind the unbridled hatred of Trump is the more abiding hatred of American and Israeli military prowess.
Where to start?
A few days ago, a protest in Philadelphia featured the applause line “For every US soldier who comes back in a casket, we cheer!” Then there are the many “expert” reports claiming that, appearances notwithstanding, America is actually losing the war. We have taken out Iran’s entire leadership, sunk nearly all of its navy, obliterated its air force, crushed its air defenses, exploded more than 90% of its stockpiles of missiles and drones, and leveled most of its war-making infrastructure.
Is The Economist magazine owned by Iran or some other opponent of America? I ask because its surreal, reality-free writing about the war has descended from the tendentious to the preposterous. Just a few days ago, they ran a cover story under the title “Advantage Iran.” “A month of bombing Iran has achieved nothing,” that once-sober publication whimpered. “Will Donald Trump escalate, or talk? For now, at least, the advantage lies with the Islamic Republic.” Really? Tell that to these chaps. Or maybe tell Alireza Tangsiri, head — rather, the late head — of Iran’s Navy. He was checked out just a couple of days ago.
If it were not that unbridled displays of insanity are inherently disturbing, such anti-Trump rhapsodies would be merely amusing. As it is, the element of pathetic mendacity renders them more contemptible than amusing. Consider “Why U.S. Victory in Iran Would Be Bad for Washington—and the World,” a recent column in Foreign Policy by Howard French, a professor at Columbia University. It is not often that one encounters such a confection of blinkered, ideologically driven nonsense. French begins by telling his readers that the political situation in the Untied States is not “normal.” He does not directly name the source of the putative abnormality, but it soon emerges that the primary cause of our discontents is — yes, you guessed it — Donald Trump. Things are so far out of whack, French says, that both the American public and world opinion “should simply not wish for a U.S. victory in the country’s 3-week-old war against Iran.”
Why is that? Why would you not wish America to win a war against the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, a misogynistic totalitarian death cult that for forty-seven years, ever since the installation of Khomeini’s lunatic Shia regime, has murdered hundreds if not thousands of Americans while avidly pursuing nuclear weapons and the extinction of Israel?
Instead of offering an argument, French offers a series of sentiments. We should not want victory in Iran because the United States and Israel are engaged in a “senseless war.” What makes it “senseless”? French says that “U.S. President Donald Trump himself has never given a remotely coherent vision of what a victory in Iran would consist of.” But from the very beginning, President Trump said that his aims in the war were to deny Iran the capacity to acquire nuclear weapons, to make it impossible for them to harry their neighbors with drones and ballistic missiles, to dismantle their network of support for terror exporting proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and finally to make it possible for the Iranian people to rise up and take back their country from the Mullahs. Those very specific goals define the “sense” of the war.
President Trump and his lieutenants have iterated those desiderata early and often. French faults President Trump for failing to have “sought authorization from Congress, as the U.S. Constitution calls for him to do.” Let me introduce Howard French to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which explicitly authorizes the president to deploy the military for 60 days without congressional approval.
But all this persiflage about process was really just what Kierkegaard called a “preliminary expectoration.” What really bothers Howard French are two things — or rather, two people: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. “The far bigger problem that underpins all of these realities,” French says, “is that the United States is governed by a malignant narcissist whose megalomaniacal tendencies have bloomed alarmingly before the world’s eyes during his second term in office.” Oh dear. The TDS is far advanced in this one. So is the NDS. Israel, he says, “has become addicted to permanent war as a substitute for politics and reason in its own region, and thereby empowering and emboldening another malignant politician, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Neither Trump nor Netanyahu is popular in the corridors of Columbia University or the pages of the propaganda press. Ask the Iranian people, though, or Americans uncorrupted by the clarity- and testosterone-sapping virus of elite opinion. French warns about “a future in which Washington has lost most of its other alliances” because of this war. But in fact new allies all over the Middle East are flocking to Washington’s banner. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are among the nations who have refused to consider a ceasefire until the Iranian regime is gone, and both are putting boots where their mouths are, so to speak, promising to send nearly 300,000 troops to join battle.
The single worst president in dealing with Iran was Barack Obama, who sent them billions in cash as a bribe but merely accelerated their nuclear program and enabled them to fund their terrorist proxies more lavishly. It should come as no surprise, then, that Howard French holds up Obama as the man whose policies could lead the way forward to “dialogue and mutual reassurances.” What a fool.
Howard French’s embarrassing column proceeds with, “An expert’s point of view on a current event.” His subhead tells us that “the possibility of Trump imposing his personal whims on another nation is even more frightening than U.S. failure.” Some wit on X had the perfect response. It, too, features the rubric, “An expert’s point of view on a current event.” But his subhead gives the game away: “Why SPQR Victory in Gaul Would Be Bad for Rome —and the World. The possibility of Caesar imposing his personal whims on another nation is even more frightening than Roman failure.” Touché.
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Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books.
