The first few days of Operation Keep Trumpanyahu Out Of Jail have cloaked the Middle East in the fog of war, making pronouncements and predictions unwise. Still, a few things seem to be becoming slightly clearer.
The first is that the people of Iran have been freed from a brutal and tyrannical government, and may well have been freed from all government entirely.
According to Donald Trump, the US had been sizing up some possible puppets to install, but he and Benjamin Netanyahu had accidentally killed them, telling ABC “it’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”
In other words, there is now a strong possibility that if the Israeli-US war effort goes as planned, the people of Iran will soon be freed not only from tyranny but also from things like running water, electricity and the chance of rebuilding a functioning country.
Second, given that Iran was in the middle of negotiations and had reportedly acceded to most of the US’s demands when it was attacked, it is now also clear that every country in the world needs a secret nuclear weapons programme, and pronto: American diplomacy might not be worth the paper it’s written on, but at least the Los Alamos gadget will always have your back.
Iran’s mistake, of course, was to have a weapons programme that was not only semi-secret but also semi-metaphysical, able to exist and not exist, or indeed to expand and compress spacetime, depending on who was looking at it and how they were polling at the time.
Last year, for example, having been Just Months From Having Nuclear Weapons™ since the 1980s, Iran had its ability to enrich uranium “completely and totally destroyed”, to quote Trump.
But in his state of the union address last week Trump revealed that Iran had once again started rebuilding its weapons programme, implying that it could rebound at an absolutely terrifying rate and ― wait, we have breaking news ― Iran had rebuilt and developed a nuclear arsenal since… Saturday?
Araghchi couldn’t have looked more flabbergasted than if a woman had made eye contact with him, because to be fair it was an astonishing question, implying that at least a few Americans believe far-flung US bases can stage first strikes on foreign countries but are not legitimate targets for retaliatory counterattacks.
Why, yes! Here’s CBS, recently bought by the ardently pro-Israel centibillionaire Ellison family, tweeting that Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes would feature an interview with the son of the deposed shah (Trump’s fourth place, perhaps?) discussing “what happens to Iran’s nuclear weapons”. Geez, I suppose you live and learn.
Still, before we get too anxious we should remind ourselves that US technology isn’t omnipotent. Yes, the Pentagon has just signed a deal with OpenAI to do what rival tech giant Anthropic refused to — potentially allow the US to build a vast surveillance network at home while also developing robots that select targets without needing a kill order from a human being — but let’s not forget that even though the US can find a mullah in his loo in Tehran, it still hasn’t developed the technology to find a paedophile in government.
There is also very little chance that the US media will make things any clearer in the coming weeks. Consider NBC’s interview on Sunday with Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, during which an American journalist asked him how, if building missiles that could reach the US was a self-avowed red line for Tehran, it could justify attacking US military bases in Gulf states.
Araghchi couldn’t have looked more flabbergasted than if a woman had made eye contact with him, because to be fair it was an astonishing question, implying that at least a few Americans believe far-flung US bases can stage first strikes on foreign countries but are not legitimate targets for retaliatory counterattacks.
If only Emperor Hirohito had had NBC to cover Pearl Harbour, earnestly asking FDR why he was responding with such unreasonable and frankly distasteful aggression.
Yes, it’s almost futile trying to peer through the smoke right now. So perhaps in conclusion, let’s take a step back and give the last word to the man for whom all of this is being done and whose prospects of avoiding a jail cell grow brighter with every exploding bomb.
Netanyahu has come in for a lot of stick in the past few years, what with overseeing the killing of tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza, but he spoke true this weekend as he insisted that this war would “lead to peace”.
He is absolutely right. For thousands of years, war has always led to peace and this one will be no different. And nor will the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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