War Aims

As the Israel-US conducts a ruthless, criminal war of aggression against the people of Iran, Peter Arnott attempts to clear the debris and see through the fog of war.

There’s a lot of talk on the radio this morning about “war aims.”  No one seems to really understand what’s going on, or, at least, be able to articulate it.  So, I thought I’d have a go, if you’ll forgive a dramatist’s perspective.

We have to start with biggest, loudest, wildest presence on the stage, which is, of course, the president. It is incredibly hard to take your eyes off him as he seems to lash out in every available direction all at once.  But if I were forced to write a short character sketch for a movie pitch, I’d probably say something like this.

Donald Trump is a person who has consciously divided the human world into consisting of enemies and suckers.  Enemies are people you destroy now, or as soon as possible later, and suckers are the people you use to destroy your enemies. (We already have anecdotal evidence from Arlington Cemetery that US Military Personnel fall into the category of “suckers.”)  The Islamic Revolutionary Regime in Iran cannot fall into the category of “suckers” since they actually seem to believe in stuff, however misguidedly, and hence are enemies.

So far so good.  But Trump is a very insecure man, and is anxious to the point of mania to have “friends.” (I suppose he includes this his own family members in this vanishingly small category of those he finds worthy of the honour.)

Unfortunately for him, the people he most wants to be his friends are people who are like him, or people who he aspires to be like. Tough guys.  Hard men.  Men for whom the world, once again, is divided into suckers and enemies. 

This is what makes him a sucker.  This is what makes him, the show-off con man into such an easy mark for those who know much better than him what the game is.

(The playwright David Mamet once memorably said of every poker game that somebody is always the victim – and if you don’t know who the victim is, then it’s you.)

This, of course, brings us to Benjamin Netanyahu, who informed the President this week that he had the intelligence to decapitate the Islamic Regime in Tehran, and that the Americans had better join in if they didn’t want to add themselves to the victim list. And Trump, yapping at the heels of the school bully, joined in with somebody else’s game.

Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, more or less confirmed this in one of the interviews I heard on the radio this morning.  Rubio himself is no mean poker player, it seems, having used Trump to weaken the Communist Regime in Cuba, in whose destruction Rubio actually believes.

Trump , by contrast, believes in nothing, except, perhaps, that people might want to be his friends.  I suspect he’ll find out very much to the contrary in the next year or two.  

Trump therefore, has no war aim. Just the personal goal of illusory friendship.  Oh, he might vaguely have the notion of regional hegemony somewhere in his noggin.  Remembering games of Risk, his might think his friend Putin is the hegemon of Europe, as Netanyahu is of the Middle East and he himself is of the Americas.  But, when it comes down to it, the reason that Trump has no aim is very simple.  This isn’t his war.

Netanyahu, by contrast, has wanted this war all his life.  He has always wanted America to join with him in attacking Iran. He has already achieved his war aim.  Whatever happens now, whether it comes to the building of new settlements in East Jerusalem, cancelling forever the possibility of a viable Palestinian State, or in the upcoming Knesset elections, Netanyahu has no war aims, because his aims have already been achieved. The sucker has already given him the one-sided carnage he wants in the depths of his dark, self-serving soul.

This then, accounts for the singular helplessness with which the once rational, once legal world is staring aghast into the future as a nigh bottomless pit of violence upon violence. The cruelty, and the violence, to paraphrase Adam Serwer, is the point. The universe is, therefore, as Joseph Goebells once articulated it, a region of force, doomed to destruction and savagery.

Unless we decide otherwise.  Unless we decide that we’d prefer it, if possible, that our civilisation, and all of the hypocrisies that go with it, survive.