This Be Madness

The Iran War

I used to sit in meetings doing this stuff for a living. Around oak tables with muted lights, hashing out strategic and operational issues. What is the timing for an operation? What would be the consequences of acting with force? What would the allies think and do? What is the strategy for bringing them on board and how do we coordinate that?

What if the munitions are in the wrong place or in insufficient supply? If we do X, what will the adversary do or how will the situation evolve? How do we ensure we have enough funding in the right places to do it. How do we make the case for action to the American people; who should make the case? How do we ensure the Big 8 in Congress are on board – bring them in for a special briefing in advance?

Doing it, researching it, teaching it was my bread and butter for more than 45 years.

This is another thing altogether. The amateur hour. A shit show. Playing with the toys. They don’t seem to have thought of anything in advance.

The only planning was done by the uniforms with the toys. They’re good at planning, best planning in government. But they are like an unguided missile when they drive the whole exercise without a cross-agency strategy process. They just blunderbuss through, talk technology, and hope for the best. Let them play without policy guidance and you end up with Iraq, Afghanistan. All firepower, no strategy.

So how did this happen? It would appear that the ill-informed narcissist at the head of the regime just handed over the few remaining operational keys to American national security policy to the irridentist madman in Tel Aviv, whose objective for years has been to grow Israel, extend Israeli military dominance as widely as possible and terrify the countries in the region. Netanyahu appears to believe that only domination and force will ensure security for Israel.

Instead, he is guaranteeing Israel will be insecure for generations.

Trump bought the message. It was simple; he is easily flattered. Presumably encouraged by the Rasputin in the White House, Steve Miller, who believes the same as the Israeli Prime Minister:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

I will not do what the American media is trying to do here – find sense in nonsense; impose pseudo-rationality on a process and policy that lack rational basis. The media, especially those who write about national security pretend this is like other wars. That somebody knows what is going on; there is a real rationale somewhere they just haven’t revealed.

They must have been talking to the “allies.” Someone must have the explanation. People must have met and discussed what this plan was, how it should work, and what its goals are. So let’s keep digging until we find it.

Where are the brave reporters who will say the emperor has no clothes and cannot be stuffed back into a framework of presumed rationality.

It’s simple and unexplainable. Miller and Trump’s view of power has now become US national security policy. It is supported here at home by cults that see the flames in the Middle East as the Armageddon they are waiting for. In that mental universe, anything goes.

The minions in the White House and State Department now scurry about trying to rationalize madness. Trotting out every possible justification, contradictory or not. All invented out of whole cloth. Negotiations were working; they were failing. Missiles were ready to be launched on us, but they were not anywhere near the range to do that. An attack was immanent, but there was no evidence of it. We were eliminating a threat of nuclear weapons; the program we supposedly destroyed last year. We were talking to the government; well maybe not.

Only poetry can penetrate this inflammatory, irresponsible madness. In his first term, I wrote about what the White House must be like.

Au Secours

The prince rages and bellows

through the high ceilinged

rooms of his white palace,

desperate for genuflection.

Counselors cluster in frightened corners;

slipper-clad minions scurry frantically,

carrying folders, folios, purses, portfolios

paper empty of purpose

bulging with encomiums.

Ushers urgently open and close doors.

Sycophantic souls slip in and out

through the liminal opportunities,

disappear between the spaces

in the chinois lattice wallpaper.

The palace roof levitates in the gale;

the prince raises his tiny hands to the sky

pleading for one small moment

Of full control, domination.

The counselors turn their backs

and flee.

And the people? The ones who pay the price of war? A friend sent me just a day ago a poetic description of what it is like to be the mouse, huddling, waiting as the elephants do combat in their world of power. It was in Farsi, translated by a relative:

“Thick, heavy clouds of smoke rise to the sky from between the alleys and streets, and the terrifying roar of bombs shakes curtains and windows. In the sky beside those frightening iron birds, the beautiful birds of my country’s sky, with their small wings, fly back and forth in panic and confusion.

There, in my country, two wills stand facing one another:

On one side is a government that seems to have forgotten the language of compromise for years, both with its own people and with the world.
It has replaced dialogue with ideology and has preferred dogmatic, inflexible certainty over reason and the exchange of ideas.

On the other side stand powers that, although they call themselves defenders of order and security, history has shown that they place their own interests above any human consideration.

They, too, seek the elimination of a “threat,” not the salvation of the people.

And… in the midst of all this, what has never been—and is never—brought to the negotiating table is human life.
People who have had no role in designing this hostility, nor in sustaining it.

Children whose bodies and minds have become hostages to the self-absorbed battles of adults.

A land whose beauty, culture, art, and memories are paying the price for power struggles.

We seek justice—a simple and complex justice:
No to repression from within.
No to destruction and invasion from without.

We do not want to be victims of ideological stubbornness.
Nor do we want to become tools for the settling of scores between powers.

If we speak of justice,
justice is not delivered by bombs.
If we speak of security,
it does not emerge from the barrel of a gun.

What we ordinary human beings want is the right to live in peace.
The right to reform without destruction.
The right to change without our country turning to ashes.

Our country is not merely your geopolitical subject.
Our country is not a military map.
It is our home.
A home whose history, poetry, songs, mountains, cities, and memories do not deserve to become your battleground.

If you have a problem with the house’s inhabitants, do not set the house on fire.

We ask the world to distinguish between the people and the government.
We ask the government not to use the people as a shield for ideology.

Our voice may not be loud, but it is clear:
Do not destroy Iran between the two cliffs of your own existence.

Your language is the language of politics.
It is not the language of mothers who have lost their children.
It is not the language of terrified children.

They say history is made by strong wills, but it is the small and beautiful lives of the people of Iran that are being crushed beneath your strong will.

Our lives, and this land to which we are devoted, are not your chessboard.

I do not want to choose between bad and worse. I want to choose life over violence.

I want the world to learn that one can oppose a government without punishing its people—
not through indiscriminate sanctions, nor through war.

I do not know, in a world filled with the sounds of cannons and podiums, whether this voice too will be heard.”

I do not know how this will end, not even how it will proceed. Because it is not susceptible to the tools I used for 45 years. I refuse to bend those tools to try to make this rational.

So I turn, again, to the poets. The only real refuge. One of the great Persian poets, Jelaluddin Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) leaves us with this koan:

The Tent

Outside, the freezing desert night,

This other night inside grows warm, kindling.

Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.

We have a soft garden in here.

The continents blasted,

cities and little towns, everything

become a scorched, blackened ball.

The news we hear is full of grief for that future,

but the real news inside here

is there’s no news at all.

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There is nothing to learn from the news but stupidity, greed, and destruction right now. This story is about madness. For the moment, madness has won.