Supporting Trump on Iran is very stupid

I'm sorry, but it really is

What does it mean, exactly, to say “I support Trump’s attack on Iran”? As I wrote that, I didn’t even know how to characterize it, because Trump has vacillated on the purpose of the attack. Was it to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon, as was the original justification? Or was it to effect regime change, which Trump has hinted at both for and against?

Because the conflict appears to be escalating, as we certainly could have expected, maybe the assertion should be, “I support a war with Iran.” Even then, what’s the objective, to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon or to remove and replace the Islamic regime?

So, from that perspective alone, I disagree with everyone who is pronouncing their support. Simply put, and everything else aside, I don’t think anyone can say with any certainty what, exactly, they are supporting. But I don’t want to talk about everyone. I want to talk about a specific group, because their arguments are the ones that bother me the most.

There are many Objectivists who argue that we should have removed the Islamic regime, which is assuredly guilty of heinous crimes and which has no moral or legal right to exist, long ago. Therefore, they support this action today, at long last, deliberately and explicitly disregarding who would be carrying it out. They assert “Iran is evil and we have the right to destroy them” as an absolute.

This is precisely the kind of rationalism that I referred to in my last Substack article, where I communicated my discovery that, in fact, Objectivism is not my philosophy. By rationalism, I mean maintaining a floating abstraction, like the one directly above, that’s completely disconnected from the facts of reality. I said in my article that Objectivism seems to either produce such rationalism in people, or to bring it out. Either way, it’s gotten to the point where I’m withdrawing from direct contact with Objectivists because I find the trait so utterly infuriating.

Consider the argument they’re making. They want the Islamic regime removed and replaced with something better (presumably, because that’s not always mentioned; sometimes, it seems like merely destroying the regime is the goal, no matter the aftermath). They post eloquent arguments in defense of that position, referring to the many crimes the regime has committed since taking power in 1979. So Trump doing something is a good thing, they say, even if it’s Trump that’s doing it.

But I refer back to my introduction. What, exactly, is Trump doing? Those Objectivists can’t possibly know the answer to that question. Probably, nobody knows the answer outside of Trump and his inner circle. Maybe Israel’s Netanyahu knows. Hell, maybe Putin knows. Or, perhaps most likely, absolutely nobody knows, including Trump himself. There’s always the possibility that it’s just a ploy to distract people from his unconstitutional and wholly immoral mass deportation, or there’s some other reason that really has little to do with Iran itself.

And all that’s setting aside the fact that everyone who’s not simply evasive is well aware of the fact that you can’t believe a word that comes out of Trump’s mouth. He’s the most common subject of the old joke, “How do you know he’s lying? His mouth is moving.” And when people lie to you all the time, you really shouldn’t believe them when they say this one thing to you.

Therefore, all those eloquent arguments in support of what Trump is doing because it means finally doing something about Iran are… well… stupid. They’re stupid because the arguments are all about supporting something that may or may not be happening, that may or may not be the goal, and that in fact might be the opposite of what is, in fact, actually occurring or is actually the goal of the people who would be doing it.

The fact is, we’re talking about a President who just a couple of months ago stood up in front of the world and suggested that the Palestinian people should all be displaced, America should take over Gaza, and we should build a resort there. Netanyahu sat next to him, grinning, and as far as I know supported the idea, at least tacitly. Trump has also talked about taking Greenland from Denmark and forcing Canada to become the 51st state. Trump is a capricious imperialist, which seems like a very bad combination.

I mean, seriously. Trump posted this video on his Truth Social account:

Judging by that alone, any rational person has to seriously doubt his intentions in Iran, just like someone should doubt his intentions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in the Middle East in general. It’s easy enough to wonder if he wants to take over Iran to gain access to their oil reserves. Maybe he wants to slice up the country and reward his cronies who put him in power. Maybe he wants the real estate to build more resorts, like he’s doing elsewhere in the Middle East and in cahoots with the Saudis who might very well have been complicit in 9/11. Maybe he wants to turn Iran into American territory to give us a power base in the Middle East. Maybe he just wants people to worship his power.

To put it another way: who the fuck knows? But more important, the last thing any rational person should think is that Trump has any rational, legal, or moral reasons for doing what he’s doing. It’s almost inconceivable that what he actually wants to do is to remove a threat to American security and to bring about a democratic Iran, which would be necessary to accomplish the former.

After all, Trump is concurrently destroying democracy in America. He is demolishing the Constitution. He is violently rounding up brown people without regard for their individual rights, he’s disappearing people on the pretense of an “alien invasion” that — oh my god — isn’t actually happening. He’s pushing every legal boundary he can, and violating the law wherever he can get away with it. The idea that Trump wants to replace an authoritarian regime in Iran with something better, when he’s actively replacing something better in America with an authoritarian regime, is beyond ridiculous.

Again, it’s stupid.

I’m well aware of all the arguments about the evils of the Iranian regime. I’ve made those arguments myself, and I agree with them. Of course, that regime is evil. And of course, something should have been done about it. But it’s also worthwhile to remember why that regime exists in the first place.

People talk all the time about the starting point of 1979, because that’s when the Islamic revolution occurred in Iran and that’s when the regime came into power. It’s a meaningful date. But it’s not as if the regime appeared out of nowhere, and for no reason. Iran wasn’t exactly a democratic paradise in 1978, and then suddenly this new evil was spawned in 1979, out of thin air.

In fact, the revolution wasn’t as much for Islamic fundamentalism as it was against the Shah of Iran, a dictator who had brutalized various groups since 1953. That’s the year that the CIA restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power and essentially installed him as an anti-Soviet puppet to replace the monarch who had previously nationalized Iran’s oil industry. The US supported the Shah for the next 25 years or so, turning Iran into one of the region’s foremost military powers. Meanwhile, the Shah was pouring fuel on the fire of a rising Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Americanism, aligning various groups that might otherwise never have been allies with the singular goal of removing the Shah from power.

After the revolution, the Islamists killed their allies and imposed their totalitarian regime. They invaded the US embassy and took hostages, creating a crisis that would last through the Carter administration and into the first day of the Reagan administration. Who knows exactly how that came about, although the Iran-Contra affair might provide a hint. The Iranian regime benefited greatly from all of the military assets that the US had provided over the previous decades prior to 1979, and it was from that power base that it began its reign of terror against US interests and against Israel.

The point is that it was US foreign policy that contributed to the existence of the regime in the first place. It’s a bit facile to point at 1979 as the very beginning of a bad historical period when, in fact, that period had already begun years before. Again, I’m not trying to minimize how bad the Iranian regime has been and how much of an enemy they are today. I’m not excusing them, and I’m not even exactly blaming the US for its foreign policy that contributed to their emergence (although I could). I get it that many things were done during the Cold War that, perhaps, helped avoid a hot war that might have gone nuclear. And some of those were bad things.

My point is that this shit is complicated. Someone thought it was a good idea to put the Shah into power, to gain back our access to Iranian oil (maybe) and to give us a foothold in the Middle East, among other reasons. The fact that the Shah was himself an evil dictator was, to those people, entirely incidental or at best a necessary evil. At worst, it was a cynical ploy to gain power for some people on behalf of other people. And the end result was that a religious movement that may never otherwise have gained so much power was suddenly a major player.

These things have consequences. That should be obvious. So saying that today, “we” (and who’s “we,” exactly?) should support a dishonest, untrustworthy, malignantly narcissistic, authoritarian madman “removing” that regime — as if that’s what he’s even doing — without any idea of why or how, is completely and entirely irrational.

Consider also that, in fact, the Obama administration had cut a deal with Iran to put their nuclear program on hold. Starting in January 2016, the JCPOA agreement signed in 2015 had stopped Iran’s enrichment of uranium. I’m sure that agreement wasn’t perfect, and it would have ended in 2025 regardless, but for well over two years, Iran was at least at a standstill. If the goal was ever to stop their producing a nuclear weapon, that agreement was doing its job.

Then Trump killed that deal in 2018, almost certainly because he hated the idea that Obama had produced a deal that was working. Because, of course, that’s who Trump is as a malignant narcissist. He can’t stand the idea that someone else, particularly not a “leftist lunatic Marxist Democrat,” had done something positive for which Trump couldn’t take credit. Or, maybe Trump had even more nefarious reasons, and it’s hard to imagine he actually had good reasons when he almost never does. Who really knows?

And then about a year later, Iran started up again in enriching uranium, leading to our crisis today. Again, these things have consequences.

That also means two things. First, it’s Trump’s fault, if stopping Iran from having a nuclear weapon was ever anyone’s goal. And second, it proves that Iran was willing to respond to non-military pressure, that is, to diplomacy. So it’s simply not true that the only response was to bomb them — which likely hasn’t even done any good — and to inflame the Middle East at the same time that we have current or potential crises with Ukraine-Russia, Pakistan-India, China-Taiwan, and North Korea-South Korea. Or more that I’m not even thinking about. And all of them have the rather frightening possibility — which many of these same Objectivists recognize — that Trump himself might even be secretly allied with some of the worst people involved with them.

Such as Putin, and speaking of “THE BOSS,” here’s a Trump rant from today.

Right now, Iran is retaliating, and they’re threatening to close the Straight of Hormuz, which would paralyze the world’s oil supply. Who knows what else they’ll do, and who knows how Trump will respond. It was always stupid to think that we could effect real change by dropping some bombs — that’s another area where I’ve found Objectivists to be too often ignorant or naive, that we could ever effect meaningful change in a country like Iran without putting boots on the ground. You can do lots of damage to a nation of 92 million people by bombing them, and you can kill a bunch of its military personnel and its citizens, but you can’t do much long-term good that way.

This isn’t meant to be a geopolitical thesis, and I’ve actually only scratched the surface of my opposition to that floating abstraction I mentioned earlier. But my real point is that so many people know even less than I do, and they’re thinking even less about it. They’ve wanted Iran’s Islamic regime — or, who knows, just Iran itself — to be destroyed for so long that they’re willing to support these people doing it even when they can’t possibly know what those people are actually doing, what their goals actually are, or what they’ll do tomorrow.

And I’m sorry, but that really is just stupid.

UPDATE: Trump just posted this insane nonsense on his Truth Social account. Which, I think, pretty much reinforces my overall argument.

UPDATE 2: And now we have this remarkably rational, cogent, reality-based assessment of the conflict in the Middle East:

UPDATE 3: I’m going to keep feeding things in here as they strike me. Here’s Trump pushing yet another false narrative, that Iran’s nuclear program is completely destroyed and, he implies, can’t possibly be rebuilt. That’s incredibly ignorant, of course. But sure, it makes perfect sense to keep saying how this maybe could have been a good thing in some alternate reality that has nothing to do with actual reality.

UPDATE 4: Um, what? He destroyed “All Nuclear facilities & capability”? For real? Like, everywhere? Oh, right, just in Iran (supposedly).

UPDATE 5: The hits keep coming… Here’s Trump posting a jingoistic, bellicose video talking about turning Iran into a parking lot. Because, you know, he’s a really serious guy doing really serious things. Kill ‘em all, and let God sort ‘em out, I guess.