The Iran War: Power and Blowback

I just read that sixty girls died in a US or Israeli airstrike on a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran today, not counting those still buried under the rubble.

Who knows if the US/Israel intentionally bombed the school or if it was hit by accident. Maybe someone will claim it stood atop tunnels full of terrorists or an arms depot (the excuse for bombing nearly every school and hospital in Gaza), or that the Iranians blew it up themselves to generate sympathy. Maybe someone will explain that it is one of those unfortunate accidents of war, “collateral damage,” and therefore the fault ot the Iranian government for failing to capitulate to the United States. Probably, most Americans will hear nothing about it at all.

The political conversation in the weeks leading up to the war—in my country anyway—has mostly been about the consequences for ourselves: American troops dying, terrorist blowback, gas prices quadrupling, the war turning into a quagmire that drains American blood and treasure. All that might happen, but to argue on those terms implicitly grants the assumption that this is the conversation we should be having. It seems to say that if we could avoid all those consequences, then certainly we should proceed with the regime change.

What about the girls in the elementary school? What about the babies in the families of the Iranian leadership targeted for assassination? What happens when we affirm, through murder, our allegiance to the principle: “Do whatever is in your interests as long as you can get away with it”? What world do we thus declare into being? What prayer do those actions issue unto God?

Epstein and his cronies, and the whole world of human trafficking, operate on exactly that principle. “Do what is in your interests as long as you can get away with it.” Those horrified at the pedo-elite and the systems that protect them should be equally horrified at this geopolitical expression of the same thing. It is another version of the principle of total domination. It is another expression of the ignorance of a basic truth of nonseparation: that what we do to the other, we do also in some form to ourselves.

Even if the US can prevent violent retaliation through an impregnable missile defense system; even if it can quell terroristic blowback forever through an ironclad AI-powered regime of global surveillance, even if it can keep gas cheap by taking over the oil fields, the consequences will penetrate the fortress walls. Civil violence and domestic violence will mirror foreign violence. Suicide will mirror murder. Depression will mirror oppression. The deadening of inner life will mirror the extinguishing of life outside. Those who live safe behind walls are still living behind walls, slowly suffocating. Those who go numb in order to commit the evil deeds of war must live numb. They cannot escape the suffering they inflict on their victims.

I want to say that we are done with this. I have some reason to think so. The Iraq war of the early 2000s enjoyed a broad level of popular support, the result of a vigorous propaganda campaign to manufacture consent. That campaign could work only because the prevailing consciousness was receptive to it. This war is different. A small minority of the American public supports it. The Trump administration has launched the war anyway, without even trying to engineer the consent of the governed, in a display of naked power. Only the public’s habit of apathy and passivity allow the war to proceed.

I would like to think that the apathy will dissipate quickly when the consequences come home. However, those consequences may not be what people fear: terror attacks, military casualties, high gas prices. They may not be visibly connected to the war at all, but rather take the form of an accelerating erosion of social, family, and personal wellbeing. Therefore, we will have to source a peace movement from somewhere besides conventional pragmatism.

Ultimately, the source of peace consciousness is not fear of the bad things that will happen to ourselves if we harm others. The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible is built on love. When I love someone, my child say, I don’t think, “I hope he lives a long and happy life—so that he will support me in my old age.” I don’t think, “I hope he is happy—or people will think I’m a bad parent.” And if he is addicted or depressed, no one can console me by saying, “Just change your locks and block his number, it needn’t affect you.” I want his happiness for him, not for me. Yet, paradoxically, his happiness is my happiness. His pain is my pain. We are not separate. We are interconnected, inter-existent. Love is the felt realization of that truth.

My readers are aware that I was RFK Jr.’s speechwriter in his presidential campaign. I had a lot of influence from the outset of the campaign up through October 2023. In fact I wrote the initial campaign platform and slogans. The two that ignited the most enthusiasm were “Heal the divide” and “End the forever wars.” The $8 trillion squandered on regime change wars after 9/11 was a mainstay of the candidate’s stump speech. He spoke of all the things that $8 trillion could have funded. All true, but I thought there was something missing from that framing. When you speak to someone’s self-interest, you speak into reality the self-interested part of themselves. But human beings need more than that, they crave more than that. I wanted the candidate to speak more in terms of “Who do we want to be as a people? What do we want to bring to the world?”

Donald Trump, despite having campaigned on ending the regime-change wars, combines the worst of isolationism and imperialism in his foreign policy. He has capitulated to the Neocon warmongers who were so alarmed by his anti-war campaign rhetoric, and he has betrayed not just the MAHA faction who loved RFK Jr.’s pledge to end the forever wars, but also much of his own MAGA base who understand American “greatness” to be a matter of middle class prosperity and a functioning civic society, rather than that of a preening bully humiliating the weak. He has also destroyed the last vestiges of Constitutional separation of powers by (among other things) launching a war without Congressional approval—again, after campaigning to end the unconstitutional abuses of power (censorship, propaganda, weaponization of the DOJ and IRS, etc.) waged against him and his supporters after his first term. On the international level, he has destroyed the illusion of American moral leadership (probably a good thing, since the reality of American moral leadership was long defunct). More ominously, he has also destroyed the principle of diplomacy by using negotiation as a mere ruse to launch surprise attacks. And he has valorized the principle of “might makes right,” which again has always been the reality behind the facade of the neoliberal “rules-based order” (the US makes the rules, everyone else follows its orders), but in dropping the facade he precludes the formation of any other relational patterning besides dominance and submission.

The lack of public support for the Iran war and the voter enthusiasm for Kennedy’s “end the forever wars” campaign theme point to a possibility of an authentic and nationally transforming peace movement. By authentic, I mean that it doesn’t just argue from self-interest, but from compassion, from the understanding of a basic inseparability of self and other. By transforming, I mean that it remakes the entire country in its image.

I don’t know what that movement will look like. I don’t think it will take the form of protests and marches and riots that provoke a police response which is then leveraged to incite public sympathy. It will take a new and creative form. Perhaps it will spread invisibly, reaching its mycorrhizae into the halls of power and into the hearts of their inhabitants who, just like most of us outside them, want to be done with this. In fact I think it is already spreading. The war feels like the final throes of an old and dying story.

Up until now, American power was draped in idealism. It was about freedom, liberty, democracy. A peek behind the drapery always revealed other designs that have become increasingly obvious since WWII. Now the drapes have fallen completely to reveal the naked truth of power. When the true nature of power is exposed to our view (as is also happening with the Epstein files), we have an opportunity to know clearly what we are choosing. No longer can we pretend to be serving anything but power, if we support President Trump’s foreign wars.

Mark my words, there will be blowback from this war. It may not take the form of higher gas prices or terror attacks. It may simply be a deeper mirroring domestically of the harm waged abroad. Some are predicting tumultuous times this year and next. I tend to agree, but the tumult may be as much or more on the level of meaning, story, and identity than on the level of civil strife and economic turmoil. Wealth or luck may shield us from the latter, but from the former there is no escape.

It’s getting real, people. It always was, but now and increasingly henceforward, there will be no denying it. Normality is dissolving. Thank God. Who now shall we be?