( edited transcript)
Amended transcript:
First, it’s good that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. He was the worst tyrant of the last half-century, anywhere in the world. That doesn’t justify this war, but let’s not forget all the blood on his hands.
Second, this war was predicated on a lie when Donald Trump said he was launching it because of an “imminent threat to Americans.” That was untrue. Recent intelligence that leaked showed that Iran would not have an ICBM that could hit the United States until 2035, at the earliest.
Another lie came last June, when Trump said that Iran’s nuclear capacity at Fordo and other sites had been, “obliterated by those strikes”, but he never produced any evidence of that. So clearly part of the motive for this most recent attack was to finish the job.
In the video where he’s wearing the USA golf hat (his hairdresser apparently had the day off), Trump told the Iranian people to rise up and take control of their own destiny. They’re noble and they’re courageous. But the people of Iran have no guns. In any society, power resides with those with a monopoly on violence. So the protesters cannot really rise up, and we will likely be stuck with the remnants of this terrible regime. Absent a military coup by moderate officers, there will not be any regime change.
The Ayatollah named three possible successors. One was killed, and the other two will presumably now duke it out, which is what usually happens in these situations. That’s a good thing, because it means that when they’re fighting each other for who’s going to get power, the rest of the world is less threatened. A chaotic power struggle inside the country—even civil war— might affect the rest of the world, but I doubt it. Recall the very long and bloody Iran-Iraq War in the Eighties. Our ironic but correct policy was to hope that both sides lost.
Is the U.S. at risk? Sure. But in the six years since a U.S. drone strike killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of the murderous Qud Forces, Iran hasn’t had a lot of success hitting soft targets. And they’re in no position to do so now. Retaliation directed at hard targets isn’t going much better for them. So far, they haven’t killed anyone in Israel, or very many in the Gulf States. Might they be conserving their missiles for later counter attacks? I doubt it. Thst’s not the kind of calibrated decision you make when the bombs are raining down. More likely, U.S. and Israeli drones in the next several days will take out a large number of their missile launchers, which have already lit up and betrayed their positions.
So where does that leave the Middle East?
The main takeaway in the region is that the State of Israel is now more secure than it has been at any time since its founding in 1948. For decades, Israel was surrounded by what was called a “ring of fire”. The country was threatened by Hezbollah from Lebanon, threatened by Hamas from Gaza, and threatened by Iran from over the horizon. Those threats have been eliminated, which will save many lives. But it’s not all a good thing because Israel has become quite arrogant. In any event, the Jewish state isn’t going anywhere, and people should get used to it.
So the anti-Zionist “from the river to the sea” crowd should give that up and move on to advocating for a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, not a non-Jewish one-state solution with an Arab majority, which will simply never happen. That’s the only way to get any justice for the Palestinian people.
As far as Iran’s role in the midterms and the next presidential election: Believe it or not, within a month or two, Iran may go on the back burner. That’s the pattern in the Trump Era. Then we’ll all focus again on the herpes of our politics, the story that never goes away: the Epstein case.
