There is No Truth in This
This is a case for mixed feelings. What good is a case for mixed feelings?
There is a time for everything. So, sayeth Qoheleth.
A time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build up.
Whether we like it or not, the killing season has arrived.
Who is so audacious, so righteous, so willing to wield power that should be reserved for God? It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it. What kind of man signs up for a paycheck to fly drones and snuff out lives as if he were playing a video game? A boy raised on Call of Duty and public school. What kind of man sits behind a crumb-covered desk and, with the stroke of a pen, sends men to kill, die, raze, and invade? One who must make grave decisions and owes campaign donors.
William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is hell.” And he was right, though I can’t remember if he said that before or after torching everything he could on his march to the sea.
Of the latest military adventure, enlightened commenters sit in their easy chairs and slap cheap bumper-sticker assessments on the Web for all the world to see. They baptize themselves in their own rectitude, having neither dodged a bullet in Fallujah nor watched a buddy’s legs get blown off by a roadside IED.
The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.
Nor have they had to live a life of conformity forced by zealots pretending to believe in a religion they never converted to. They never had to be beaten and raped for showing their hair, or singing an ancient song, or dancing an ancient dance. Cocksure critics have never been duty-bound to chant “Death to America” as a pledge of allegiance, even when they didn’t mean it.
Those with firm opinions care little about the terror syndicates who wait like invasive species, some having slithered through our open border sometime between 2021-2025. Will they strike while we sleep?
High on sanctimony, the opinionated sit at the children’s table of geopolitics, coloring inside the lines of moral discourse. They posture in cottony confines, breathing recirculated air—but cannot fathom the chaos and confusion that are war’s orphaned children.
There is no Truth in this.
It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.
Why can’t we just be angry and confused, and glad, and hopeful, and sad all at once?
Why can’t we shake our fists at a power that extracts from us routinely through taxation and debt to play its deadly games of Risk that enrich the war profiteers?
Why can’t we celebrate with the happy Iranians thronging the streets of LA, London, Paris, Washington, and especially, Tehran—free, if but for a moment, after forty-seven years?
Why don’t the Free, Free Palestine protestors chant Free, Free Iran? Hamas will lose a major source of funding. And why can’t feminists cheer for Iran’s liberated women? Toxic intersectionality is a dangerous drug.
Why can’t we grieve our long-dead Constitution yet hold out hope that the Iranians write one that holds?
Why were President Obama’s boosters quiet for every one of the record 90,000+ bombs their man dropped on the Middle East, but full-throated in their opposition to the bombs dropped before and after Hope and Change? Why are so many America Firsters suddenly capable of seeing 4-D chess against China, unless they think Israel and the Jews are behind everything?
If the US government is capable of 4-D chess, why have the past few interventions been so checkered? And why shouldn’t we worry that this will all go sideways, that they will have transformed a vast land—once controlled by wicked men—into a zone of destruction and destabilization—fought over by other wicked men?
What sort of courage and strength does it take to be neutral like the Swiss, instead of appeasers like Chamberlain, or imperialists like Caesar? Are our betters lawful and good enough to be the world’s constables? And if so, how many dictators will they depose before we realize they have become what they hate?
Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good.
Americans are still shell-shocked debt slaves, bitter from the decades-long adventures in the GWOT. Yet that won’t stop the world’s leading state-sponsor of the 4H club: the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Harakat al-Nujaba. And like Romans returning from the provinces, military victories will slake Americans’ bloodthirst and change opinion polls. Not all, but enough.
If there is a coherent casus belli, why can’t the administration make a coherent case? We want to know.
Why, we want to know, can’t we confront the fact that the Iranian government is a cancer that has metastasized?
Why, we want to know, should it all work out this time?
Why, we want to know, should the strong stand by while the vulnerable must endure the whims of evil men?
Why, we want to know, can we not repair our own beleaguered homeland, which is falling further into debt, disrepair, and disunity?
Why, we want to know, should the Administration be religious about the rule of law when the legislators have auctioned that very law to oligarchs, functionaries, and military contractors?
Why, we want to know, should we believe Steve Witkoff, who—having lied about his Epstein ties—says the Iranian delegation opened their negotiations claiming they had enough enriched uranium to make several nuclear warheads?
Why, we want to know, should we care that a duplicitous, millenarian doomsday cult makes threatening us its national motto?
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
“What is a sovereign state to an anarchist?” Christopher Cook wants to know—and rightly so. Then again, what is an anarchist to a sovereign state? A milk cow? A war horse? A tax return. A SS#? A draft card? A tit for another’s tat?
How does the oil of pragmatism mix with the water of principle? How does the ethics of war compare to the morality of mullahs? How does strategic shrewdness compare to dovish sentimentality? Does a non-interventionist wait until he’s sucker-punched? Does every problem in the world look like a target to an interventionist? Are 47 years of threats just idle talk or somebody else’s problem? Isn’t she old enough to remember the hostage crisis or the 241 killed in Lebanon? Or did she hear about what the CIA did back in ‘53?
All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad.
If you “bomb the shit out of them,” but don’t put boots on the ground, you might leave a vengeful, oppressive rump state. If you put boots on the ground, you might over-extend the military and risk sending young men home in body bags.
The United States government is a protection racket that has made far too many enemies around the world. The people of the United States need protection from enemies that their government has made around the world.
What a business model.
Forget about Azaleh and Roya and the rest of those cheering throngs singing the YMCA song and naming Tehran streets after Trump and Bebe. Taking out Maduro and taking out the Mullahs represent two ways to desanguinate China. Check, CCP. (USA! USA!)
Oops, a China with less oil is a weaker military power but also a weaker manufacturing partner. Most of the inputs for our military hardware and weapons systems depend on China for logistics, rare-earth minerals, and manufacturing. Would we rather face China, a muscular trading partner, or China, a caged, desperate animal?
This is the case for mixed feelings. What good is a case for mixed feelings?
The justification for war or non-war is a multi-layered stack:
Humanitarian—Will this help those poor people?
Popular—Do Americans support it? Can we afford more blood and treasure?
Legal-Institutional (internal)—Does this protect or destroy our freedom?
Legal-Institutional (external)—Will regime-change work this time?
Diplomatic—Are we alienating ourselves from our allies?
Financial—Cui bono? Quis decernit?
Military-industrial—Cui bono? Quis decernit?
Geostrategic—Will this isolate and weaken China?
National Defense and Security—Will this make us safer, short-term? Long?
If one cares to run down this as a kind of justificatory checklist, maybe the exercise will leave you as confused and uncertain about matters as I am. Like everybody else, I love to be right and righteous. But it’s easy to be right and righteous when you compare your ideal system to the one that exists.
“The only winning move is not to play,” said Joshua, the AI in WarGames, the same year a truck bomb hit the Marine barracks. So, I gave AI my justificatory checklist to offer its opinion on the matter:
Weighing these together, the case against escalating or prolonging the war outweighs the benefits.
In other words: same answer Joshua gave 43 years ago.
We can cling to our rectitude from the comfort of our easy chairs till we find final comfort in a coffin or an urn.
Qoheleth tells us that there is,
A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot
Trouble is, he never told us how to tell what time it is.
This is the first public commentary by a libertarian on this subject that comes close to being worthy of the nuances involved.
Most of what I've read from my fellow libertarians just repeats dogmatic talking points and uses cherry-picked evidence to support them.
I say this as a person who wrote most of an entire website criticizing Gulf War 2 before it happened, and nearly a dozen articles criticizing past U.S. interventions. I understand the libertarian case against foreign intervention quite well, and mostly agree with it. But the Iran situation has unique features that most libertarians are simply ignoring in favor of shop-worn articles of faith and tired old sound bites from yesteryear.
Thank you for giving us something that better matches the need, Max.
You nailed it. I despise politicians who treat war like a video game and the soldiers and civilians like cartoon pawns.
I am not naive about the bad actors in the world, who have no reason to negotiate except through bribery, blackmail, or force. And, then there is our country's hypocrisy and opportunism: Our support for totalitarianism when it suits our political (military bases in other countries) and economic goals (other people's natural resources, such as oil). Which means, at this point in history, that even the best of diplomats have a quagmire of past bad decisions to wade through.
And we will never know the full story of what is happening or why.