I was going to write about the U.S.A. men’s hockey team’s and Kash Patel’s less than golden locker room moment – which to me was more about professionalism than politics – but then the United States and Israel attacked Iran, and all bets were off.
As has become clear in the handling of border control – which now embraces warehouses turned into detention camps – it’s less about what the Trump Administration wants to do than how it does it. No one wants illegal aliens who commit crimes. But no one wants people whose only crime is coming to and staying in this country illegally – and the American citizens who support them – to be arrested, incarcerated, brutalized and killed.
No one wants people to game the system with anchor babies. But if you go after birthright citizenship – enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) as a moral right – then who is actually a citizen of this country?
Now we come to Iran. As with Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, our previous go at regime change, no one is exactly weeping at the removal of dictators who torment their people. The Canadians support the Iranian attack. (And remember, it was the Canadians who helped us in the 1979-80 Iranian hostage crisis by hiding and smuggling out six American diplomats. I will never forget the billboard at the northern border with the Canadian flag in the upper-left hand corner and the American flag in the lower right and in between the words “Thanks, Canada.”)
The Iranian people are apparently ecstatic at the thought of regime change, even though they are taking the hit, as will American bases in the Middle East. The Israelis are, of course, anti-Iranian but then, so are most of the Arab states.
I also don’t buy the idea that Russia and China are going to rush to Iran’s defense. Did they rush to Venezuela’s? And speaking of Venezuela, how’s that going? Are the people better off? Are we drilling for the sludge that passes oil there?
Still, this might turn out to be a “win, win, win,” potentially for the Iranian people, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who needs a new conflict to stay in power post-Gaza and for President Donald J. Trump, who can now deflect and distract from the Epstein files story at a time when the narrative has headed to pages implicating Trump having been removed by the Department of Justice.
The Bulwark, an excellent conservative, anti-Trump podcast that nonetheless sometimes misses the mark, is having a hissy fit over America’s latest war, because we all remember that Trump campaigned on MAGA isolationism. But as a lame duck, Trump has realized that no president earns glory at home. It’s all about being the biggest player on the world stage, even though Trump has carved out the Western Hemisphere as the U.S.’ “sphere of influence.” And no president can resist the Middle East. Indeed, no leader has been able to resist the Middle East since Alexander the Great. I always have to laugh at those who chastise my expertise on Alexander. But it’s still his world and we’re just living in it.
Iran was part of the Persian Empire he conquered. He stayed there. Indeed, he died there, in Babylon (in modern-day Iraq) in 323 B.C., a month short of his 33rd birthday. He never went back to Macedon (in northern Greece). He never went home. The Persian Empire became his home.
That’s how you do regime change. You become the regime. You stay. Are we going to stay? Shed blood? Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan: We were there, like, forever. And forever ended – badly. Were the places better off, because we were there? What did we learn from them? What did we know going in?
We never understand the culture, the language or the people. We just assume that they’re like us, and they’re not. And 250 years ago, we fought a revolution to defeat an empire that treated us the way we have treated others.
We have a good relationship with Vietnam now, because of trade not because we fought a war that we lost in those jungles.
We had a nuclear treaty with Iran that enabled us to keep tabs on its nuclear operations. Eliminating Iran’s nuclear capability is the proximate cause of our latest war. Or at least that’s the Trump Administration’s storyline du jour.