Led by Psychopaths, Israel and the U.S. Are Waging a Psychotic War Against Iran
I wish to write my opinion about the war. No filters. It's important to do this because, heaven forbid, a missile will hit our rented apartment in Jaffa or the shelter in the assisted living facility next door where we run to during the incessant sirens. I'm using the free platform provided me by Haaretz, which has been under frontal assault by the government in recent years. It is also my right to make my civic voice heard in a democratic country (still, ostensibly).
I think that this is a psychotic war. One that Israel and the United States entered led by two psychopaths. Vainglorious, narcissistic, disconnected. They're up to their necks in political and legal trouble. They head the two most fundamentalist and anti-democratic governments in the history of their countries. And they have the chutzpah to preach democracy elsewhere.
America entered this war with a secretary of defense who prefers being called "secretary of war," an evangelist who goes to work smelling of alcohol, tattooed with crusader crosses associated with the far right, who was suspected of sexual harassment and came to his position as a commentator on the Fox News morning show. Israel entered it with the Defense Ministry headed by a Likud operative, Israel Katz, who has no security background or public influence beyond the Likud districts. The orders are executed by obedient technocratic general staffs, who are addicted to exercising unlimited power and have no strategic horizon.
At the moment, it's a deluxe war, based on bombing from an open air corridor high above, with almost no enemy antiaircraft or jets. Or bombing by American cruise missiles, which sometimes hit desalination plants or a girls school. The cannon fodder are Israelis and people in the Gulf states. Also the Iranian people, whom U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are encouraging to replace the ayatollahs' regime even as they are being savagely bombed and hit by black rain after oil depots were attacked. And one million Lebanese who were again ordered to evacuate their homes, or were simply unfortunate enough to live in Beirut. Everything is supposed to give rise to "changing the face of the Middle East for generations."
This is a war with no defined objectives or orderly plans, and if there are any, they're changed daily on Trump's whims and caprices. He, at least, talks to the media every day. Netanyahu has not appeared before the public or answered questions from (real) journalists since the beginning of the war, and is content with recorded videos and briefings by him and his eunuchs in the name of a "political official," or a "defense official" or "someone knowledgeable about the details".
We learn from them and from the reality seeping between the sirens that we moved from regime change to "creating conditions" and "creating cracks". We've moved from removing the nuclear weapons to "nuclear withdrawal". We've moved from destroying ballistic missiles to "damaging launch capabilities". And there's also been talk of eliminating Hezbollah, and severing its ties with Iran. They stand roughly where the total victory over Hamas and its overthrow stands.
A two-year war ended only in October. The body of the last hostage was returned only in January. Signs of normalcy appeared for a moment. The economy woke up, schools, the Euroleague and Eurocup, a little tourism. And then, in the shadow of Netanyahu's trial and a probe of his aides and the collapse of the government of shirkers and abandonment, the Iranian threat began to throb. The one we "destroyed for generations" last summer.
And again we're in the shelters and on "rescue flights". And Trump urges a pardon, and IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir is demanding "patience" and former generals Yaakov Amidror and Dedi Simchi are saying on Netanyahu's behalf that it's no big deal if we sit in a shelter until Passover, or until next Purim. And billions from the deficit are being funneled to the army, the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers, and soon we will get into the Lebanese mud. I have a name for this war: the roaring psychos.
[Uri Misgav is an Israeli journalist, publicist, lecturer, teacher and director. Currently a journalist in Israel, one of the leaders of the Black Flag protest and among the prominent opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.]