The Moustache of Understanding Is Back Yet Again to Explain Yet Another Middle East War

Speaking of classic rock, did you know Neil Sedaka wrote a hit song in 1961 called “Stairway to Heaven?”

Fourth, we must not let this war to bring democracy and the rule of law to Iran distract us from the threats to democracy and the rule of law posed by Trump in America and by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Trump wants to promote those ideals in Tehran, even as his ICE agents operated for two months with limited regard for legal restraints in my home state of Minnesota and as he floats ideas about restricting who can vote in our next election. If the war in Iran enables Netanyahu to win the Israeli elections planned for this year, it will be a major propellant to his efforts to annex the West Bank, cripple the Israeli Supreme Court and make Israel an apartheid state, which would be a major blow to American interests in the region beyond Iran.

Does anybody remember laughter?

In the ur-Mind of our impossibly sclerotic superannuated elite pundits, American exceptionalism can never fail, it can only be failed. How else to explain the flagrantly preposterous belief that Donald Trump has any interest in bringing democracy and the rule of law to Tehran, given his disregard for those concepts in a city chock full of (white) Americans?

The bizarre thing is that Friedman is on some level aware that what he’s saying is nonsense — hence his allusion to Minneapolis — yet his addiction to the neoconservative project ultimately overrides all rational cognition, like an Oxy fiend desperately crushing his latest acquisitions from a West Virginia pill mill, even after waking up in a pool of his own vomit in a $49 hotel room.

Donald Trump is a demented narcissistic moron, and his grand plan for Little Tommy Friedman’s, Age Eight, Middle East RPG Fantasy is that there’s no plan, or rather there’s a different plan every other hour, which is functionally the same thing:

Trump is basically calling up every journalist in his phone to workshop different timelines and goals for his war. In the past two days:

@washingtonpost: the aim is “freedom for the people” of Iran

@axios: maybe we can “end it in two or three days” with a deal

@nytimes: might be “four to five weeks”, I have “three very good choices” who might take control in Iran

@abc: actually, nevermind, we killed those choices He doesn’t sound convinced by any of it. He’s throwing spaghetti at the wall. Ultimately I suspect he just wants to say he “solved” a problem that has vexed every American president since Jimmy Carter. But there’s no clear idea what that looks like and no plan for how to get there. And there are plenty of possible scenarios in which Trump declares victory and leaves the region with an absolute mess.

Of course that’s what’s going to happen.

If you read the replies to that Twitter post you’ll learn that Trump is actually a masterful negotiator, who is saying wildly contradictory things to the media as part of his masterful negotiation strategy, not because he’s a demented narcissistic moron, with no actual plan.

But it’s not just the Russian bot farms that are pumping that message out into cyberspace. The Tom Friedmans of the world are sociologically overdetermined to pretend, most especially to themselves, that something more sophisticated and less terrifying than a demented narcissistic moron starting a war with a country of nearly 100 million people, with no plan for what happens next, is the actual reality in which we live. And the ultimate impenetrability of that denial has played its own role in putting the rest of us in the middle of this mess.