The underpants gnomes theory of war

Krugman states the obvious, the obviousity of which doesn’t make its continual statement any less necessary:

Any hopes that this war might be extremely brief are fading. The Trump administration may have imagined that decapitating the Iranian government would bring swift regime change, but the Islamic State isn’t a government of mere thugs — yes, they’re evil thugs, but they’re also serious religious fanatics facing what for them is an existential threat, and their grip on power isn’t that easy to break. Furthermore, it’s painfully obvious that Trump and co. had no plan beyond bombing Iran, killing its current leaders, and hoping that something good would happen.

This sounds like hyperbole because it’s so absurd and outrageous, but it’s not: That is actually the plan, or more properly, the “plan.”

Speaking of stating the obvious that needs to be stated, Ryan Cooper:

 As my colleague Harold Meyerson pointed out, California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom, a shameless political weather vane if ever there was one, is now calling Israel an apartheid state and suggesting its subsidies be cut off.

Frankly, it’s long overdue. . .

 Israel collects tens of billions of dollars in American subsidies, constantly meddles in American politics and steals American secrets, treats the trillion-dollar American military as its personal plaything, demands (and receives) free use of the American veto on the U.N. Security Council, so that it can contemptuously ignore U.N. resolutions to halt its illegal annexations of Palestinian land. In return, America gets … its international reputation severely tarnished by the resulting association.

Pick your foreign relations school of thought: hard-nosed realpolitik, liberal internationalism, socialist humanitarianism, or straight up brute selfishness; this “alliance” makes no sense.

From a perspective of protecting Jews, Israel is arguably doing more harm than good—particularly for American Jews, who constitute the largest Jewish population outside Israel itself. Israel and its apologists have for decades cynically leveraged the taboo against antisemitism to shut down any criticism of its behavior.  . . .

The world’s richest man is throwing Nazi salutes at a presidential inauguration. Nick Fuentes, who openly admires Hitler, is a rising star among American conservatives, and dined with Trump. Yet instead of focusing all their energy on confronting this threat, ostensibly pro-Jewish rights organizations like the Anti-Defamation League burned up their credibility defending Israel’s indefensible foreign policy. The ADL treated Elon Musk in particular with the softest of kid gloves. It’s obscene.

Israel is not only a major hindrance to American interests, but it is also overtly opposed to the best version of America: the “mother of exiles,” a beacon of freedom and universal human rights, and a haven for all the oppressed peoples of the world, Jews very much included.

It is a sad irony that Zionism, in its current form at least, has turned out to be quite similar to other ultranationalist projects around the world, from Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia to Action Française in France, that are almost invariably fervently antisemitic. But that’s obviously what Israel has become, and where it belongs: alongside other corrupt, violent ethnonationalist states like Russia or Hungary.

“Corrupt violent ethnonationalist state” is also the aspirational program of Trumpism for America, and that program has advanced a considerable distance already.