Why I Trust Trump on Iran

Let’s list the many ways.

There has been devastating radioactive fallout from Trump authorising US stealth bombers to deliver 30,000 pound bomb strikes on 3 Iranian nuclear facilities.

Just kidding.

The only radioactive fallout has been in the hysterical responses of the most ludicrous people in the West, whether that’s the Desperate For Attention Radical Left or the Desperate for Attention Radical Right.

You see, Trump is a military dictator steering us towards World War Three, scream the Radical Left.

You see, Trump is a Globalist neocon steering us towards World War Three, scream the Radical Right.

And both scream Trump is a a Zionist puppet.

Because you know, hating Jews is politically ecumenical. It’s the first dish of choice for any fuckwit who goes off the deep end, to mix my metaphors.

But of course it is true that it is possible to have reservations about the Iran strikes without being a Jew hater, a nut job, an online hack looking for clickbait, or a sufferer from TDS. Maybe 80% of the people criticising the Iran bombings fall into one of those categories or are Democrats serving in Congress, but it is possible to be genuinely and reasonably worried about the, for want of a better word, fallout.

After all we have gone through at least a 25 year period of disastrous military blunders. Many of the points which represent the beginnings of a Radical Right response to this action, for instance, have some justification.

Many of them are points I have made in relation to US and UK engagement in Ukraine.

It’s reasonable to worry about whether a military intervention escalates a conflict and makes it worse.

It’s reasonable to be aware of disastrous or pointless or obviously corrupt prior military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria.

It’s definitely reasonable to note that since World War Two the US, and other western nations following the US lead, have engaged in a very long series of wars, very few of which can show a positive outcome. The Cold War provided some overarching sense of meaning to many of these engagements up to the fall of the Soviet Union, and despite multiple dubious actions, the tenuous nature of a domino theory argument for opposing the Soviets, and a few actions that would later prove to be disastrous (such as funding and supplying people like Osama bin Laden when they were fighting the Soviets) the moral case for Cold War interventionism did at least rest on some fundamental truths-that the West on the whole was very much freer and morally better than the Communist nations of the Earth, and that the Soviets were a direct enemy continually acting against us.

Since then, though, US led interventionism and military action abroad has if anything increased. Cold War military agreements centred on NATO did not declare victory, pack up their toys, and go home. Instead NATO rushed to fill the East, increasingly in ways that squandered any chance of a lasting peace or new alliance with Russia. At the same time, a period as the sole superpower did not lessen US foreign policy wars but rather increased them, with the alleged moral duty to serve as the world’s policeman proving an even more bottomless commitment than acting as the leader of the Free World during the Cold War required.

I think one of the key errors in examination of this history is the assumption, now, that it was always just a Big Con, a thing we today label Neocon. Part of the reductive error of the Gnostic Right, the people who think they have discovered the secret cause of everything that a corrupt mainstream was hiding from us, is this belief that everything in the postwar context can be understood as a malign scheme. Having discovered the influence of something like the military industrial complex and correctly identified some instances of wars serving purely corrupt interests, it’s clear that some people will then err in the opposite direction and regard every poor choice as malign choice and every war or intervention as a moral crime. This ends up putting them in the same position, eventually, as radical leftists and Marxists who have also concluded that everything the West did and is…is evil.

Some of the most passionate opponents of Trump and Israel who are in the Gnostic and Pacifist Right sound word for word identical now with the Radical Left. Candace Owens sounds like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Tucker Carlson sounds like Owen Jones. Marjorie Taylor-Green may still get into cat fights with AOC, but her attitude to Israel is indistinguishable from the words of Ilhan Omar.

What they ignore is the context of the moment and the particularities of each case. They do this especially with Israel, but also with ‘War’ as a concept or in any policy context. And they do it in their understanding of history, which becomes reduced to a few fetishised positions that must always apply. Both the Radical Leftist and the Gnostic Rightist now agree that the history of the West is the history of corruption, greed, exploitation, hidden evils and profit based wars. Both see all history as conspiracy. This attitude ignores the reality that a thing can begin with noble intent, and end in squalid corruption. It ignores that a thing can change for the better or the worse. When I look at our history, and particularly our foreign intervention history over the 20th and 21st century, I do not see a tale of unremitting corruption and evil from start to finish. I see a process by which noble intent becomes corruption and self-interest over time.

I don’t believe it is accurate or fair to suppose that in 1945 everyone powerful in the West sat around a table and said ‘this is what we are going to do. We are going to have a fiat banking system that seriously distorts public policy. We are working for the banks. We are also going to have an international rules based order that gives us a cover for going to war, and we are going to war perpetually now because that makes money for the military contractors and funds a political class and lobby that serves them. We are going to build up obscene debt doing this, and every step if it is a deliberate plot. We are going to ruin or assassinate anyone who tries to stop this, and all parties are on board with this. We can use the Cold War first, and then we will have to invent new wars to fill the gap. We will also enforce the petrodollar and kill anyone who tries to take their country away from using the US dollar as their reserve currency’.

Of course so far as the banking system goes, the descriptions of malignancy go back further than that, encompassing events like abandoning the gold standard or establishing the Federal Reserve. That’s too much of an aside to go into and there are arguments for and against deliberate malignancy in that gradual transition. I’m not saying none of it was malign or even conspiratorial, I’m saying it’s a very big stretch to say that every economic and policy choice can be explained by the Grand Unifying Corruption (whatever that might be).

What I can definitely and accurately say is that many of these Gnostic arguments (everything we see in this political reality is controlled by a hidden Evil Demiurge, dig deep enough and you’ll discover His Name) lead to the oldest conspiracy theory of all, and far too frequently the Deep Dig turns up the Old Compost of antisemitism. Every time someone starts perceiving the wickedness of the mainstream, and particularly if they do so in the context of banking, finance, war and profit, they become susceptible to that most widespread of simple explanations that are false, which is that the Jews Did It. I think as an aside it’s impossible to understand modern reactions to Israel, Hamas and Iran without referencing that ancient Hidden Cause and the idea that all bad things are explicable as the malign schemes of the Wicked Jew.

I have said before, many times, why I don’t subscribe to that thinking, but to summarise: it’s factually inaccurate (Jews do well in professions or generally statistically because of positive educational memes and high IQ rather than because of malignant conspiracy), it’s morally disgusting (blaming an entire race encompasses blaming millions of innocents and the Holocaust gives us a record of the consequences of this particular racial hate theory) and because it excuses vast swathes of non Jews who are actually guilty of many of the things ascribed to Jewish Plot-including, for instance, every corrupt white or black banker, genuine conspirator, politician, leftist, Globalist and national traitor since time began who has ever backed an insane foreign policy or a corrupt economic one or an unnecessary war.

My own view is that there is an entropy to institutions, civilisations and organisations over time. I do not subscribe to the belief that the fall of any civilisation is inevitable or that each has a set and average time of greatness and a shelf life which inevitably expires at around the same time. It is more that over time all institutions and organisations fail and disappear or succeed and survive, but every survival, every crisis, requires transformation to continue (like an evolving creature) which can quite frequently transform the thing into its opposite. Human error and corruptibility plays its part in this process, and by the late stages there will be a malign version that acts in a conspiratorial fashion utterly against its original and usually still declared principles. Bureaucracies in particular are prone to this, and larger organisations are more vulnerable than small ones.

It’s not that there aren’t people who malignly plot evil and wicked things, it is that deliberate malice of this kind is most common in the later stages of organisational and civilisational development, just as cancers are more common in elderly bodies. Organisations have imperatives akin to those of living bodies. First they begin as a ‘loving moment’ or at least as an idea with a noble or practical, rational intent. Then they develop by growing, feeding, acquiring, extending themselves. Then they develop self interest by such growth, and start representing their own interests as much or more than they represent the aims they were made for. Loyalty no longer flows from the institution to the noble first aims or the general people it is raised over, but to itself, its own aims, and the people within it. If a Department of Education ever begins nobly, with the intent to improve education, it soon becomes a thing which exists to excuse, defend, fund and build itself and its remit, or the tool of professional educators who are themselves failing. If NATO begins as a purely defensive organisation with a sensible remit to protect western nations during the Cold War, it becomes something else entirely when the Cold War is over.

If an international set of laws is originally designed to prevent authoritarianism and defend democracy, it will eventually enact authoritarianism in the name of Our Democracy, doing so with the false validation of its prior efforts when it was less self blind, less hypocritical, and more justified.

After a time of course that organisation will be riddled with people who are enriching themselves, only concerned about their own perks and kickbacks and professional status, caning the expense account and promoting policies directly contrary to the original mission, demanding huge public spending essentially on them and the rest of their professional class, and fully and deliberately malign when interacting with anyone outside their institution in the society they share. But the stage of people deliberately doing wicked things comes after a period of sustained purely entropic decline. The organisation does its job badly before it starts doing the opposite of its job well.

When we look at things like the Deep State for instance we can acknowledge their reality and their malignancy without mistaking them for an omniscient force and without assuming ‘the Plot’ was laid out in detail from the beginning with those services never having a legitimate purpose or a non malign intent.

In other words, most Cold War interventions at least made some non malign sense. It was only when structures designed to fight the Cold War outlasted the Cold War that they become hideous at almost all times.

Thus while the Deep State is real, the MIC is real, while genuine conspiracies were enacted and astonishing levels of corruption created, and our own period has very much seen innumerable wars that were completely unnecessary, it is still false reasoning to, without examining the particular case, assume that every war is of this kind.

None of which detracts from acknowledging the history.

Afghanistan represented 20 years of boots on the ground and trillions in spending in order to end with 80 billion worth of US military tech and equipment in terrorist hands and the Taliban back in control of the country. The Iraq Wars removed Saddam on the basis of a lie and ended up with long years of anarchy and chaos in a ruined nation, hundreds of thousands of pointless civilian deaths, and no WMDs firmly proving the whole thing was completely pointless….save for the point of generating vast military and rebuilding contracts, of course.

In Afghanistan all we got was humiliation and a bill in lives and spending all the more grim and bleak because the same result would have occurred without us. Western intervention in Afghanistan is often described in comparison with the futility of the Vietnam War, or by reference to Afghanistan’s long history as the so-called Graveyard of Empires. But it might just as easily be compared, if a bit more flippantly, with Penny’s descriptions of the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark in The Big Bang Theory, when Penny points out to Leonard and his friends that everything would have played out in the exact same way had Indy stayed at home with his feet up.

In Syria, our interventionism played out a contest with Russia which we ultimately ‘won’ with a regime change from the dictator Assad to the ‘former’ ISIS terrorist Ahmed Al-Sharaa and an immediate mass slaughter of Christians, Alawites and Druze that the religiously rather moderate (in Islamic terms) Assad had protected. In Libya, the toppling of Gaddafi saw chaos and anarchy on the same model as the fate of Iraq after Saddam’s fall, and the full scale return of the ancient Arab practice of slave trading black people in the portions of Africa they control.

In Ukraine, which I strongly oppose supporting as I opposed all of the neocon Middle Eastern wars, our intervention has helped create and then very definitely extended a conflict that might have ended much sooner. In return for trillions in spending (much of which has been lost to western and Ukrainian corruption) we have increased the chances of nuclear world war while gaining nothing, unless we really did wish to gain (like Lindsay Graham) more Russian corpses. The Ukraine stalemate has not weakened Russia internationally or strengthened the West geopolitically. Our interventionism has had a reverse effect to any rational one that might explain it. It’s harmed the German economy more than the Russian one (Russia ultimately secured increased trade by being forced to pivot from the West to India and China-the current GDP growth for Germany is -0.27% i.e. contraction, for Britain a measly 0.34% growth that is effectively recession and for Russia a healthy 3.6% growth). It’s extended losses on both sides but would require much more engagement, much more dangerously, to secure a ‘Ukrainian’ victory, and geopolitically it has cost the West international prestige and influence since it exposes our failures as much as Russia’s while gifting Russia a maverick status as single-handedly defying the West which paradoxically supports Russian claims to being a Great Power, all while driving Russia into the arms of China and speeding the building of BRICS as an alternative power block.

All of the above, I hope, should illustrate that I am as against corrupt war, neocon war, pointless war and wars only serving the military industrial complex as any American isolationist is. But I’m not Anti-War or Anti-Intervention. Not only is pacifism ultimately redundant on a national as well as an individual level (leading inevitably to your harm if you refuse to defend yourself) but an Anti-War fetish can be very similar to saying that you are an Anti-Fascist or an Anti-Racist. Suffused with abstract moral certainty and the determination that you are good, you assist and excuse evil, perhaps enact the very thing you claim to be opposing. Anti-War thinking adopts a submissive posture that makes War more likely. Perhaps less intentionally and hypocritically than say a progressive self declared Anti Fascist uses fascist techniques, but with the same ultimate effect.

Once we discard the idea that ALL wars must be corrupt neocon wars, we go back to examining whether the Iranian intervention is justified on rational grounds acknowledging the particulars of this case. This is automatically a better approach than opposing it as a general unthinking rule. Now it’s possible that helping Israel destroy Iran’s nuclear programme matches neocon wars.

But I’m very, very confident Iran is something different. I’ll briefly summarise why:

• Trump’s Credentials

When asking oneself whether to believe an intervention is necessary, it matters who is telling us that it is necessary. A widely shared meme among those critical of the Iran bombings shows an image of Trump morphed into an image of President ‘Dubya’ Bush. The idea is that by this action Trump has betrayed America First and his war averse credentials and become exactly the same thing as George Bush.

This is an astonishingly stupid line to take. The general Anti-War fetishist seems to believe that one act of limited military intervention is the same as an entire war, which is not true, and that this one act erases 40 years of established trust and credentials on opposing unnecessary wars, which is also not true. Trump has been opposing unnecessary wars for 40 years. His record on that is second to none, which is why he negotiates with anyone, why he has tried to force peace talks on Ukraine and Russia, why he walked into North Korea alone in his first term, why he backed and created the Abraham Accords, why he managed to defeat ISIS without assigning fresh troops, why he led a successful drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan that both reduced US presence and was conducted without US casualties, why he opposed the Iraq Wars and why he has stated the US should never have engaged in the failed neocon wars throughout the Middle East.

Even where Trump uses military action he does so in a limited and precise manner, which is the manner in which the Iranian bombings (Midnight Hammer) were conducted. He declared no new wars in his first term. He still hasn’t. Obama delivered somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 bombs in his two terms as President, with over 20,000 bombs dropped in his final year. Trump ordered limited strikes against the Houthis and dropped precisely 6 bombs on Iranian nuclear programme sites. It’s quite clear that whenever Trump authorises military action he wants it to be decisive and brief. Part of Peace Through Strength is having enough capacity and competence to deliver knock out or game changing punches quickly, precisely in order to avoid long term engagements and quagmire wars. Nor can you obtain Peace Through Strength by refusing to ever display the Strength.

There is nothing so far that would ever indicate to a fair observer that Trump wants a long term, boots on ground Iranian War, and nothing either to suggest so far that this is what will inevitably result from bombing the Iranian nuclear sites.

Trump’s long established credentials and favoured military approaches all support trusting him in ways George W. Bush and Tony Blair could not be trusted, as do his efforts at dialogue in every instance before military actions are ordered. The idea that a man who has always opposed the corrupt wars of the military industrial complex, and who was hated and distrusted enough on that basis to prompt continual attacks lasting years from those funded by military contractors, suddenly in his second term abandons those 40 year old principles out of corruption, is absurd.

• The Urgency of the Threat

When calculating whether a military intervention is necessary, surely the scale of the threat from not acting is as important a factor to consider as the risk from action. In the case of the Iranian nuclear programme the risk of not acting is both extreme and immediate. Every US President has at least publicly and verbally agreed that the policy of the United States is to prevent Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, even Obama who actively helped Iran and pursued a policy of Iranian appeasement publicly stated that the purpose of the various bribes and absurd concessions to Iran were to prevent the Iranian nuclear programme-whether this was sincere depends on how much you consider Obama a Marxist traitor. Nevertheless, the reason even Obama had to state public opposition to the Iranians having nuclear weapons is that it is self evidently a bad thing for an extremist Islamic theocratic regime which believes in jihad, martyrdom and supporting terrorism to possess nuclear weapons. The logical assessment is that a regime of Iran’s nature is likely to use those weapons.

Even Pakistan, a nation with fundamentalist Islam and savage backwardness common in its populace, has a leadership more restrained and rational than the Iranian leadership. Pakistan recently de-escalated against India after Trump brokered negotiation, despite that conflict being longer lasting than Israeli and Iranian opposition to each other. While it might well have been wise to prevent Pakistan acquiring nuclear weapons, that horse is long bolted. Iran has been more belligerent and much more a sponsor of terrorism abroad, even though terrorist bases have been common in Pakistan too. Therefore even by the very low standards of Islamic regimes, Iran’s actions have confirmed a higher level of threat from them possessing nuclear weapons.

As far as whether that threat is real, there is also a qualitative difference in the evidence presented for it, outlined below.

• The Accuracy of the Target

When neocons took us to war in Iraq, they did so entirely unnecessarily and on false premises. The fact of the matter was that Iraq was not responsible for 9/11 and that Saddam’s capacity to threaten others was limited. Iraq did not possess WMDs. Iraq was not involved in the planning or execution of 9/11. The first Iraq War under Bush Snr was justified to some extent if one regards the US acting as the military enforcement arm of the UN as a legitimate thing (which is highly debatable and easily argued against). In that conflict it was true that Iraq had invaded a neighbouring country, and it was also true that response was relatively swift, successful and limited, expelling the Iraqis from Kuwait. But the war also seemed to give the Bush family a taste for action against Iraq, and both Bush Presidents a feeling that they should have pushed on after the first conflict and enacted a forcible regime change. 9/11 gave them and the MIC interests behind them an excuse to close that unfinished business.

The Second Iraq War was stunningly illegitimate. The evidence was weak and concocted and those doing that knew it was so. The 9/11 bombers were largely Saudis. The day after 9/11, Dubya was hosting Saudi representatives at the White House. In other words, those who might be considered more responsible for 9/11 were excused, and US military response was aimed first and foremost at a nation that had no involvement in the 9/11 attack. It was like responding to a punch by kicking a bystander.

With Iran, the target is clearly both guilty and a threat. Iran has been the primary sponsor of ME terrorism, even though it should be admitted that virtually everyone has had a hand in that game. The Qataris hosted Hamas, but have spent more money on subversion propaganda and asset accumulation in the West, a more subtle form of what might be called influence jihad. Iran was the direct main sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Houthi attacks on shipping were funded by Iran. The Iranian military complex also supplied the Houthi drones and missiles. Since the Revolution, Iran has directly or indirectly killed well over 1,000 Americans. This may seem a small number compared to a one day atrocity at the scale of 9/11, but represents decades of multiple seperate terrorist incidents (and is a fairly conservative estimate).

• The Quality of the Evidence

Again a contrast with Iraq is supportive of a greater necessity of engagement in Iran. In the case of Iraq, we were told that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. But what was the quality of evidence presented?

The evidence was extremely poor, and obviously so almost immediately. Weapons inspectors had access to Iraq with fewer limitations than applied to equivalent inspections in Iran. Obama agreed that all Iranian inspection sites would be given prior warning, that Iran could refuse inspections, and that Iran could veto who conducted the inspections. Eventually, he agreed that Iranian inspections were effectively administered by the Iranians, who were thereafter pretty much policing themselves. Western weapons inspections on Iraq were much stricter. Saddam had famously used gas and chemical weapons on his own people and both sides used these during the Iran-Iraq War, but the strict inspection regime and increasing US pressure after the First Iraq War put Saddam in a position that nobody (until now) applied to the Iranians.

Saddam’s regime was caught between needing to save face and appear as a serious threat to maintain status regionally and probably to maintain a sufficient degree of internal control too, while having to avoid weapons inspections discovering proof that could give a good excuse for a hostile US to attack again. While once helped by the West as a balance against Iran, from Kuwait onwards Iraq never had any significant western backers and certainly didn’t ever have a US administration as forgiving and indulgent towards it as Obama was with Iran. The Iraqi regime tried to dispose of any WMD or WMD adjacent stockpiles they possessed, while still vacillating somewhat and hinting now and then that they had capacities they had never possessed or, at the most damning, no longer possessed. This contradictory approach was supposed to mollify the West since no really serious threat could be found, but at the same time preserve some illusion of strength for the purposes of discouraging the regimes internal and local enemies.

The US though was genuinely looking for an excuse to attack, and found it in 9/11. Whether this was driven by a personal Bush family sense of mission or not, the US intelligence services and senior Pentagon figures shared Dubya’s eagerness to finish the job his father had started. This was a truly neocon war in that it was entirely unnecessary and based on lies that the key western players knew were lies.

Britain would be involved as heavily as the US. What little scrap of actual evidence was supplied, was invented by Britain. Weapons inspections more thorough than later Iranian one’s found no evidence of Iraqi WMDs. Dr David Kelly, the British scientist who was the most experienced Iraq weapons inspector, knew this. Two things happened in Britain that represented the height of neocon corruption. Having been informed by Bush that the US intended to attack Iraq and would like British support (filling its post WWII role as an ‘international approval’ rubber stamp more reliable than UN security measures) Blair set his key sofa cabinet special advisors the task of justifying both British and US military action. British intel privately confirmed the weapons inspectors and described WMDs as lacking evidence, but this was stiffened under government pressure to an assessment concluding WMDs were possible. Such possibilities were then filtered through Alastair Campbell’s spin-doctoring fingers, and adjusted to a declaration in the Commons by Blair that Iraq had WMDs it could load onto missiles that could reach British bases within 10-15 minutes.

Campbell and his small team of fellow conspirators scoured every intelligence report, weapons inspection, and even news reports they could to find every possibly, perhaps, maybe and could that might suggest corroboration of Iraqi WMDs. Even with that effort they ended up with little more to put in their dodgy dossier than old speculations, the bulk of which were then simply presented as if they were fresh certainties. The majority of the Second Iraq War dodgy dossier, which formed both the UK and US ‘evidence’ for war, came from a single old PhD student thesis. It was on the basis of how flimsy this evidence was, and how much pro war spin was put on statements in the Commons, that persuaded several Blair cabinet members to resign, notably Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary who was Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council at the time of his resignation. Dr David Kelly, the chief weapons inspector who knew that WMDs were a fiction, died by a very unlikely and mysterious suicide. Cook died two years after his resignation from a hypertensive heart condition while mountain walking, and seven questions regarding anomalies there were initially blocked from public release by the Scottish police.

All this contrasts strongly with evidence regarding the Iranian nuclear programme. In that case, rather than unknown locations, there are known specific sites, such as the 3 the US just bombed. Rather than vague assessments and possibilities cribbed from an old student thesis, or public statements crafted by spin doctors to maximise the case, the evidence that Iran was about to complete it’s nuclear missile quest comes from multiple known facts that nobody disputes. Even the Iranians and their allies the Russians agree that Iran had developed highly enriched uranium sufficient to create several bombs. Every major intelligence agency on the planet, both antagonistic towards and friendly towards Iran, confirms that the nuclear programme was real and had reached the stage of possessing all the ingredients needed to build and test nuclear weapons.

And instead of a weapons inspector saying the opposite who then mysteriously kills himself, we have the international nuclear body responsible for assessing this precise topic, the UN’s IAEA, confirming that Iran possesses 408.6kg of 60% enriched uranium, that is enough for 9 warheads and enriched to a level completely unnecessary for any purpose other than warheads. It’s true that the IAEA ludicrously hedged their bets, also stating there was no proof that this meant Iran was developing nuclear weapons, but one might question why anyone builds deep bunker secret nuclear installations and blocks inspections into even historic nuclear programmes they have declared closed while increasing their production of enriched uranium that can only be used for nuclear weapons by 50% and gathering all the other materials of a nuclear bomb….for no reason.

The quality of evidence for ‘Iran is building a bomb and could assemble one in very short order’ is of orders of magnitude more substantial than the Iraq dodgy dossier was.

• A Better Moral Argument

There is automatically a better moral argument for responding to aggression and threat rather than initiating it. This is what made the First Iraq War more legitimate than the Second Iraq War, even if it might well be argued that both were really none of our business. 9/11 would most definitely have justified an ACCURATE response, aimed at the detected and true origins of the 9/11 attack. Oct 7th most definitely justifies an Israeli response to Hamas and to Iran as the primary funders and backers of Hamas.

Those who are highly critical of both Israel and US support for Israel do so quite frequently on the basis of false moral arguments. For the most hysterical, whether Right or Left in political leaning, these arguments become vehement and focused enough to make an underlying hatred of Jews very obvious indeed, as is the case with an Ilhan Omar or a Candace Owens. When discussion turns to describing the Israelis as innately evil, bloodthirsty and wicked, that has zero evidential basis and is all Jew hatred.

When people talk about the Israeli bombing of Gaza as a genocide, that is an obscene lie. Despite all the propaganda saying the opposite, there is zero evidence thar the IDF target civilians. Actually, the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties is unusually low when Palestinian terrorists are counted as such rather than as innocent civilians. Most western fools who cite Palestinian death tolls do so by directly quoting Hamas supplied figures, which count every one of their terrorist fighters as innocent civilians and every self inflicted terrorist rocket misfire and friendly fire casualty as a casualty inflicted by the Israelis. Quite often those who believe Israel is guilty of genocide share and quote purely imaginary figures, like the 14,000 child deaths figure entirely invented as an projection estimate of starvation deaths when starvation wasn’t happening, by a single UN official who later had to admit that none of these deaths had occurred. Those intent on genocide do not supply 20,000 trucks of food to their intended starvation victims. Those looking to bomb civilians do not try to clear, create and defend evacuation routes for them. But those intent on high civilian casualty rates and genocide do fire thousands of rockets at Israel, do engage in bloody hands on civilian slaughters like Oct 7th and do prevent their own people, at gunpoint, from evacuating from targeted regions with terrorist bases. Palestinian terrorists use Palestinian civilians as human shields, place weapons caches and missile installations in schools, hospitals and residential districts, and then claim genocide when despite IDF warnings and Israeli prior notice and strict rules of engagement, these civilians are hit.

Part of the brilliance of the Israeli campaign has been how very precisely targeted their boldest attacks are. In the initial Iran strikes, senior Iranian commanders were eliminated in penthouse apartments, without any other casualties. In the pager attacks, nobody except confirmed members of terrorist groups were harmed. Similarly, the US Midnight Hammer raid targeted underground military bases precisely enough to drop two bombs in the exact same hole. The truth is that all of these operations have been the opposite of indiscriminate. They have been stunningly precise.

As for the US support for Israel, that too has moral justification. Iran sponsored an assasination attempt on Trump, as well as having over the years killed many Americans. Acting to eliminate a terrorist organisation that targets you is morally justified just like individual self defence is justified. Acting to prevent a murderous regime with REAL genocidal intent and ideology from acquiring nuclear missiles is morally equivalent to self defence too.

• The Limited Engagement

Hysterics having fainting fits over the action seem to have failed to notice how limited it was. As described above, a single raid dropping 6 bombs does not make a comparison with US administrations that dropped tens of thousands of bombs accurate in any way.

If a single bombing run becomes hundreds of bombing runs, or if air support becomes another 20 years of boots on the ground, then clearly the action failed and Trump did go on to betray his record of avoiding wars. But critics act as if Trump has already repeated the entirety of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, or that it is inevitable that he will do so. None of them provide any evidence at all that Trump wants a protracted war anywhere. They haven’t even provided proof that the Israelis want a protracted war. They simply treat any military action as unjustified and any limited strike as a fully intended, fully realised, fully neocon disaster.

The actual reality at this stage is that Iran lost control of its skies, Israel and the US attacked very successfully, and the entire geopolitical map in the Middle East has seen the elimination of a major network of terrorism and Iranian backed chaos. Israeli and US forces have delivered textbook military successes, making current levels of criticism absurdly inaccurate.

• Israeli Competence

If you are picking allies, pick competent ones. It’s my view that unless it is followed by some serious reversal or error yet to come, so far Israeli strategy has been inordinately successful and the conduct of the campaign to roll back Iranian influence and power has been flawless. 40 years of Iranian strategy has been reversed by two years of Israeli action. Israel has crippled its main tormentors. Of course that carries risks, but surely we should acknowledge the redrawing of the Middle East. Israel has done significant damage to the Iranian regime, and has Arab and Muslim nations scrambling to realign in a friendly fashion with Israel. By any reckoning this is success.

• Hidden Allies

As a consequence of that success, both Israeli and US standing is reaffirmed. Far from the absurd TACO label put on him by radical leftists, Trump has been assured, calm, stern and consistent. Nothing exorcises the ghost of 25 years of failed wars like highly competent displays of rediscovered strength and purpose.

The competence displayed by Israel has been matched by that of Trump and the Trump administration. The Middle East runs largely by a barbaric notion of law, by might makes right and by respect for unflinching strength. Far from alienating much of the surrounding Arab world, various Muslim nations had their own reasons to fear and mistrust an over mighty Iran that were more urgent and anxious for them than fear of a strong Israel or a forceful US is. The position of a superpower is a unique one. Its strength can often be hated….but never so much as its weakness. Under Globalism the West and the US present as weak, degenerate, confused bullies, as incompetent conquerors and declining but still insufferably arrogant powers. They make demands that the barbarian doesn’t understand, but also submit and make approaches in ways that earn his contempt.

Trump doesn’t make demands for the ME to adapt to his understanding, but does enforce easily and clearly understood boundaries. He quite literally went to the nations of the ME and said I won’t tell you who to worship, what to think, what’s good or evil. In your nation. That’s yours to determine. But present as a threat to me and my nation, that’s different. Then I have the right to swiftly, decisively, smack you down. This is the kind of combination of freedom and discipline otherwise alien cultures can easily comprehend and appreciate as a Strong Man’s honesty. It offers the right balance of respect and self confidence, far from the alternating fawning and ignorance of the Globalist.

The truth is that both the ME and the Far East likes Trump and the Trump administration. They see them as blunt and honest and strong, whereas other westerners are confusing, dishonest and weak. And they are pretty much correct in that assessment. What this delivers is hidden allies, a surprising facility from Trump and his administrations when following his direction to carve out major successes on the world stage and reverse western geopolitical decline. It is Europe and the UK, or nations like Canada, that become a mocked joke in the Middle East and Far East, not Trump (there are a few exceptions, places in the Far East dependent solely on European media for their understanding of US figures).

I do think there is a chance for strong Trumpist actions to make sustained periods of peace and alliance in surprising places more likely rather than less, whereas corrupt neocon wars only increased non Western hatred of the West and emboldened and hastened a geopolitical shift against it.

For all these reasons I judge Trump trustworthy on avoiding long term or fruitless wars, Israel justified in its actions, and all the better known critics of the Iranian strikes as either leaping to the most fearful conclusions without evidence or exposing themselves as long lasting Trump or Jew haters who only briefly disguised their true motivations.