The Iran War and the Anti-American Reflex
Here, there are smiles, falsely regretful sighs every time President Trump delivers one of those incoherent or absurd statements for which he is known. There, expressions of weary superiority, as though all this were inevitable, whenever an Iranian missile hits a hotel in Dubai or a Saudi oil installation.
Then, that idiotic and venomous refrain according to which the world’s leading military power no longer thinks for itself, no longer sovereignly decides its wars, and is manipulated, remote-controlled, “ventriloquized” by the demonic Israel. All of this was already written in the antisemitic pamphlets of the 1930s imagining nations led to ruin by an invisible, all-powerful, corrupting Jewish hand.
I watch these television generals and studio experts. I see how they seem electrified by every image of smoke rising over an emirate and every siren sounding on an American base. I sense how they are secretly disappointed when the infrastructure holds, the Gulf allies absorb the shock, the sailors of the U.S. Navy absorb the blows and don’t break.
There is an obscene joy in announcing America’s “fiasco” and Tehran’s unexpected “resistance.” There is, in the West and throughout the world, a powerful desire for defeat.
This unhealthy fascination with the idea of a humiliated America has very little to do either with Mr. Trump or with the good and healthy anti-Trumpism that I practice every time I denounce the wanderings, vulgarities, or violence of the 47th president of the United States.
Let us remember: The same jubilation existed when George W. Bush became bogged down in Iraq. The same malicious joy greeted Barack Obama’s retreat when he renounced striking Syria and capitulated before Bashar al-Assad. The same contemptuous irony targeted Joe Biden when he seemed incapable of intimidating Moscow at the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
It is always the same story. Presidents change; the contempt and hatred remain. It isn’t this or that occupant of the White House who is at issue, but America as a power and as an idea that people take pleasure in seeing falter, doubt itself, and lose its footing.
In short, it is the same obsessive, compulsive, Pavlovian anti-Americanism, whose origins people too often forget also lie in the France and Germany of the 1930s, and which almost always preferred authoritarian regimes to societies of noise, pluralism and civil discord.
Besides, who still speaks about the Iranian civilians? Who still cares about the women who marched bareheaded under gunfire in the streets of Tehran? Who is trying to get news of the Iranian youth who dream of putting an end to the mullahs and the immense theocratic prison?
No one. The Iranian people have disappeared from the screens. The new heroes—the only ones deemed worthy of attention—are the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, solely because they confront and defy America.
Where the blindness becomes astonishing is that the actual military situation isn’t the one being described to us with unhealthy delight. Of course, the ayatollahs are digging in their heels and refusing to negotiate. And of course missiles and drones are striking the allies of the Great and Little Satan.
But with what strategic result? A few deaths. Infrastructure hit and immediately repaired. Economies that continue functioning and states that endure. Nothing of that great regional upheaval greedily foretold by the prophets of Western decline.
Meanwhile, on the other side, what do we see? An Iranian command structure decapitated. Decision-making chains fractured and sometimes shattered. A ballistic missile and drone attack capability nowhere near what it once was. A nuclear program slowed for years. Stockpiles of enriched uranium whose question isn’t where they are hidden, but at what moment Washington will decide (or not) to seize them.
And a regime that a few months ago dreamed of ruling an empire stretching from Beirut to Sana’a, and now finds itself isolated, weakened and reduced to dragging the region into the suicidal logic of its coming downfall.
If the U.S. stopped the war today, it would already have achieved a large part of its objectives. There would remain the decisive question of regime change. But do tyrannies ever fall in a single day? Doesn’t history teach us that they crack slowly, gradually lose their grip, and see fear change sides before collapsing?
That is precisely what this intervention—with its shortcomings, its flaws, and its share of cynicism—will have begun to set in motion in Iran. Whatever anyone says, that is a victory.
Fantastic article
