Iran’s plight is a warning for Trump’s America
It’s The Atlantic that drew the right lessons from the Israel-Iran war, the one Donald Trump (a great historian and periodicist) has termed “the 12-day war”.
Iran’s predicament is a warning to the United States, the magazine said.
It’s a cautionary tale about a country 75 times the size of Israel but unable to counter it. It’s got to this point because many high-level Iranian functionaries are conspiracy theorists, seem to believe their own propaganda about their enemies and adhere to regime-sanctioned fantasies about Iran and Israel’s actual abilities. Iran’s predicament, The Atlantic noted, shows “what happens when loyalty to a ruling ideology – rather than capability – determines who runs a society, and when conspiracies, rather than reality, shape decision making”.
It’s true that Iran’s failures were stunning. Israel achieved air dominance over a country 1,500 miles away, eliminated the leadership of its military, air force, and intelligence agency, bombed its nuclear sites and other places and killed its civilians. Israel demonstrated enormous reach and intelligence penetration of the Iranian regime’s highest ranks.
The Atlantic exposed the long roots of this sudden withering of Iranian abilities. Back in the summer of 2018, during an Iranian drought, the head of Iran’s Civil Defence Organisation, Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali accused Israel of stealing Iran’s clouds and snow. “The changing climate in Iran is suspect,” he told a press conference. “Israel and another country in the region have joint teams which work to ensure clouds entering Iranian skies are unable to release rain.” Israel, he said, is responsible for “cloud and snow theft.”
The Brigadier General’s ridiculous conspiracy theories were a sign of a deeper malaise, the magazine said, which are also “beginning to manifest in democratic societies”, including the United States.
The disease is ideological fervour and incompetence.
US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is a vaccine sceptic. Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, believes Syria’s deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad did not use chemical weapons against his people in 2017 and 2018 even though there is extensive documentation on these. Thomas Fugate, the 22-year-old who is the interim director of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security, has no apparent experience in counterterrorism. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the Republican Congresswoman, who sits on the powerful House Oversight Committee, once speculated that the Rothschild banking dynasty was setting wildfires with a space laser.
The lessons of Iran’s failures loom large for the US.
As The Atlantic wrote, “when allegiance replaces proficiency as the primary qualification for advancement, and conspiracism replaces competency, disaster looms”.
