There is a strangeness to the way in which American pundits responded to Donald Trump’s genocidal threat (now deferred by a fortnight) to destroy Iran. This is apparent to everyone who isn’t American. “A whole civilization will die tonight”, the US president posted.
US leader writers were shocked. Who talks like that? Columnists reached back to the last American president who had killed lots of Muslims in West Asia, the wicked, stupid, but always decorous George W. Bush. Fareed Zakaria, that tireless apologist for American Empire, made the comparison in a conversation with Ezra Klein, published in The New York Times.
“If you watch or listen to George W. Bush when he is essentially losing the war in Iraq, what is striking is the difference. Bush, for all his flaws — and he made many, many mistakes in Iraq — always looked at it as an essentially idealistic, aspirational mission. We were trying to help the Iraqis. He never demeaned Islam. He always tried to see this as part of America’s great uplifting mission.”
Zakaria’s rehearsal of American exceptionalism, its essential benevolence, its selfless policing of the world and its tragic end at the hands of the vulgarian Trump, is not peculiar to him. Ezra Klein, his interlocutor (and arguably his successor as American journalism’s all-weather centrist), has more reservations than Zakaria about American virtue, but he is a true believer in the idea of America as an embodiment of liberalism and its values. And both are broadly representative of liberal punditry in the US and the West in general.
What is strange (and interesting) in their response to Trump’s vileness is its narcissism. We’re not like that, they say in chorus. George W. Bush might have killed tens of thousands of people on a false prospectus, but he preserved the decencies and said the right things. To the extent that Bush made ‘mistakes’, he made them in the service of bringing democracy to Iraq. Liberal angst about American wars is mainly about American trauma. You can see this in Hollywood’s films about Vietnam, even the unillusioned ones like Apocalypse Now. These films are seldom about the natives killed by these wars because their deaths are obscured either by the fog of war or the misty haze of American innocence.
This is only possible if your leader’s proclaimed intentions are good. Bush, in Zakaria’s grotesque take on the Iraq war, was just trying to help. That this veteran ventriloquist for American Empire should be able to say this unchallenged twenty years after the hideous mayhem of America’s Iraq war tells us how durable and useful this doctrine of good intentions is. It isn’t surprising that Klein didn’t call him out on this because Klein himself was a young cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq.
Trump’s willingness to own up to the central aim of modern warfare, namely, killing civilians and destroying habitat from a distance at such a rate that a demoralised and outmatched enemy surrenders, makes it hard for these liberals to reconcile hegemony with the Enlightenment values they tout so fluently. This is why they are nostalgic for Joe Biden’s doddering presidency, who, throughout Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, said all the right things. This allowed centrist liberals to bless America’s sponsorship of the war. Gideon Rachman, writing in the Financial Times in the first weeks of the war, endorsed the idea “… that the best chance of preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is to support Israel.”
The continuity and the contrast between the US-Israeli war in Gaza and the ongoing (or partially paused) US-Israeli war on Iran help explain the outrage being performed by liberal commentators in the Anglophone world. I don’t class progressive public figures and writers who have been consistent in their opposition to the rampaging of this violent twosome over the past two-and-a-half years as liberals.
The destruction of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran are episodes in a single war jointly prosecuted by Israel and the US. In Gaza, Biden was the indulgent quartermaster, supplying the money and munitions necessary to raze the Strip and holding a horrified world at bay as America’s murderous protégé prosecuted a genocide. It’s worth mentioning that this world didn’t include the governments of most Western countries, who, like the US, endorsed Gaza’s destruction as the inevitable if tragic consequence of a just war.
In retrospect, it is obvious that the Gaza war was a training run for US-Israeli assaults on Iran and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Complete military superiority, massive bombardment, the razing of cities, ethnic cleansing, a deliberate indifference to mass civilian deaths and a savage willingness to starve a population into submission were features of Israel’s Gaza war that liberal commentators and the US ignored till pictures of famine and starving children nudged them into their Bob Geldof moment.
The difference between Biden’s war on Gaza and Trump’s war on Iran was that after Gaza, the rhetorical devices that Israel and the US had used to justify mass civilian deaths — the seeding of democracy, the wickedness of terrorists, tragic collateral damage — were undone by the scale of the devastation and the body count. No nuance, no appeal to historical complexity could mitigate the evil of the genocide.
When Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu set the dogs of war running again in Iran and Lebanon, liberal pundits knew that they needed a short war that wouldn’t raise prices at the pump or tank stock markets. A war where another US president had been inveigled into conflict by Netanyahu would do nothing for the rules-based order that underwrote their intellectual existence. Zakaria, who, a mere nine months ago, had been lauding Netanyahu’s military genius at a conclave in Aspen is now counting the moral cost of Trump’s war in the pages of The New York Times. Zakaria’s annoyance at Trump’s transactional style is the embarrassment of a sarkari liberal used to servicing American power via the rhetoric of free trade, the free world and the furtherance of democracy.
What really infuriates this class of pundits is that Trump didn’t bother to make a high-minded case for attacking Iran or helping Israel destroy Lebanon. The pretence of liberating Iranians from their theocracy died a quick death and Trump’s perfunctory claim that Iranians wanted to be bombed into freedom made him seem ridiculous. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the prospect of a short war faded and once Trump explicitly threatened genocide, given Gaza, there was nowhere for even muscular liberals to go.
Trump’s unpredictability and Netanyahu’s impunity make it impossible to know if the fighting in Iran and Lebanon can be ended. What is certain is that Trump’s abandonment of rules-based pieties has stymied Beltway liberals, strange orchids rooted in the fungus of American exceptionalism.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
