Here’s Whom to Trust with World War III Dawning

How blessed are we to live in a country with so many gifted geopolitical mavens? Islamic scholars, Persian historians, bushland tacticians, Jewish theologians, dispensationalist seers—who knew America was teeming with so many average citizens self-taught in the civilizational bloom irrigated by the Tigris and Euphrates? “There is, assuredly, no country on the face of this earth in which Shakespeare and the Bible are held in such high esteem as America,” remarked German traveler Karl Knortz. He mustn’t have noticed dogeared copies of Aeschylus’s The Persians enmeshed in the counterpanes of the generous Yankees who welcomed him into their guest rooms.

Israel’s ballistic strikes of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure have kicked off another Middle East bellum that threaten, among countless lives, such scary Beltway buzzwords like “geographic stability,” “sectarian conflict,” “global commerce,” “polar-power balances,” and, the phrase that sends a shiver down the spine of every joint chief of staff, “the American-lead rules-based international order.”

Maybe we should say a prayer for both the board members of Lockheed Martin and the brown-skinned infants wailing under crumbled concrete—both being equal in the green eyes of Lady Liberty.

The newest M.E. ruction is being documented by on-the-ground reporters risking their lives to give the world a glimpse at the objective state of play. Only the most war-scarred, knowledgeable, and scrupulous chroniclers are stationed in Tel Aviv and Tehran, who, in their recountings, are ensuring the most fastidious fact-checking paired with stone-sober analysis. These boffins of battlefield records are, despite reporting from the ashened, flame-flecked craters, are providing us low civilians with an Archimedean-point documentation of the combustive blow-for-blow.

Ha! Actually, most “debate” over the war is happening via hair-trigger takes on Twitter, front page of the internet. Debate is irony-quoted because precious little of the colloquy on Elon Musk’s message board can be seen as thoughtful, curious, good-faith argumentation based on mutually held principles. It’s more like pre-school free-play with instead of juiceboxes on offer, Celsius and SSRIs fuel the chatter.

Within this overconfident scrum, two contentions have emerged, each as emotionally invested as the other. And, because Twitter is ruthless dialectical bloodsport, neither is having a tipping-mind effect on the other party. Words are being shot like bullets, only to reflect off impregnable epistemological armor.

Those urging Trump to stay America’s hand, and rein in Israeli aggression, are invoking our sordid recent history. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a Republican is elected president promising a humble foreign policy that harkens all the way back to John Quincy Adam’s famous caution against questing “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Then, thanks to an unfortuitous mingling of circumstances, plus senior advisors itching to carve a spot for themselves on Wikipedia entries, the formerly prudent president decides to go full martial marching into the earth’s sandiest stretches in order to cast away blinkered, illiberal societies in favor of a capitalist vector that’s as Big Mac-munching, Coca-Cola-guzzling, Amazon.com-addicted as Arkansas.

Donald Trump, it’s alleged by these restrainers, is dangerously tracing the steps of his party predecessor, George W. Bush, who, exempting Fox News anchors, is regarded as the worst, most foolhardy American president of the past 100 years. Trump is violating his own America-First doctrine in acceding to Israel both missiling Iran nuclear-enrichment sites and assassinating its fissiling physicists as well as bigs of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

On the other side lie the unreconstructed neoconservatives who don’t see blunder and waste as the residual droppings of twenty-plus-years of our MidEast misconquest.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen—all irrelevant, all the blood long soaked into the sand admissible, because those lands of hodgepodge ethnic clans were all just stepping stones to spearing the big kahuna: the node from which Islamic puritanism is hymned, the Supreme Leader’s Iran. How can anyone say American nation-building has failed when real American nation-building has never been tried, e.g. kinetically warping Persia into shattered glass?

Donald Trump has stirred the pot by doing the swampiest thing possible: announcing a two-week wait-and-see period before deciding if the U.S. will save Israel’s kosher bacon by authorizing B-2 stealth bombers to drop a series of GBU-57s over the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, where the Iranians are allegedly developing split-atom arms. So rather than act decisively to ether a global threat, Trump played both professor and student, awarding himself an extension on his final term paper.

But it was all a feint. Trump gave the nod to incinerate three—count ’em, three—Iranian nuclear facilities. Was Congress consulted beforehand for its constitutional input? Nope! It was a Saturday night, so members were obviously out on the town, scrounging for campaign coin.

All the more fortuitous for the Twitterati: first gifted another fortnight to squabble over whether or not Uncle Sam will be the next Gavrilo Princip, then awarded a unilateral ordinance drop to chatter endlessly over the ramifications. It won’t just be blue ticks twittering past one another. Consider how many more cable news roundtables will devolve into viral emotive fracases. Somewhere, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Thompson are chinking flutes.

We no longer have until our nation’s birthday to find out if America will light off its own thermobaric firecrackers, if Raytheon’s stock will spike, and if Lindsey Graham will collapse in a giggle-fit like a drunken school girl. All three came early. As the sun set on the longest day of the year, a great cheer swelled from the swamp over “Mission Accomplished.” Surey, given our recent history, everything is looks likes blooming daisies going forward, right?

As we ponder potential retaliation from a defanged-but-undaunted regime, to whom should you read for considerate insight? Perhaps the all-caps slobber-rattling of uberhawk Mark Levin? The quick-wit gotchaism of intervention-skeptic Tucker Carlson? MAGAfluencers fretting that they’ll have to find a new foot to lick? Commentary and National Review writers cribbing one another’s lines on shoving a good ol’ American bunker-buster up the Ayatollah’s poop chute?

May I offer a suggestion? Listen to nobody, especially the zinging mugshots who think worldviews can be capped at 280 characters. That might, admittedly, be a cop-out. But as Don Draper reassured Roger Sterling when JFK was playing atomic chicken with the Soviets: “We don’t know what’s really going on. You know that.”

You didn’t have to “trust the plan” to accept that all the comments fired off into the digital ether didn’t make one iota of a difference to the isky strategy hatched up in a reinforced bolt hole deep below the Pentagon during what will prove to be a very fateful week.