America Second

forever wars, forever

Six weeks ago I wrote a piece called “Saturday Morning Glory” that opened as follows:

I went to bed Friday night expecting to wake up to news that the U.S. had attacked Iran. Why? Because the “unpredictable and erratic” Trump has proven, in some areas, to be as predictable as clockwork. The peace president only bombs nuclear facilities or kidnaps world leaders after Wall Street has closed. This is why his “operations” so often fall in the early hours of Saturday.

Take just the last year:

• US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facility – Sat., June 22, 2025

• Hawkeye strikes in Syria - Sat., Dec 19, 2025

• Venezuela bombings and the abduction of Maduro – Sat., Jan 3, 2026

After I posted, a prescient reader, Diomedes, commented:

You might have been early, but you still may not be wrong! it’s Jan 30 and military pressure is still building on the IRGC.”

Unfortunately, he was right. Add another Saturday morning glory to the list.

It sure feels like 2003 again. We’re back to regime-change wars in the Middle East. Back to the pretense of preemptive strikes (not that there’s much pretense anymore). Back to the myth of saving ourselves from a murderous regime bent on American destruction. Back to Fox News modeling Goebbels in its fearmongering and bloodlust while the legacy outlets like CNN, NYT, and MSNBC play cover despite their occasional handwringing.

Iraq is now Iran. Change a letter and start all over. Never mind the rubble and caskets of the last two decades. Never mind that the U.S. is weaker than it was at the turn of the century and that Iran is a far more formidable state, with harsher terrain, than Iraq ever was.

So buckle up. Time to go kill some A-rabs. I mean some Persians. Whatever. They’re both brown. Just keep tossing the red meat and pray we keep cheering on the bombers.

Sure, maybe a hundred elementary schoolgirls were blown up on day one. How unfortunate, right? Hundreds of young parents, weeping over the mangled bodies of their daughters. But, hey, “war is brutal,” right? Just shrug your shoulders, purse your lips and say, “Alas, war is a terrible thing.” Terrible but necessary, goes the subtext. And of course the most hardline supporters of attacking foreign lands are also usually the softest men, the armchair warriors, who urge on their young to fight across borders and overseas (well, not their young—their children get exemptions), the ones who’ve never seen combat, who live the cushiest lives, who stand most to benefit from the destruction of others.

Anyway, nuclear weapons, right? Iran is on the verge. Netanyahu told us so, repeatedly, in impeccable English.¹ The Iranians even, as he asserted unequivocally with no evidence, tried to assassinate Trump (twice!!). You’ve got to hand it to Bibi—the man is well versed. And well practiced. He has been standing up in front of U.S. Congress and the U.N. showing little pictures of loony tunes bombs and claiming Iran is on the verge of getting a nuclear bomb for decades now.²

Netanyahu in 2012 at the U.N. General Assembly alleging Iran is months away from getting the same nuclear bomb the Roadrunner dropped on Wiley Coyote

Never mind our own assessment last year when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified that Iran is not developing nukes (“I don’t care what she said,” came the response from Air Force One). Never mind that Trump campaigned on ending forever wars, blew up the Iran nuclear deal in his first term, then failed to renegotiate his “much better” golden deal because at the eleventh hour he suddenly decided civilian nuclear enrichment was intolerable.

Never mind that he backed Israel’s assault on Iran and then joined in on the destructive glory—part of his 5D chess strategy, like his big beautiful tariff chart, with import taxes for the penguin-rich Heard and McDonald Islands.

Never mind that there is one country in the Middle East that has made it known it does have a nuclear arsenal, that is not a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and that has the richest record in the region of expansionism, war-making, and territory seizure—and that country, believe it or not, is not Iran.

So it goes.

Nuclear weapons, right?

Wait—wasn’t Trump just crowing about how his big beautiful B-52s had demolished Iran’s nuclear capacity?

This isn’t about nukes. Nor ballistic missiles. Nor necessarily even regime change. It’s about breaking Iran—crippling it, fragmenting it, Syria-style, so the regional hegemon can roam unchallenged and maybe one day restore that Davidic Kingdom from the Nile to Euphrates. Forget the river to the sea. That’s child’s play. Think bigger. Think biblical.

Strip away the saccharine mythology our media paints about Israel and the U.S. as shining beacons of democracy and freedom, and you’re left with two competing explanations for the relationship between the two countries. The first is that Israel is America’s bulldog in the Middle East, indispensable to U.S. control over Mideast oil and regional projection of force. The second, which can veer conspiratorial in some of its extremer guises, has it that Zionism dictates American policy, even when it makes no cold-eyed geopolitical sense for the U.S.

The establishment has always preferred the first, because it sounds like strategy, not submission. But the needle, at least among public opinion, has been shifting toward the second, and it’s getting harder and harder to write that off to antisemitism.

Whatever the case, a round of applause to the war hawks and neocons. After so many years in the wilderness, they’re back. Another 90s band back on global tour, from Venezuela to Iran. Let’s get back to bloodshed and wreckage and shredded flesh—what fun! As Lindsey tweeted after the Israeli attacks in Natanz and Tehran last year:

So it goes.

Fortunately, Trump is surrounded by sane God-fearing men like Mike Huckabee, who last summer sent this private message to Trump, who in turn reposted it so we could marvel at its lunacy:

Down with the theocracy in Iran so that we can make way for The Rapture! Overthrow those apocalyptic death cult mullahs so that we can make way for the glory of the End Times!

So here we are. All this under the same president who campaigned against forever wars. Who tweeted in 2012 that Obama might attack Iran to distract from falling poll numbers.

Who claims he is America First despite a domestic and foreign policy that identifies as brazenly Israel First. Who railed against “Woke” while launching a fig-leaf pseudo-antisemitism campaign that makes the excesses of MeToo look milquetoast in comparison.

That same president is once again on his knees, going to work for a foreign nation.

Meanwhile, the latest polls before the attack had roughly three in four Americans opposed to striking Iran despite the usual propaganda blitz. So why is this popularity-obsessed president doing the unpopular thing? Why, with his base peeling away on this issue, is he pressing harder? Why launch “Operation Epic Fury”—a title as epically cringey in its bro-ness as its Secretary of Defense (who, in his defense, really is a Secretary of War)? Why serve up his biggest, steamiest pile of horseshit yet—and for an unparalleled huckster like Trump that’s a whopper of a megaturd—that he attacked Iran to defend Americans from an “imminent” threat.

Why?

A. Adelson and Co. campaign contributions?

B. The Lobby?

C. The Epstein files and their skeletons?

D. A Hail Mary in the face of plunging poll numbers?

E. Imperial hubris

E. All the above

Even these seem insufficient. Perhaps the reasons are more personal. More private. More intimate.

That’s right. Perhaps Netanyahu and Trump are lovers. Love, as Shakespeare noted, is a madness. It would also explain why Bibi made six visits to the White House in the past year, and why we almost never see Melania anymore.

Unlikely. But if true, there’s probably complicated BDSM involved. And we all know who’s the Top and who’s the Bottom.

1. His speeches in Hebrew, meanwhile, are for his domestic audience and more to the point of what he’s up to: Amalek.

2. Not that Netanyahu’s nuclear threat playbook is limited to Iran. In 2002 he testified before Congress that Saddam was working on nuclear weapons.