What the hell are we doing in Iran?

The US and Israel have launched "major military operations" in Iran, with no strategic clarity or stated rationale other than "regime change:"

The attack on Iran came hours after Trump said he was “not happy” about the latest negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme.

Both the US and Israel called for regime change in Iran and urged a popular uprising after Saturday’s attacks.

Trump called on the Iranian people to “take over your government” in a video on his Truth Social platform. He offered the Iranian military “immunity” should they surrender, or “certain death” if not, and told Iranians the “hour of your freedom is at hand”, urging them to rise up and “take over your government”.

By late morning the scale of Iran’s attacks across the Middle East was becoming clear, as its Revolutionary Guards commanders insisted there were no red lines and no targets off limits. Explosions heard in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait suggested Iran had activated its plan to try to hit as many US bases in the region as possible. Iran said warnings had been given to the Gulf states’ leaders explicitly in the past and that no one should be surprised by what was to come. The UAE and Kuwait closed their airspace.

Andrew Sullivan called bullshit on this operation before it began, postulating that the actual rationale for this geopolitical own-goal is that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu knows it's the last time the US will support him:

I listened to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Huckabee this week and was struck as much by Huckabee’s flailing as Tucker’s excesses. Huckabee came off as the Israeli ambassador to the US, not the other way round. He held assumptions that would sound insane to anyone under 40 not steeped in generations of bizarre, evangelical Israel-fetishism.

He had zero explanation, for example, for why he would host a vile American traitor, Jonathan Pollard, in the US embassy. I mean: WTF? Huckabee barely acknowledged the existence of Palestinians at all. And he basically argued that the Old Testament is the dispositive guide to US foreign policy, and that Israeli expansion as far as Iraq (!) remains a divine right the US affirms. Dangerous lunacy — but then you realize the opposition leader in Israel, Yair Lapid, agrees, and you begin to see the scale of the problem.

All of which leads to one obvious conclusion. The only reason we may be on the brink of war is because Netanyahu knows this could be his last chance to leverage the might of the United States for his own ends: unchallenged Israeli supremacy in the region alongside more aggressive ethnic cleansing at home.

This is, in other words, the last chance for the tail to wag the dog. Get ready for the fallout.

The governments of Israel and the United States are creating the conditions for the complete ostracism of Israel from the West. Combine that with vast numbers of people who hold Jews outside of Israel responsible for the country's government, which makes about as much sense as holding your local Catholic parishioners responsible for the Crusades. Michelle Goldberg, writing yesterday, lays out the problem:

By aligning Zionism with American authoritarianism, Israel’s champions earned the country the enmity of many Democratic partisans. The influential resistance podcaster Jennifer Welch is indicative. A wealthy interior designer from Oklahoma, she was once a Hillary Clinton-supporting Democrat who backed Israel without thinking much about it. But more recently, she told Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, she’s come to link the pro-Israel lobby with the forces destroying American democracy. “My husband always said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on in Israel and Palestine, but I just know every politician I hate supports Israel,” she said, using an obscenity.

Netanyahu and his government deserve this growing bipartisan opprobrium. Unfortunately, ordinary Jews are experiencing it as well. I’ve long argued that anti-Zionism and antisemitism aren’t the same thing. Yet as antisemitism rises in the United States, contempt for Israel sometimes gives way to anti-Jewish paranoia and hostility. Carlson doesn’t just disparage Israel; he also hosts white nationalists and Holocaust deniers. And just this week, Uygur’s “Young Turks" colleague Ana Kasparian indulged in an antisemitic outburst on X, writing, “The goyim are waking up. Deal with it.” (She used an obscenity I’m not allowed to repeat here.) Kasparian refused to apologize, insisting that she was merely deploring Israel, even though “goyim” is a Yiddish word for non-Jews, not non-Zionists.

No one is to blame for Kasparian’s bigotry but herself. But Israel, by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters.

And now, we've attacked yet another Muslim West Asian country. That's never gone badly before, has it?

Question for those who voted for the OAFPOTUS (even if you're lying to pollsters about it now): how's the "Peace President" who "stopped 86 wars in just three days" working out?