A War Too Logical to Explain

By Abe Greenwald

The term “hysterical amnesia” describes a condition in which a person deletes a memory to protect himself from psychological harm. In the U.S., the condition has been spreading since the start of Operation Epic Fury last Friday.

After 20-plus years of public speculation about how Israel, the U.S., or both would ultimately handle the threat emanating from the Iranian theocracy, many Americans are suddenly stumped as to why the U.S.-Israel coalition is trying to topple the regime. They just can’t figure it out.

It’s apparently traumatic to recall that the Islamic Republic has been the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism for decades. For those who haven’t blocked this out, the facts are so well-established that one can list them by rote. Iran has routinely vowed both “death to Israel” and “death to America,” killed thousands of Israelis and Americans (and many more Iranians), expanded its reach through multiple terrorist proxies and statelets throughout the region, sought to assassinate American officials (including Donald Trump), and worked assiduously to build and hide a nuclear weapons program.

And that’s just a partial list of sins. A plausible case for U.S.-led war against Iran could have been made at virtually any point in the 46 years since Khomeinists took 66 Americans hostage in 1979. Since then, we’ve never lacked a justification for wanting to topple the terrorist regime. To the contrary, the casus belli have only grown in number. What we did lack until now, however, was the will to act and sufficiently optimal circumstances for success.

Having obtained both, our decision to go to war should be easily explained and readily understood. Yet it is neither.

The amnesiacs are forgetting America’s case for war on Iran not because the regime’s crimes directly caused them trauma. They’re discarding it, rather, because what’s traumatic for them is to accept that Israel, the U.S., and Donald Trump are doing the right, moral, and necessary thing—after so many administrations allowed the threat to grow.

This problem, like most of our current maladies, manifests in different versions on the left and right. To many on the left, American action abroad is by definition criminal. So, too, are the existence of Israel and Trump’s exercise of presidential power. Only the enemies of the U.S. and the Jewish state are righteous in the use of deadly force.

A smaller contingent on the right shares the left’s hostility to Israel and sees any shared goals between it and the U.S. as the deceptive product of Jewish manipulation. Alliances in general are a zero-sum trap for an America that must always shoulder the burden. Indeed, these populist right-wingers have anathematized a whole range of concepts and terms that would otherwise explain Trump’s decision to strike. Preemptive war is immediately suspect and specifically unacceptable absent an imminent threat. American military intervention becomes morally tainted if a byproduct of its success is the protection or liberation of non-Americans. And regime change is the language of madmen and fools.

For years, Trump helped to promote these anti-historical attitudes. They now permeate different parts of MAGA to varying degrees. As a result, he and his administration are at a loss to explain what they clearly now understand: that strong alliances based on shared values are the guarantors of civilization, and that the U.S.-Israel alliance is the strongest of all; that it’s better to strike one’s enemies before they pose an imminent threat; that liberation from tyranny is a rare miracle that the United States alone can facilitate in foreign lands; and that, except in wars over land, regime change is the only way that wars end.  

Administration figures have instead offered thin, sometimes contradictory, justifications for Operation Epic Fury. These attempts at assuaging right-wing skeptics only stoke the populist suspicion that they’re being lied to. And they are, only not in the way they think. Trump isn’t protecting the secret agenda of an all-powerful cabal. He’s hiding the fact that he took his base for a wild ride only to return to the boring but valuable realities of establishment statecraft. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.