As the Israelis and Iranians careen toward Armageddon, America deflects and cowers
The superpower of the "superpower" turns out to be not very powerful at all
In Deadpool and Wolverine, the current all-the-rage spoof on Superhero movies, one of the characters asks another: “What’s your superpower? Is it parallel parking?”
The jape could apply to the events of October 1.
With the anniversary of October 7 fast approaching, the very real version of World War III – not the metaphorical one that continues to color America’s overheated, hyperpartisan discourse – reached its inflection point.
At approximately 1 pm Eastern Daylight Time Iran launched a barrage of 180 missiles, some hypersonic, at Israel that will almost certainly prompt the Jewish state to retaliate, possibly in concert with the United States military, with direct attacks on the Persian homeland.
Just as I saw the news alert on the screen of my IPhone screen, I started a 45-minute drive to a scheduled engagement. I assumed I could pick up something on the radio about what was happening, especially National Public Radio (NPR).
But what I heard instead was crickets. Some PBS commentator spent the whole hour chattering nonchalantly with some academic author on their newly released history of the vice-presidency.
Finally, when the news came on at the top of hour, there was just a brief report about “lights blazing across the Israeli sky”, then the usual PBS coded partisan comments about the importance of the upcoming vice-presidential debate that evening.
That evening Margaret Brennan, one of the CBS moderators, did open the debate with a somewhat loaded question about how each administration would respond to Iran’s actions. They asked if the candidates would favor Israel launching a pre-emptive strike against the Islamic Republic.
J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, said essentially that because of the policies of the Biden-Harris administration Iran and other unnamed “bad guys” no one any longer feared the United States.
Democratic candidate Tim Walz talked in vague terms about the need for “leadership” and “consequences” for Iran, but later scolded Trump for being too aggressive on the world stage. Both candidates consistently dodged Brennan’s original question.
It seems the superpower of the world’s leading superpower is indeed “parallel parking”.
But that is not the fault of the candidates. To quote Shakespeare’s familiar line, the fault “is not in the stars, but in us”.
If either of the candidate had offered a serious and detailed answer, they would have probably lost at minimum the two percent of the electorate we call “swing voters” in those so-called “swing states” who will like some silly, screeching game show contestant on the verge of winning a trip to Hawaii decide this fateful Presidential election.
Of course, Vance did make the obvious point – unfortunately not so obvious to America’s not-so-intelligent intelligentsia - that it is the Israelis, not the White House, who ultimately will decide on whether to launch such a “pre-emptive strike”.
The war that will almost inevitably draw significant American blood is already on, and the Israelis are more ever than likely following the October 1 fusillade to strike stealthily and to strike hard.
Despite the ongoing and fulsome narrative in the American mainstream media that Netanyahu’s recent and calculated moves of escalation against Iran and its proxies is just one more desperate move to save his political skin, CNN of all sources reports that “a brutal campaign of airstrikes in Lebanon assassinations across the Middle East in recent weeks have buoyed the prime minister to heights unimaginable in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ attacks almost a year ago”.
Israelis know what they are up against, which is why they are rallying around Netanyahu, even though a sizable segment of the population despises him. The slogan “never again” has meant an unshakable “existential” commitment to averting a second Holocaust.
Many Americans, especially those with college degrees who should know the basic facts of history, don’t - or more importantly don’t care to know . Perhaps what is far more worse, they know and don’t care.
The Iranians and their proxies are as hellbent on destroying the Jews as Hitler was. They have from the very outset of the Islamic Republic in 1979.
Even before the Islamic Revolution that brought down the Shah in that year, its architect, icon, and motivating force Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was villifying “the Jews” for everything that was wrong today as well as yesterday.
“From the very beginning”, he opined in lectures to Iranian theological students, “the historical movement of Islam has had to contend with the Jews, for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems, and as you can see, this activity continues down to the present.”
In his collected writings Khomeini rails against “wretched Jews” in general as “agents of America, Britain, and other foreign powers” as well as “imperialism” overall.
Like both the Hamas Covenant (or “charter”), which defines its “resistance” as a “struggle against the Jews”, and the highly revealing speeches of its now deceased leader Hassan Nasrallah, the Khomeinist version of Shi’ite Islamist ideology obsesses with one of the hadiths (“sayings” or “traditions” about the prophet Muhammad) that runs: “The stones and trees will say O Moslems…there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”.
The obscure, but familiar hadith in the view of many late modern Muslims centers on the final apocalyptic battle when the Jews return to Palestine.
Following up on this flagrantly antisemitic passage to which other Muslims do not necessarily grant as much significance, Khomeini writes that “Islam is prepared to subordinate individuals to the collective interest of society and has rooted out numerous groups that were a source of corruption and harm to human society.”
For Khomeini, the Jews are public enemy number one.
The necessity of them, he argues, can be found in the actions of the prophet himself, who fought with and vanquished a local nomadic tribe of Jews. “Since the Jews of Bani Qurayza were a troublesome group,” he writes, “causing corruption in Muslim society and damaging Islam and the Islamic state, the Most Noble Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) eliminated them”.
Throughout his writings Khomeini sounds hardly any different from Hitler’s fetid rantings about the Jews in Mein Kampf.
One of the dirty little secrets that has been covered up systemically by the global foreign policy establishment in their unremitting palaver about Iran as a “rational actor” and the necessity of diplomacy as a brake against “escalation” in dealing with the Islamic Republic is their not-so—unwitting complicity in the ayatollahs’ project of genocide against the Jews.
Supreme leaders Khomeini and Khamenei don’t merely have similar sounding names. They are ideologically joined at the hip bone, and always have been.
Most Islamic and Iranian academic “specialists” are well aware of what is genuinely at stake in the ayatollahs’ “project”.
he fact that in the wake of the October 7 atrocities they not only immediately fell with full-dress attire in slimy writhing among the most obnoxious of the Iran-curated wingnuts throughout the US system of higher education is no mere blip on the historical radar screen.
If it were not for the decades-long campaign of intellectual seduction among certain progressive thought leaders by Iranian agents of influence throughout the halls of Ivy you would never have witnessed the toleration, and many case even the endorsement, of the kind of crude antisemitism experienced by Jewish students from both their peers and their professors last year.
As this essay receives its finishing touches and goes out on to the internet, momentum is building for what in Muslim eschatology is known, primarily from as Malhama Al Kubra, the great and final war.
The narrative cycle of this Islamic version of “Armageddon” envisions the conquest of Constantinople and probably dates back to the eighth century, but in contemporary Middle Eastern renderings is often interpreted as a bloody and brutal struggle between Islam and Europe of which American is merely its evil prosthesis. The Iranian emphasis is always on “the Jews” and the state of Israel.
The Iranians are convinced, as Vali Nasr writes in Foreign Policy, that Washington’s superpowers are no more than, figuratively speaking, “parallel parking”. The Biden administration’s hyperreactive strategy of pushing back against every hint of “escalation” strikes them as weakness.
In consequence, Iran believes, according to Nasr “that it is the only country in the Middle East that is willing to confront Israel head-on”.
Such a head-on collision may indeed be something that is not only imminent, but happening sooner than anyone can anticipate.