Overcompensation

 Well, then. That happened faster than I expected—but roughly as I expected. Just hours ago, I wrote on this blog that there was no way Trump would be able resist the urge to drop a few bombs on Iran, now that the opportunity had presented itself. He is far too predictable in his masculine insecurities not to. 

After all, the media just devoted a whole week of coverage to the great big "bunker-buster" bombs that the United States is supposedly the only country to possess. Wall-to-wall commentary emphasized that only these great big bombs would be great big big enough to blow up the Iranian nuclear sites. 

Anyone who thinks Trump would be able to resist such a siren song does not understand him. Anyone who thinks he would be bothered by the obvious inconsistency between this action and his own campaign pledges and his ostensible "isolationist," "America First" ideology has not been paying attention. 

His psychology is far too simple for that. People need to think more in terms of Freud here than of Pat Buchanan. Harold Pinter's diagnosis of the true psychic nature of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq seems the only apt one here: "There's no escape. / The big pricks are out. / They'll fuck everything [....] Watch your back." 

In short, we are witnessing a massive exercise in overcompensation. 

I know that this is a vulgar way to analyze the situation. But we're dealing with a vulgar man. Trump's actions can be explained at no higher level. They are unworthy of any more serious analysis than that. He is a small, insecure man with a bottomless need for the affirmation and admiration and dread of others.

He wants more than anything to feel "big" and "strong." 

You present a man like that with an opportunity to wield a great big bunker-buster bomb. You tell him that he alone has the power to use it. You get enough Fox News hosts and Senate Republicans whispering in his ear and catering to his vanity. Of course he is going to press the launch button. 

And so—as Pinter wrote in another poem from the same collection—again responding to the Iraq War: 

The bombs go off

The legs go off

The heads go off

All Pinter's poems from the Bush era were vitriolic in this way, and often vulgar. But when I first found them in a bookstore decades ago, as an angry Bush-era teenager, they were like water in the desert. Pinter seemed to be the only writer of the era treating the madness of Bush's war with the rage it deserved. 

So too, Trump's decision to undertake a criminal act of unprovoked aggression against a nation of millions—on a theory of "preemption" eerily reminiscent of Bush's own—does not deserve to be coolly debated by military analysts. It should be mocked as the juvenile, narcissistic, dick-swinging madness it is. 

Pinter in another piece from that era called Bush's invasion of Iraq "a plan for premeditated murder of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their dictator." Many people at the time he wrote it would have called that hyperbole. But with hindsight, we'd call it merely prescient. 

After all, one hundred thousand civilians at least did indeed die from Bush's war. 

And so too, it is not absurd to call Trump's decision to start a tit-for-tat war with Iran—through an act of unilateral aggression—without any plausible defensive justification under international law—a proposal for mass murder. Because thousands of innocents will almost certainly die as a result. 

And, just as in Hussein's Iraq, the fact that the Ayatollah's theocratic regime is one of the world's worst governments—a murderous, terroristic regime in its own right—in no way changes the argument. It was the innocent civilians who ended up paying the price in Iraq; just as they will in this war. 

And so, let us skip the intellectual pseudo-debate over Trump's motives. There was no intelligence—in either sense of the word—behind this decision. There was no ideology either. The fact that "MAGA" had nothing to do with this move and mostly hates it is perfectly irrelevant. 

This wasn't a man who was thinking with his brain or his political savvy. This was a man thinking with his cock. This was a "short-fingered vulgarian" dreaming of an artificial extension of an inadequate member. The small man dreams of the great big bunker busters. Now that they are flying, "the big pricks are out" indeed. 

As Pinter said: Watch your back.