Bret Stephens over at the New York Times—who sometimes comes across as the world's last doctrinaire neoconservative war hawk—seems to have learned nothing from recent events in Venezuela. He spent months banging the war drum in favor of a U.S. regime change effort to topple Maduro and install democracy. In the end—he got the war he wanted, but not the democracy. So it goes.
Now—apparently without any self-reflection or reassessment of this strategy—he has moved right along to doing the same thing with Iran. In multiple recent columns in the paper, he has called for a U.S. attack to overthrow the Islamic Republic in favor of—I don't know; whoever fills the void? (A role which presently appears most likely to be filled by the son of the former deposed Shah, that ruthless CIA-backed autocrat best known for the terror inspired by his secret police.)
Stephens's argument for regime change is simple: the current regime is terrible. And it's impossible to argue with him there. He points to the fact that the current Iranian government appears to have just murdered thousands of its own citizens in cold blood. The regime shut off the internet and—as soon as the cameras were no longer rolling—started butchering its own people without mercy or appeal.
The only adequate response to this mass murder—in Stephens's telling—is "bombing the regime leaders" and removing them from power. But such a course of action is not likely to earn the support, he sneers, in an earlier column, of those "campus activists and global do-gooders who care so deeply about Palestinian lives but not about Iranian ones."
Here, as so often, Stephens uses the classic Bush-era hawk argument of equating "caring about" an atrocity with supporting an illegal war to punish and remove its perpetrators. What goes unaddressed is whether there are other and better ways to express human solidarity with the victims of mass murder than to go and commit a bunch of murders of our own.
What if we were to start—for instance—with welcoming Iranian asylum-seekers and other victims of the regime—instead of banning them and deporting them to Panamanian detention camps?
Stephens may have a point that some of the individual protesters who care about lives lost in Gaza genuinely do not care about lives lost in Iran. So much the worse for them—I do not defend that species of moral blindness or indifference. But one can always turn this point around—as with any similar "argument from hypocrisy"—and ask why Stephens, in turn—who cares so deeply about Iranian lives—seems to care so little about Palestinian ones.
I suspect in both cases there is a kind of emotional displacement at work. Arthur Koestler writes at one point in his memoirs about how, in his Communist days, he became obsessed with the crimes and outrages of Ottoman imperialism—particularly the Armenian genocide—partly because it served as an outlet for the horror he felt against Stalinist atrocities, but which he could not consciously acknowledge.
Something similar seems to be happening with today's observers of events in the Middle East. Many campus protesters know, on some subconscious level, that they cannot defend the atrocities of October 7 or the actions of the Iranian regime against his own citizens. But they do not talk about these things overtly—the displaced outraged hits a bottleneck and has to be redirected toward protesting Israel as the source of all crimes and injustice.
But the same phenomenon occurs in reverse for the Bret Stephenses of the world. I'm sure he too knows on some level that he cannot defend Israel's carpet bombing of civilian targets—their enforced starvation of an entire population—the fact that they are still, to this day, under conditions of a supposed "ceasefire," routinely killing Palestinian civilians in shootings, demolitions, and bombings—but these are crimes he, too, cannot overtly acknowledge, within his worldview.
So he displaces his outrage and horror and anger. He says: "well what about Iran? Where are the campus protests against what they are doing?" (He does not pause to consider that campus protests against the actions of a U.S. adversary might be a far more futile exercise than campus protests against the actions of a U.S. ally, who routinely receives U.S. aid and military support, and which the U.S. public is therefore much better positioned to influence.)
It's the same what-aboutism that Koestler copped to, with the benefit of hindsight and self-reflection. Back when he was still a Party member in good standing, he writes, he couldn't condemn overtly what Stalin was doing in Ukraine, or to the minorities he was deporting en masse. So, he changed the subject. He said: "well, but what about the Ottoman empire, hmm? hmmm?"
It was the horror of the Armenian massacre in the capitalist world that helped restore for a time, he writes, his Communist worldview and support for Stalin's regime—as if one atrocity permits another; as if Stalin's crimes were justified by the Ottomans'; or Netanyahu's crimes in Gaza by the Islamic Republic's atrocities in Iran. The "nationalist," as Orwell capaciously defined the term, is always picking and choosing which atrocities to condemn based on a one-sided worldview.
Stephens, to put it simply (but not, in my view, unfairly) sees the atrocities of the Iranian regime for what they are; but "has a remarkable capacity" for not noticing or caring about the atrocities committed by the West and our allies—to borrow Orwell's phrase on the subject from his "Notes on Nationalism."
And since the Iranian regime is in fact committing atrocities (which I do not dispute), he argues that the correct response is to bomb and depose them. As Stephens puts it: "I’m for bombing the regime leaders who last month murdered thousands of protesters, perhaps tens of thousands. I’d make that case both as a matter of justice and prudence: Iran’s leadership will continue to make its people and the region suffer so long as it remains in power."
Let us leave aside the fact that Trump is never going to support a transition to actual democracy in Iran. Look at what he's done in Venezuela. Even if he bombs Iran again—for the second time in less than a year—it will be for the sake of cutting a deal with whoever he sees as the most corrupt and effective power brokers in the country who can advance his interests. He's already betrayed the Iranian protest movement once, after promising them support—why would he not do it again?
Suppose we forget all this, though, and step into the neocon fantasy world for a second, in which a Republican administration is still governed by Bush-era ideology and is therefore bound to attempt regime change and a democratic transition in Iran, if it does in fact invade.
Would such a policy be morally justified or defensible?
I think not. As I said above, opposing and despising the Iranian regime is not the same thing as demanding war to remove them from power. Even if a government commits crimes, it is not the role of another state to appoint itself global dictator and punish what occurs in another country's borders. As the ancient sage Mencius put it (D.C. Lau trans.): "'Correction' is only when someone in authority punishes those who are subject to their rule. It is not for peers to punish one another by war."
That's the deontological argument against waging a war of aggression against Iran. There's also a consequentialist argument, though—namely, that the effects of such a war are so unpredictable as to counsel against taking the risk. And this is an argument so potent that even Stephens is forced to admit it gives him pause.
"The larger question, I think, is whether an attack on Iran would be enough to badly destabilize the region but not enough to topple the regime. That’s harder to predict," he acknowledges.
I return to Arthur Koestler for this point. I was just reading his 1950s collection of essays, The Trail of the Dinosaur, and I think it's worth revisiting, since Koestler's political thoughts in that era could—on a too-casual reading—be seen as lending ammunition to a neoconservative worldview. Much of the book is devoted, after all, to castigating liberals during the Cold War for their appeasement of Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe and their misguided calls for unilateral disarmament.
Koestler's admonitions against appeasement and his invocation of the specter of Munich certainly do have a lesson to teach us today. I'd say they counsel us specifically against cutting "deals" with Vladimir Putin that sacrifice the territory of our allies, say—on the mistaken assumption that his neo-imperial ambition will stop at these limits and that it is possible to placate him permanently through the sacrifice of the innocent inhabitants of the Donbas.
But Koestler was not merely a straightforward hawk in the 1950s either; and the perils of naive liberalism or pacifism are not the only dangers he warns us against. Rather, he counseled the West to chart a course between what he called the "Scylla and Charybdis" of excessive appeasement, on the one hand, and the opposing danger of what he called "preventive war"—a phrase which he observed was itself a "contradiction in terms."
The problem with "preventive war," he wrote, was that it takes on an astonishing amount of risk for a very uncertain reward. We know, after all, that waging an unprovoked war will kill thousands—maybe millions. The idea that it will leave democracy and freedom in its wake is much less plausible—at the very least, it is too uncertain a proposition to justify such a cost in human life and blood.
"With regard to preventive war," Koestler writes, "[... t]he amount of damage that would be inflicted on humanity is incalculable, the factors in the equation are unmanageable, and the results unpredictable."
He goes on: "Even on the inadmissible premise that morality should be sacrificed to expediency, and the present generation sacrificed in the interests of future ones—even on these premises the preventive war must be ruled out on the grounds that the magnitude and complexity of factors are beyond the computing capacity of the human brain."
Indeed. Neither Bret Stephens nor I can foresee exactly what would happen if Trump started bombing Iran today or tomorrow. But the scenario in which he both consistently supports a democratic transition and actually manages to achieve it is so vanishingly unlikely that we have no right to demand the suffering and death of potentially thousands of innocents here and now for the sake of what is at best a (as Isaiah Berlin would call it) "distant goal."
If we did in fact wage such a war, it would be another case of Isaiah Berlin's "invisible omelette." As he put it: "The one thing that we may be sure of is the reality of the sacrifice, the dying and the dead. [... T]he ideal for the sake of which they die remains unrealized. The eggs are broken, and the habit of breaking them grows, but the omelette remains invisible."
And isn't this exactly what we just saw happen in Venezuela? Stephens got his war. The U.S. invaded. But none of the promised "distant goals" advanced one step closer to fruition. The political prisoners are still locked up. The authoritarian regime remains in power. All that happened was that 100 people died and the region was further destabilized. All we can see is the "reality of the sacrifice, the dying and the dead." The goal for which they were purportedly killed "remains unrealized."
A Trump invasion of Iran, I strongly suspect, would end no differently. Particularly since he has once sold out the Iranian people already.
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