Be a Bourne

 Three more Americans died this week because of Trump's utterly needless and unjustifiable war of aggression in Iran. 

As Thomas Hardy wrote of another pointless colonial war—this one at the turn of the century: 

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,

A mouldering soldier lies—your countryman [...]

Our own countrymen and -women are now mouldering in the Middle East thanks to Trump's knee-jerk decision to bomb another country and assassinate its leadership in the midst of ongoing negotiations—a war he started but in which he now appears to have completely lost interest (he devoted a prime time address last week—not to talking about Americans' concerns about the progress of the war and the lives of our soldiers and compatriots it is taking—but to rehashing his vindictive election conspiracy theories from 2020). 

One of those soldiers who has now died for Trump's sins was only nineteen years old—a fresh recruit out of high school. 

O Love, your eyes lose lure

When I behold eyes blinded in my stead! (Owen)

Despite the fact that Trump's war is 1) illegal and completely unjustifiable and a total disaster; and 2) negatively impacting the daily life of every American, not to mention the families of the soldiers who are being killed—it is a war strangely without critics. 

No one seems to approve of this war. But neither has it spawned any mass protests or marches in the streets. Nothing equivalent to the mobilizations in global capitals in 2003 has greeted this latest U.S. war—even though it follows Bush's model to the T. 

To be fair, the war doesn't have a lot of defenders either. It's like we all know that our president will do idiotic, utterly self-destructive things that show complete indifference to human life—including the lives of our own service members—and not one of us expects to be able to do anything about it. 

The tenor of intellectual engagement with this war has therefore been very different from what happened in 2003. 

The good news, to be sure, is that there has been very little of the lockstep conformity and intellectual groupthink that greeted Bush's invasion back then. The handful of commentators like Bret Stephens and other erstwhile neocons who tried to promote the war were seemingly in the minority—and were quickly disabused anyway, once it became clear that Trump did not share their goals for this war. 

Now, the U.S. is just trying to negotiate Iran back to the starting position we were in before Trump's invasion. We're just trying to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which was fully open and never an issue before Trump and Netanyahu started bombing. 

So it's good that this futile war has few overt intellectual enthusiasts. 

But I'm dismayed that the intellectual class hasn't really mounted any serious opposition to the war either. The standard New York Times editorial board line—echoed by many an elected Democrat in Congress—is simply to say that Trump "went in without a strategy" or an "end game"—which is obviously true, for reasons I just said. 

But we also need to be crystal clear that the U.S. doesn't have the right to haul off and bomb another country and assassinate its leaders in violation of the UN Charter—whether it did so with an "end game" in mind or not. 

Let us heed Dwight Macdonald's warning to intellectuals in 1946, in his essay The Root is Man. He asked us to remember the ever-relevant contrast between intellectuals like John Dewey who went along with the government during World War I, and those others—like Randolph Bourne—who risked their careers (and even freedom) in order to criticize it. 

"Bourne’s cause was doomed; Dewey got his war; yet whose was the triumph?" Macdonald rightly asks. 

Let all intellectuals contemplating Trump's war today remember Macdonald's advice. In a world full of Deweys, be a Bourne. 

Without more Bournes around, after all, it's not clear how this war can possibly end. 

The wholly needless and preventable deaths of three Americans this week predictably did not lead Trump and Hegseth to reconsider their war of aggression. Instead, it just prompted them to double down harder. "Every time Iran kills an American Soldier," Trump has now declared, "they will pay for that killing many times over."

And so the cycle will continue. 

Thomas Hardy's question, in the poem quoted above, is one indeed we should be asking of this eye-for-an-eye thinking—particularly when it comes from our purportedly "Christian" administration: 

[...] I would know

By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law

Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,

Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?