Trump was back to threatening war crimes against Iran this week. As he fumes about the fact that the war of aggression he started is not working out well for him, he has vowed to begin blowing up Iranian civilian infrastructure—unless they agree to let Trump walk away from this war of his own making and restore the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz that prevailed before he started bombing.
Nor is this the only recent sign that we are heading back into full-scale war. In response to the deaths of four U.S. service members, Trump declared on social media that "Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over."
The Iranian leadership has since matched that energy, saying that if Trump does attack their civilian infrastructure, they will respond with an "eye for an eye." Specifically, according to the Wall Street Journal, they are likely to set their Houthi proxies in Yemen to try to shut down the Bab al-Mandeb Strait—cutting off yet another key artery for global oil markets.
I'm reminded again of what the snooty Bertrand says in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim about the inadequacies of the postwar Labour government: "Their foreign policy, I agree, might have been a good deal worse, with the exception of their spectacular inability to pour water on troubled oil." (Bertrand offers this witticism apropos, specifically, of an earlier oil crisis in Iran (then Persia)!)
Oh, and after Iran said that they will take "an eye for an eye," Secretary of State Rubio apparently told the press that Trump's policy is "a head for an eye."
This doesn't seem to be heading in a good direction, people.
The Iranian government is of course a notoriously fanatical and ideological regime that has proved itself more than willing to sponsor international religious terrorism and antisemitic murder. They are not in any way a sympathetic group of people.
But Trump's illegal war of aggression against them seems to be waged increasingly in the same spirit, with the two sides quoting Biblical maxims of revenge at each other.
Let me be clear: I don't actually think religion played a role in Trump's personal decision to go to war. That one was already overdetermined: Trump's ego, stupidity, hubris, and tendency to trust the last person he talked to can all account for his willingness to follow Netanyahu into a fool's errand.
But we should recall that our self-styled "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth has a crusader tattoo with the motto "Deus Vult"—or, "God Wills It"—on his arm, and has repeatedly invoked a Biblical Jehovah of wrath and violence to justify his gleeful participation in this war.
It has been reported that many of the most fanatical leaders of Iran's revolutionary guard, meanwhile, welcome the war with America because they believe it will usher in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi—the Islamic Messiah.
Which is obviously insane. But no more insane than a sitting a U.S. politician running the Pentagon who sincerely believes himself elected by God to wipe out the infidels.
What we plainly have here is a case of "Mahdi meeting Mahdi," as Moncure D. Conway puts it in My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (1906).
Conway—the great freethinker who also spent the last years of his life as an anti-war activist—was talking specifically about the furor in Victorian England that greeted the death of General Gordon in Khartoum.
He acknowledged the tragedy of any loss of life, but he observed that Gordon was "slain in fair combat while invading a foreign country"—so the people to blame were not his killers, but the government that sent him there.
Nonetheless, "The wrath of the clerical aristocracy, reinforced by that of the Queen herself, seemed about to flood the Soudan with a deluge of blood," Conway writes.
That is something of our situation today. The person responsible for the deaths of 18 American soldiers in the Middle East—in a war they did not choose—is Donald J. Trump. He is the one who started a war of aggression that put them directly in harm's way, for the most ridiculous and ill-thought-out of reasons.
Nonetheless, Trump has predictably tried to redirect Americans' wholly justified grief and outrage about the loss of our compatriots away from himself and Hegseth and the other architects of this war—and over toward Iran, vowing that the latter will "pay many times over" (even though all they did was fire back at an armed force that is in fact bombing their country and just assassinated their leadership).
Conway then reports his discovery that Gordon's diary revealed him to be every bit as much a religious maniac as the one he claimed to be fighting. While Gordon went to Sudan to suppress an uprising against a British client state on the part of a self-styled "Mahdi," he himself welcomed the struggle, as Conway reveals, because he hoped it might prove the prelude to "Armageddon."
"One need only read the passage in Revelation [...] to realize the fatal fanaticism of that word 'Armageddon' [appearing in Gordon's diary] in such a crisis," Conway writes; "It was Mahdi meeting Mahdi. [...] I reached the conclusion that if one scratches an Englishman with a Moslem spear he will find a crusader."
And apparently the same holds true for contemporary Americans too. Pete Hegseth has openly praised the medieval crusaders and attributed the progress of modern Western civilization to their "holy war" against the Saracens.
It would seem that—as Conway elsewhere observes in the same book, apropos of an American bombardment of Ottoman ports—"the youngest of nations, whose constitution ignores religion, stains itself morally with precisely that criminal complexion which has often been attributed to Mohammedanism"—namely, that of trying to "propagat[e] religion by the sword."
Hegseth too appears to believe in propagating his religion by the sword.
"[H]ow far we have fallen below President George Washington," Conway adds, "who in 1796 sent to the Senate a treaty with Tripoli, whose opening words are these:— 'As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musssulmans [...] it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
Would that our government today could live up to Washington's words as well!
J.D. Vance, in his quixotic efforts to introduce a sort of Action Française-style Catholic nationalism into American government, recently wrote a whole book arguing that what we really need more of in America right now is religion.
It would seem instead that we are suffering under a surfeit of religion. Religion is "the one thing a man has had too much of" (to repurpose a phrase from D.H. Lawrence). Hegseth's religion is apparently leading us into another holy war in the Middle East in which hundreds or thousands of American lives may ultimately be lost, and from which there will be no escape.
"Entire civilizations have been done in by vengeful monsters claiming a special relationship with 'God,'" as Hunter S. Thompson aptly reminds us in one of his essays from the 1970s. Surely, he added, we can do better than merely calling for yet another revival of the "same old primitive bullshit that caused all our troubles from the start."
We have more reason by the day, it would seem, to agree with Shelley's warning (emphasis added):
"... I know
Too late [...]
That Virtue owns a more eternal foe
Than Force or Fraud: old Custom, legal Crime,
And bloody Faith the foulest birth of Time."
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