Wars and Rumors of Wars
The Mind War (so far) is the Real War
UPDATE: The U.S. bombed Iran. Technically we’ve joined the fight, but my points from below still stand, the mind and narrative war is the more dangerous theater right now, at least for Americans.
It’s 2002 all over again and President Donald Bush wants to save us from the weapons of mass destruction that a Middle Eastern country is just about to acquire and lob at us and our allies:
Among the president’s allies are many respected conservatives who want the Holy American Empire to get involved and fulfill its divine mission.
The regime in question destabilizes the Middle East, commits acts of terror around the world, pre-emptively strikes its enemies, commits genocides against its own people, and will do all of this over again, but ten times worse if we don’t intervene to stop them from gaining regional hegemony. But just a slight push by the United States and its overwhelming military force would cause the locals to give up their fanaticism and become nice, peace-loving little democrats in a utopian paradise of earthly delights. The country’s leader has been in power forever, but is actually unpopular, and a regime change would quickly follow if we just destroyed their weapons of mass destruction before they finish developing them.1
If you don’t support the war, you’re not just a coward but are anti-American and anti-Christian, blocking the Divine plan from being fulfilled. You actually hate America and its greatest ally of all time, Israel and you’re probably a terrorist yourself if you don’t support our getting involved.2
We’ve been through all this propaganda before, and many more times in similar variations, which is why so many of us feel a crazy apprehension this time around that we’re headed for the exact same 20-year long bloody, genocidal, and ultimately pointless fiasco.
The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and our politicians3 have cried wolf so many times and been Lucy pulling away the football so many times that we’re justified to feel suspicious.
But Is It Real? And Is It Worse This Time Around?
So is this 2002 all over again? Is this the MIC out to make a few trillion for Haliburton and friends is this something worse? Is the threat to the United States posed by Iran—or by getting involved in Iran—real this time?
Iran has a few more allies than Iraq so we’re doubly right to worry that Netanyahu’s pleas for us to intervene in “blowing up a few nuclear bomb sites” could quickly snowball into something far worse than the Iraq War.
Many of the war’s proponents try to side-step the danger, but for others like Mike Huckabee and Lindsey Graham and many Evangelicals, as
points out here, launching World War III and bringing about the Apocalypse is kind of the goal.Perhaps Israel’s pre-emptive strike on Iran, using the exact same justifications by which the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, and Russia in 2022, Ukraine, was something they had to do. Perhaps this time there really is a wolf. Perhaps if we don’t act now, Iran will get a nuclear bomb and instantly turn it on their neighbors.
Why is it not-ok for Russia to invade Ukraine because they consider them to becoming a threat to their security. But why is it ok when Israel does the same thing? Of course “we’re telling the truth but they’re lying” would be the reply. But in the confusing online propaganda, claims, and videos, we can’t tell whether Iran has no imminent plans to build a nuclear bomb or has already built one, and is ready to use it.
For some observers, Israel just launched a war of aggression against their (only-semi) neighbor, that Iran is retaliating (justifiably), and we’re being asked to join in beating down it’s last real rival in the Middle East while they’re down.
“It’s the Jews”
The aggressive online social shaming against anyone not on board with the Iran War has pushed many towards the theory that “they”, “the Jews”, the “Israelis”, “Netanyahu” or the “Deep State” or somebody has been planning all this since forever and needs the U.S’s involvement to complete their conquest of the Middle East.
Many can’t help feeling that there’s a strange pattern at play in our Middle Eastern adventures over the last generation or two, that a certain nation run by religious extremists is slowly, methodically taking out every rival, using the United States as cannon fodder to rebuild an empire while saddling us with debt.
And there’s at least a small bit of truth to these claims.
If you’ve ever listened to the incredible
’s Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem you might understand why a traumatized perpetually marginalized, and highly motivated people like the Jews, finally having the hope of safety in the reborn state of Israel, might do something like lobby 90% of Congress, involve their intelligence agency with Jeffery Epstein to collect actionable blackmail on all the U.S. power brokers, manipulate the Evangelical protestant movement to their benefit,4 and use the U.S as their sword and shield—to finally, finally achieve safety.The reason isn’t malice,5 but simply because for the paranoid, one can never truly feel safe.
I don’t blame the Jews. They probably don’t “control” the world as they are split internally as many ways as any other group is, but the Israelis and their allies definitely influence it, the same way all of us influence it. People who are successful, as many of the Jews are, but traumatized, are motivated to do just about everything they can to defend themselves, even to the point of launching wars and genocides “in self defense.” I can’t blame them, and you can’t either. U.S. History over the last century or two is just about as sordid, and perhaps even more genocidal.
For Israel, and for Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose Likud party are particularly extreme in their geopolitical outlook and methods (think of them as Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney on steroids), this means being paranoid about any threat in the Middle East. And since it is a dangerous place, so they’re not entirely lying,6 or necessarily wrong to have launched a pre-emptive strike against Iran as they did. Iran is a revolutionary fanatical state led by Shia imams which has a strategy plan for destroying Israel by 2040, but of course Israel also has the plan outlined in this image below and imminent plans to regime-change Iran.
We just must keep in mind that the Israeli government, or at least its current leadership, are not the most rational, moderate actors. Ideally, both Israel and Iran would get more moderate, less fanatical governments, but we’re not necessarily in a world where that sort of ideal is possible.
Where we are instead now, has been a confusing fog of war for the last week and half.
Is This a War Yet?
The war that Israel and many of our politicians want us to be involved in, is of course not officially a war yet, but merely two special military operation’s Israel’s “Rising Lion” and Iran’s “True Promise III.” It’s been tragic of course. If the news propaganda is to be believed, dozens to hundreds on either side have been killed after hundreds of cruise missile, drone, and airstrikes by each side on the other, aimed at debilitating each other’s military resources, decapitating their leadership, and breaking their morale.
After a deployment of U.S. forces to the region made U.S action seem imminent, Trump delayed direct U.S. involvement this week, saying it would take him two weeks to decide his course of action. For us in the United States the war isn’t a materially present reality yet but merely a “rumor of war.”7
Even in Israel and Iran, we’ve seen lots of videos of cruise missiles, downed fighters, and blown up skyscrapers, but we have very little idea of how much of it is real, or how much really has been blown up. Oddly enough, while each country is officially giving the other all they’ve got in terms of airstrikes and missile attacks, relatively few people have died, and compared to the World War II-era bombings or the current state of the Gaza Strip, neither Israel or Iran seem particularly devastated yet. If this war is as existential for both parties as each claims, where’s the warfare to show it?
Perhaps both sides are merely short on missiles and bombers or are actually acting slightly rationally, but once again no war has officially been declared, merely two hyped up missile campaigns by each country against the other.
The Real War is the Online War
In fact, most of the “war” so far seems to be on the Internet in meme space, with each country running ad campaigns, releasing propaganda videos, and seemingly focused far more on the marketing of the war than on fighting it, as evidenced by each side frequently telegraphing their targets to the other in advance, a suicidal move from a purely military-strategic perspective:
Israeli post trying to establish moral superiority
Someone points out the irony of telegraphing your attacks in advance
Iranian propaganda video against Israel (“Boom Boom Tel Aviv”)
Israeli ad on X
Israeli paid ad on YouTube:
Iranian AI video showing a destroyed Tel Aviv:
Iranian LEGO Propaganda Film about Israeli/US Warmongering:
Bots and paid ads on X and other social media also seem preoccupied with hyping up the war as a news event, as World War III, as with this post and many others which were shared as paid ads, by somebody looking to stir up fear:
There’s a whole debate going on right now between two factions of the right that reached its culmination after Tucker Carlson’s interview with Senator Ted Cruz, as to which side is being influenced/propagandized more, anti-war rightists by Iran and its allies or pro-war people by Israel.8
There have been real victims, yes, but compared with the hype, it seems to demonstrate that what we’re seeing in this war is an online battle for the minds of the world (and America in particular) for support of the Israeli narrative vs. an Iranian one.
Spreading Rumors of Wars is the Real Goal Right Now
Propaganda is nothing new, but we’ve reached a point where the “rumor of war” almost appears more important to the parties involved than the actual war. Perhaps the real fight is about whether the United States will get involved and the way to influence President Trump’s decision on that matter is to psy-op Americans and the West in general one way or another in order to put pressure onto the President’s decision.
I fear that things could escalate out of control with U.S. involvement, but perhaps we aren’t actually facing World War III, but it’s to the benefit of propagandists to make it appear to us as such. Perhaps the war isn’t actually existential or the end of the world, but merely a continuation of the last century of warfare in the Middle East taking place in a new information landscape.
Both sides, Israel and Iran, realize that they can’t accomplish their aims without the U.S. making a decision favorable to their side. In order to make the U.S. join the war on the Israeli side, Israel and its allies have to make the danger of Iran appear existential to us, and Iran and its people into unhinged fanatical, irrational monsters that have terrorized the peace-loving Israelis but which could be quickly crushed with “just a little” U.S. help.9 Iran, for its part, doesn’t want to be invaded, obviously, and has to frame the war as part of Jewish/Zionist centuries old conspiracy to take over the Middle East with Israel being fanatical terrorists who are losing the war.
Stay Calm
Perhaps reality is neither of these. Perhaps both sides are trying to influence us, but the war, is well, just another war. We ought not to get involved, but, in the end, our getting involved or not getting involved won’t save the world nor end it.
Instead, we’re just facing what a son of Israel who also happened to be God warned us of two millennia ago:
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.
“Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.10
The purpose of the online psy-war11, the mind war is to alarm you, so that you, having lost your rationality, you would join one of the teams and swing the U.S. decision toward one side or the other. But as both sides in this current war are fanatics with paranoid and/or genocidal intentions, we ought to support neither side, yet only the people who stand to suffer and die, who, under the weight of propaganda begin to “betray and hate each other.”
“See to it that you are not alarmed” for the “end is still to come” Christ says, and so we should stand firm to the end and ignore the online war or at least avoid adding to the paranoia, rage, and fear it engenders. I again wish we could see “peaceful” regime change in both Iran and Israel, but barring that, we should at least not make the drums of war and fear worse than they already are.
I mean Iran and/or Iraq, of course, but hilariously this applies just as much to the Netanyahu government of Israel
And you must instantly put the flag in your bio, the sign in your yard, and say some magic words while signing up to serve in the attack on the greatest villain of a nation that’s ever existed (ahem, since the last greatest threat ever).
And our “greatest ally ever” in Israel
There’s a strong possibility that the reverse is true, that evangelicalism helped create the modern state of Israel through their influence on the British Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but the relationship is symbiotic at the very least: https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/ad/ad_v9_2/daw01.html
The Anglican John Nelson Darby (1800-1881), at the very least, invented the eschatology and interpretative framework of Revelation used by most evangelicals that includes the supposed need to recreate the State of Israel.
At least not solely malice.
Matthew 24:6 RSV
The pro-Israel and pro-war people are the ones complaining about the woke-right and seem like neo-cons under a new coat of paint:
Trump seems to stand in between the two camps:
I’m thinking of the book If You Take a Mouse To School here. A little help, as we saw in the lead up to the Vietnam War, quickly becomes something far larger. See my review of Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly for more:
Matthew 24:6-13 RSV
Psychological warfare
The real problem is what is really in control, the intelligence agencies. We have a "special relationship" with Britain not because we fought them in 1776 and 1812, or with them later, but because of MI6.
Israel is our "greatest ally" not because they've ever really done anything for us, but because of Mossad.
These intelligence agencies form a way of doing for each other what they can't legally do in their own countries. The elected leaders and bureaucrats are in fear of them. All of them together live on the MIC, war, color revolutions, and keeping the citizens too confused or scared to understand what's going on.
They are what prevents us from having a better, more peaceful world.
If Iran wants to have a theocracy, it's on the people of Iran to change things. If left alone without foreign interference, things would eventually become what that culture wants. If China wants to have strong control over its demographically and geographically large country, same thing goes.
If the citizen's of the USA ever want to have a free country, which having oceans on either side and lots of natural resources, and land, is blessed with the ability to be peaceful and prosperous, we must take back our government.
We vote and send them, but then they are crushed if they don't go along with the CIA. As Sen. Schumer once said, "They have six ways to Sunday to get you if you go against them."
Also, the BIRD, bi National Industrial Research and Development Initiative.