The perilous U.S. attack on Iran is the culmination of a projection of America’s own existential dread.
A U.S. B-2 bomber of the type that struck Iran. (U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt Bennie J. Davis III)
The Trump White House has launched an attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran – a country that already is the victim of an unprovoked aggression by Israel.
B-2 bombers have hit three major nuclear facilities; batteries of Tomahawk missiles also have been fired.
Potential consequences are catastrophic. This action is in violation of the explicit Constitutional provision that Congress alone has the power to declare war. That fundamental fact gets barely mentioned in whatever public discourse has taken place.
The termination point of this reckless path to war will find the U.S. despised in the world — whatever the immediate military outcome. At home, the nation will demonstrate once again that it has become incapable of shame, and that whatever self-respect survives will be in the form of that confected adulation that egoists apply to themselves.
A pariah despised abroad and a sullen, autocratic nation look to be America’s ignominious destiny.
By what route did the U.S. get here?
Americans harbor an intense hostility toward the Islamic Republic of Iran that is an emotional response to the humiliation they felt from the occupation of the United States embassy in Tehran in November 1979. That searing experience left a scar on the American psyche. It has irritated it constantly ever since.
So, the long smoldering impulse to destroy the mullahs’ regime is driven by an animus that goes beyond realpolitik calculations or the relentless pressures from Israel and its American lobby. That emotion added to and was itself intensified by the 9/11 trauma.
I offer the proposition that the 9/11 phenomenon qualitatively changed American attitudes toward the world and themselves. It generated powerful emotions – of vulnerability, of free-floating anxiety, of vengeance – that have swirled just beneath the surface of America’s thinking about the United States’ place in the world, its objectives, and – not least – the means that it is prepared to use to reach them.
Hunting Whales
Moby-Dick edition – C. H. Simonds Co, 1892 (Wikimedia Commons)
Since there is no actual Moby Dick out there for the U.S. to pursue, Americans have fashioned a virtual game of acting out the hunt, the encounter, the retribution. The U.S. thereby has embraced the post-9/11 trauma rather than exorcised it. That is the “war-on-terror.” That war is about America – it no longer is about them. It is America’s Passion Play.
The psychodrama unspools in America’s own mind and imagination.
Ahab destroyed himself, destroyed his crew, destroyed his ship. He sacrificed all in the quest – a quest for the unattainable.
The United States is sacrificing its principles of liberty, its political integrity, the trust that is the bedrock of its democracy, its standing in the world as the “best hope of mankind,” and its capacity to feel for others – including its fellow citizens. America’s Moby Dick has migrated and transmuted itself. It now is lodged in its innermost being.
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There, it spawns fictive offspring – foremost, the Iranian mullahs and Vladimir Putin. Now, China too. But the phantasmagoric ‘Putin’ is but the projection of America’s own existential dread. The spectral persona who haunts America’s minds, “Putin” has no objective existence.
“Putin” – and the diabolical mullahs — are the creation of America’s troubled national psyche. The U.S. has transposed onto them the whole maelstrom of turbid emotions it had imparted to Osama bin-Laden, and then the Islamic State. ‘Putin’, like depictions of Satan, is the dark star amidst a host of demonic furies: Iran, Assad, the Taliban, Hezbullah, Houthis, Hamas, M-13.
To be rid of America’s transmuted Moby Dick the U.S. must kill part of America’s tainted being – a form of psycho-political chemotherapy. Otherwise, America’s national soul will wither away just as Ahab was sucked into the ocean depths entangled in the very ropes he had fashioned to ensnare Moby Dick.
Thirty-five years ago when the Cold War’s negotiated end, followed by disintegration of the Soviet Union, ushered in the “unipolar moment,” the U.S. seemingly saw confirmation of the belief that there was a teleology of history at work that moves in parallel with the American project.
That article of faith encouraged the United States in the audacious project to globalize an American-directed Western hegemony. The record indicates that for a decade the execution of that project entailed relatively little direct conflict or coercion – the big exception being the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.
A smaller exception being the Kosovo intervention.
The American political class, and the populous at large, favored the country’s ambitious activities abroad in a mood of quiet self-satisfaction.
Today, while the global project remains intact for elites and the vast majority of the public, the U.S. does witness dramatic changes in methods and national mood that emerged post 9/11. Emotions play a more prominent role in what the U.S. aims for, what it does and how it does it – be they aggressiveness, righteousness, or the impulse to denounce, scapegoat and punish others who obstruct the U.S.
The U.S. picks fights with whomever it perceive as hostile. America resorts to violent force as the first resort rather than the last. It engages in acts of gross inhumanity – directly or as accomplices.
The stress on 9/11 does not preclude the facilitating influences of other societal trends. Over the past few decades, it is evident that the country’s social fabric has loosened, that spreading nihilism has opened a playground for narcissists and self-seekers of all stripes, that the software of America’s liberal democracy is corrupted, that moral sensibilities are weakening – all expressions of a coarsened society and a calloused conscience.
In short, the ethic of involvement in and responsibility for public affairs – at home and abroad – has thinned dramatically.
Is the inference that 30 or 40 years ago, the U.S. as a people and America’s leaders could not have countenanced or participated in an open genocide in Gaza; that the U.S. would not invade other, non-threatening countries cavalierly without even a ritual bow to principle or international law, that the U.S. would not have snatched migrant children from their parents and stuffed them into holding-pens owned by privateers?
That the step toward ultimate disaster taken today would have been ruled out of order?
Or, domestically, that the Supreme Court majority would not treat the Constitution as a speed bump on the way to reaching whatever predetermined conclusion they had set themselves, that successive Presidential admissions would not have ignored or perverted stipulations of the 1st and 4th Amendments?
We can only speculate. My personal assessment is that the U.S. could not have done so.
Michael Brenner is a professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, mbren@pitt.edu
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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“Americans harbor an intense hostility toward the Islamic Republic of Iran that is an emotional response to the humiliation they felt from the occupation of the United States embassy in Tehran in November 1979.”
Oh, bosh! 99 out of a hundred Americans don’t even know about the hostage situation 55+ years ago. Americans hate Iran because it’s full of brown people and because we’re told to.
With all the layers of government and general “officialdom” enveloping and constraining potentially insane human behavior across this planet it is simply preposterous that the will of the masses has been (mis)represented by our most important leaders as a desire–or even just a blase’ acquiesence–to a purported remedy that is guarenteed to result in our mass extermination…accompanied by untold misery before death for virtually every one of our 9 billion souls. Never mind that 99.99% of those waiting victims were not even asked if they were cool with this planned mass self-destruction. I don’t think the few public opinion polls done on the matter have revealed that nearly all of us don’t care about our own personal demise, or that of our dearest family member, just as long as we can kill and torture as many people of ethnicities different to our own as is possible in the time window so efficiently scheduled for this mass culling.
One would think that it might, or rather should, be possible to nip this madness in the bud and the small collection of crazies like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahoo in priviliged positions or authority are given precedence for their personal psychotic visions of the future. These clearly deseased minds surely must be the lesions extirpated from our collection understanding and will… not everybody else! Why have they not long ago been identified, treated for their mental afflictions and removed from the planetary power structure? How do they end up as the last representatives of humanity still standing? To focus on just one such madman, when will Trump finally be impeached and tried for his crimes against humanity–which are as obvious as the nose on anyone’s face? Instead he is left protected to apply sarcasm to the roiling social turmoil, rather than the tiniest bit of insight and compassion to the billions he has inflicted with certain doom. These crises are NEVER addressed and rectified as they SHOULD be! Rather the elite bullies continue to be entrusted with the “family car keys” whereupon they persist in driving into the nearest ditch… though ALL could see such consequences surely coming… as though inevitable from the first principles defining the human animal and the human mind. Many people say trust in the Lord, He will save us. I’m not sure that He, if there, has a clue either.
pretty sure the beef w/ Iran has more to do with our desire for world hegemony and Iran’s role in the world which increasingly threatens that-the Israelis surely have other reasons. been watching a lot of Jefrey Sachs. really challenges the MSM narrative re the last 40 years of US aggression
In the 50s and 60s indocumentados from Mexico were rounded up, often violently, their only protection the well connected farm owners who ruthlessly exploited them. Kennedy and LBJ led us into Vietnam, an illegal war authorization of which was more or less obtained by outright lies. While Americans were enjoying the Beverly Hillbillies and hoping to move up in class from a Chevy Impala to a Buick Riviera.
“That searing experience left a scar on the American psyche. It has irritated it constantly ever since. ”
BS. Don’t know if its pure, 100% BS, but it is definitely BS. Let me explain. It did leave a scar on the corporate psyche, and the military psyche. On the sorts of control freaks who sit on top of hierarchies and believe that they can thus order around everyone in the world. But, please be very careful about mistaking this corporate-military psyche for the “American psyche”.
The corporate-military psyche has been blasting out their Two Minute Hates at Iran for decades, and yes this has had an some effect on the foolish minds who turn on those channels. But that is in no way the same thing as what the author claims, which was that a instance of democracy and freedom in throwing out the CIA then having some mythical but permanent effect on people who have either lived 5 full decades of live experiences since then, or were not even born yet. The mind control of the 2 Minute Hates is always a temporary effect that wares off over time.
Thus, that claim quoted at the top registers as BS. Unless of course the writer is so immersed in this corporate-military psyche and propaganda that they now are so infected with Stockholm Syndrome that they have adopted this as their own psyche.
This is my kind of writing: long imponderable sentences salted with anodyne alliterations…but also dead-on truth with a sneaky screech of emotional whiplash ready at the end of every paragraph.
I have been trying to find a way to jump from this version of the Pequod for years, but we seem to be sailing evermore into violent waters, safe harbors all compromised; the madness of mad men the remaining consitent wind in our sails.
The author hides from blaming Trump and the neocons, and he blames America collectively.
The neocons were (and are) in **both** parties, not just in “Trump’s” party. A case in point is Victoria Nuland, who held high office both as an advisor to Dick Cheney, and under Obama. The Biden admin was chock full of neocons. That admin openly and blatantly supported Israel’s genocide, as well as very deliberately provoking & then feeding the Ukraine war.
Well, some 95% did vote for one flavor of this or the other in the last election. And, I don’t exactly see 10 million people in the streets of DC today demanding that this stop immediately.
From where I sit, as someone who voted for a candidate that got maybe 1% of the vote in the last election, it sure as heck looks from that point of view as if America does indeed collectively deserve the blame. America has voted for this, over and over. Every President from the War Party, (D) or (R), has fully supported Israel in everything they do. America has elected the Congress that gives all this money and bombs to Israel, and which never has any limits on how far Israel can go. The same Congress that will of course fully support this attack, with the blessings of majorities of Americans behind them. America has voted for this in election after election for this entire century. By such huge majorities that my votes in opposition struggle to reach even 1% of the total. The Killer (D)s do not get to walk away clean from their wars and genocides and massive weapon sales.
The author blames “The American political class” and the sheep that keeps that class in power. And bear in mind that Biden kept Trump’s excesses: did not stop prosecution of Assange and did not restore JCPOA as previously agreed, kept arming Ukraine and egged it toward the war. And provided least restraints on increasingly rabid Israel when compared with predecessors, hard to find any. Some members of the “political class” are fond of mis-interpeting Abraham’s blessing, some simply say that “if Israel did not exist we would have to invent it”, but with the same result.
There is a fatal flaw in the design: the people must be strong and informed to limit and control the leaders (political class) and the people look to the leaders for strength and information; there is no Reality based informing and delimiting structure. The ecological relationship was such a structure for the 300,000 years of our species’ existence, but no longer…and it is not replaceable with good intentions, agreements, contracts, laws or anything else of human design.
Blaming Washington DC collectively is much more accurate than blaming America collectively. Almost everyone getting to Washington DC quickly becomes a member of a tribe, and self preservation (remaining in DC) becomes the daily task.
Sure, but who elects the members of the Washington tribe? The buck stops with the collective American voter.