War, What Is It Good For?

War. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.

So sang Edwin Starr in the 1970 protest anthem War.

Starr was singing about the Vietnam War, a conflict that proved as senseless, misguided, and ideological as any war undertaken by the United States. Decades later, the lessons of Vietnam are still being learned.

Among them:

First, it was fundamentally an ideological conflict. While it had military objectives, its political goals were vague and shifting.

Second, ideological wars are notoriously difficult to win. Territory can be captured, armies defeated, and infrastructure destroyed. But beliefs cannot be bombed out of existence. More often they harden under pressure.

Third, Vietnam demonstrated the dangers of escalation. What began as a limited commitment gradually expanded into a full-scale war. The phenomenon would later be called “mission creep,” a term popularized during the United Nations Operation in Somalia.

Fourth, Vietnam showed the limits of overwhelming military superiority. The United States dominated the air and possessed vast technological advantages. Yet these advantages proved insufficient against a determined adversary employing asymmetric tactics.

Finally, it was a war of attrition. In such conflicts, the weaker side can prevail simply by outlasting the stronger one. Time, more than firepower, becomes the decisive factor.

The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is “the continuation of politics by other means.” His insight was that war, at least in theory, is rational. It is a tool used by states to achieve political objectives when diplomacy fails.

But Clausewitz’s observation contains an implicit truth: wars end by agreement. Military victory only matters if it produces a political outcome accepted by the parties involved.

Which raises the question: is the war against Iran winnable?

The United States and Israel possess overwhelming military superiority. They can degrade Iran’s military capabilities, damage its infrastructure, and weaken its ability to defend itself. These are achievable objectives. But they are also temporary ones.

Only a political settlement—one accepted by Iran itself—could transform military defeat into a durable outcome. Yet the Iranian regime defines itself in ideological opposition to the United States and Israel. A regime that frames resistance as martyrdom cannot politically survive capitulation.

Washington and Jerusalem appear to have hoped that sustained military pressure would weaken the regime internally. Perhaps popular unrest would topple the government, or factions within the military might stage a coup.

So far, neither scenario has materialized, and there is no reason to believe it is likely.

Popular revolt is unlikely while the population is under bombardment. External attack tends to consolidate national unity, even among citizens who dislike the regime.

Nor has there been any visible fracturing within Iran’s security apparatus, including the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

If the past is any guide—from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan—the most likely outcome is a familiar one. At some point the United States will declare its objectives achieved and bring the conflict to a close.

Iran, having survived, will declare victory as well.

And in doing so it will strengthen the very regime the war was meant to weaken, while deepening its determination to obtain the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon.

Bad news for Washington.

Worse news for Israel.

War. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.

Say it again.

Please don't write

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

Please don't write 

any more poems about death. 

I've read too many already, 

and let's admit it,

they come too easily. 

War. Grief. Sorrow. Loss: common 

as poppies in spring

when it's still chilly outside, 

the bright papery blooms 

fading quickly. 

Write the elusive  

difficult poems 

about love - 

ones you know by heart

when words 

fail; 

A poem that stands on a riverbank 

watching the flow— 

a poem that surprises,

like a fish leaping out 

from the turbulent darkness, 

with all its might, 

going upstream  

with vigour and purpose,

and you know,

only because it moves 

against the current,

it's alive.

The Golem of Mar-a-Lago

Based on The Golem of Prague

Once upon a time, in the city of Jerusalem, there lived a leader of the Jewish community. He was not a humble leader, for he had ruled almost without opposition for many decades.

All his life, the leader of the Jews believed it was his sacred mission to protect his people from their greatest avowed enemy: the Islamic Republic of Iran, led by the Ayatollah and his mullahs.

The Ayatollah dreamed of creating an Islamic caliphate and called for the destruction of the Jews in Israel. For many years he spent the treasure of his people building an army and acquiring powerful weapons, and placing them in ways that threatened the Jews.

The leader of the Jews possessed a mighty army too—indeed the mightiest in the region. But it was not mighty enough to defeat the Ayatollah on its own.

He needed help.

And so good fortune seemed to fall upon the Jews.

In a distant land there existed a humanoid being said to command vast treasure and unimaginably powerful weapons. The being was large and orange—the color of desert clay baked too long in the sun—and roughly in the shape of a man.

The being was grotesque to behold. Many said it was without a soul, because when it spoke, which it did often and loudly, only strange and incoherent noises emerged.

The being lived in Florida, inside a palace of gold and mirrors called Mar-a-Lago.

When the leader of the Jews in Israel heard about this creature, he conceived a clever idea. He believed that if he traveled to Mar-a-Lago and whispered certain mystical words into the being’s ear, he could transform it into a golem—a powerful creature that would obey his commands.

And so he crossed the ocean and did exactly this.

He leaned close and whispered into the creature’s ear.

Instantly the being’s eyes glazed over, and its orange skin began to glow. The leader of the Jews knew that the creature had become a golem and would now follow his every instruction.

He said to the golem:

“You are the strongest man the world has ever seen.”

“You alone can destroy our enemy.”

“The Ayatollah and his mullahs mock you. Iran is your enemy. You must destroy the Ayatollah.”

The words were repeated again and again—until they became an incantation.

The golem of Mar-a-Lago stirred. It pounded the table and released a great, incoherent roar. The golem’s minions understood what the noises meant, and soon an armada of warships was launched against the enemy of the Jews. From their decks, fighter jets dropped bombs upon the Ayatollah’s lands, and missiles rained down across Iran.

At first the leader of the Jews smiled. The golem had done exactly as he commanded.

But, as the ancient legend foretells, a golem does not understand limits.

Missiles rose from deserts and mountains all throughout the region. Armies mobilized. Oil fields burned. Exploding drones struck hotels, apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals.

The streets of large cities were set on fire, a toxic rain burned the skin of residents, many people died and economic markets crashed like towers of glass collapsing in the wind.

The Middle East shook. Yet the golem did not stop.

The creature thundered across the world stage—threatening, striking, shouting. Fear spread wherever it turned. Former allies became mistrustful, and enemies multiplied.

Even many among the Jewish people who had first cheered the golem began to fear it. And soon the leader of the Jews who had activited the creature, realized in horror, that he had made a terrible mistake.

He had forgotten the one thing required by the ancient legend to control the golem. He had never placed the word Emet—Truth—upon its brow. For if the master of the golem needed to stop the creature that was how he did it. He could simply remove the first letter, leaving only Met—Death—and the golem would instantly turn to dust.

But now it was too late.

This creature could not be restrained by truth. Truth had no meaning to it at all.

And so the golem of Mar-a-Lago marched onward—louder, stronger, and more uncontrollable with every step—while the world wondered who, if anyone, still possessed the sacred word that could make it stop.

Evil

This weekend I started watching the Netflix documentary series Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. I was obviously drawn to it because of the war now unfolding in the Middle East and the demented, soulless, brainless orange golem currently controlling the levers of power in the White House who appears to be steering the world toward ruination and catastrophe. Play with fire and get burned.

History rarely repeats itself in the neat and tidy ways we imagine, but it does have an unsettling habit of echoing when political systems grow fragile and grievances become political fuel.

“Evil” is a word I dislike and very rarely use. It has too many religious connotations. It belongs to a universe of absolutes, and we don’t live in absolutes — or at least we shouldn’t.

Through archival footage and dramatizations, interspersed with commentary from historians, the series tells the story of the failed Austrian painter Adolf Hitler, his rise to power in Germany, and the world’s attempt after the war to seek justice at the Nuremberg Trials, where twenty-four of the regime’s most senior surviving figures — including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Joachim von Ribbentrop — were prosecuted.

The story is told in part through the eyes of the American journalist William L. Shirer, who had a front-row seat to events. Shirer reported from Berlin during the Nazi period, covered the trials, and later wrote the monumental history The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The question at the heart of the story is whether there is such a thing as evil.

The answer, I think, is no — at least not as something distant, mythical, and grandiose. Its source is far more mundane. It lies in ordinary human weaknesses: resentment, humiliation, cowardice, opportunism. Not even as interesting, perhaps, as the word “banal” that Hannah Arendt famously used when writing about the bureaucratic mediocrity of Adolf Eichmann.

Watching the series, what strikes you most is how ordinary and unremarkable Hitler himself appears as an individual. His character was shaped by personal failure, grievance, humiliation, and resentment — hardly unique qualities in politics.

His rise from a marginal extremist with a radical agenda and a relatively small following to someone holding the balance of power in parliament was enabled by conservative and moderate politicians who believed they could control him, harness his popular support, and neutralize his more dangerous tendencies.

They miscalculated.

In the fractured political landscape of the Weimar Republic - divided very much along rural/urban lines - elites who feared instability more than extremism opened the door to him, convinced that the institutions of the state would ultimately contain him. It was a door they later discovered they could not close.

Hitler understood how to exploit the situation. His nativist and romantic vision of German greatness appealed to an economically struggling population that was humiliated by defeat in the First World War and by what many perceived as betrayal by a feckless political class who had accepted the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Once in power, Hitler’s first objective was to avenge that national humiliation. The symbolism of forcing France to accept surrender in the Compiègne Forest — inside the same railway carriage used for the 1918 armistice — was no accident. It was revenge made theatrical.

The regime’s genocidal campaign against Europe’s Jews did not emerge all at once as a single master plan. It was radicalized over time, particularly after the Blitz failed to defeat Britain, and the military campaign against the Soviet Union in the east hit a brick wall. Military success had emboldened the regime, while later desperation hardened its brutality, and the plan was codified at the Wannsee Conference in 1942.

But if evil exists at all, it is not the product of some diabolical plan, like in the movies. It's a more organic process, and often improvised. It flourishes in weakness, grievance and opportunism, and feeds on apathy, fear and cowardice. 

Then it festers and spreads like an untreated disease in the body politic - hiding in plain sight, behind words like patriotism, security, loyalty, greatness.

The Golem

My orthodox friends were giddy at the coincidence of the US launching its bombing campaign just a couple of days before the festival of Purim. They saw in this attack a parallel with the biblical story of the small Jewish community of Shushan, located in ancient Persia (present-day Iran), who miraculously and fortuitously defied a king’s death warrant and turned the tables on his evil henchman Haman.

Haman–Khamenei. Get it?

I see parallels to current events in another Jewish story from folklore: the Golem.

Created from mud, the Golem is an oversized, brainless, soulless humanoid creature of myth possessing superhuman strength, summoned to protect a Jewish community in peril. The creature is brought to life by Jewish mystics who recite a mysterious formulation of sacred texts.

The origins of the story may date as far back as the Talmud, but the best-known versions of the legend come from the late 16th century. In the most famous telling, rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel summons a Golem to defend the threatened Jewish ghetto of Prague.

In this version of the story, the creature is animated by placing the Hebrew word Emet (truth) on its forehead. The creature is deactivated by simply removing the first letter, turning Emet into Met (death)—like flicking an on/off switch.

The Golem of Prague predates Frankenstein by Mary Shelley by more than a century. It’s possible Shelley knew the legend, since the first German publication of the tale appeared in 1808.

Like Frankenstein, the story of the Golem is often read as a cautionary tale—a warning to be careful what you wish for.

According to the legend, the Golem was man’s creation, not God’s. Therefore it lacked the gifts of reason and speech. It carried out the tasks it was given without reflection or restraint, which carries great risk.

In many versions of the story the creature eventually becomes uncontrollable. The power that was unleashed to protect the community turns against it. The Golem runs rampant, wreaking havoc, spreading destruction. The genie has been let out of the bottle, and can't be put back.

With all this talk of Bibi Netanyahu going down to Mar-a-Lago and whispering in the ear of the orange Golem, one has to wonder: Are we living through a contemporary version of this ancient tale?

The Greatest Danger of the War

The first danger of a war with Iran is to the international rules-based order—and global stability.

But the second, far more immediate danger is to American democracy itself.

The stage has already been set.

Last Sunday, a mass shooting in downtown Austin left three dead and a dozen injured. The shooter, a 53-year-old naturalized immigrant with no prior FBI record, wore a hoodie reading “Property of Allah” and reportedly a t-shirt with an Iranian flag underneath. A lone actor, perhaps—but one whose symbolism will be seized by those who want to portray the homeland under threat.

If the war drags on, costing a billion dollars a day, trump will eventually need Congress to approve a special appropriation. He currently lacks the support of both parties. And politically, he is in trouble: unpopular, embattled, facing the very real prospect of a Democratic wave in the midterms that could end his presidency.

Under these pressures, one can imagine a scenario that until recently seemed unthinkable: the declaration of a state of emergency, the assumption of extraordinary wartime powers, the suspension—or outright cancellation—of elections.

A war abroad is no longer just a question of foreign policy. In this climate, it becomes a weapon against the very democracy it claims to defend.

Thinking it Through 2 - The Case for Israel

Notice that in my previous post explaining my reasons for opposing the war, I did not mention Israel.

The reason is simple. Israel can make a coherent and legitimate case for attacking Iran on the basis of self-defense in response to an imminent threat. The United States cannot. And that distinction matters.

The United States, as the most powerful nation in the world by far, has the greatest responsibility, and that includes responsibility to build an international consensus in response to the Iranian regime’s conduct. Instead, by taking unilateral military action, it has undermined the very rules-based international system it claims to defend, and given other great powers free rein to act with impunity.

The threat Iran poses to Israel is one matter, and it is inarguable. The threat Iran poses to the international rules-based system is another.

Israel has a responsibility and obligation to its citizens, as all nations do. For decades, the international community failed to adequately acknowledge the threat Iran poses to Israel. Arguably, Israel felt it had little choice but to act, and do so when Iran was most vulnerable.

The same cannot be said about any threat Iran may pose to the United States. Let’s be clear: there was no imminent threat to the United States or to American citizens. The claim that this war was necessary to prevent such a threat simply does not withstand scrutiny.

As a sponsor of international terrorism, the Iranian regime does represent a threat to the rules-based international system. But that threat is precisely why the response should have been collective and grounded in international law, norms, and conventions. The responsibility of the United States was to build that consensus, not bypass it.

What the war has demonstrated so far is something many analysts long suspected: Iran was, in many ways, a paper tiger. Iran’s feckless military response to Israel’s attacks has revealed just how limited its capabilities really are. Much of the threat turned out to be bluster.

From that standpoint, one could even argue that the war may still prove necessary from the perspective of Israel’s long-term security.

My own position has always been that Israel ultimately possesses the strongest form of protection: nuclear deterrence. For that reason, I have never accepted the argument that Israel faced an existential threat, or that the Iranian regime was suicidal.

Like all regimes, the leadership of the Islamic Republic has always pursued two basic goals: first, self-preservation; and second, the expansion of its ideological influence across the Middle East, including the long-term ambition of a broader Islamic political order. That is not an apocalyptic agenda.

Their campaign against Israel has therefore been primarily religious and ideological rather than strategic. It is also why they signed the JCPOA. The agreement offered them time, legitimacy, and a stage upon which to wage a different kind of war—one fought not with missiles, but with narratives.

Their hope was that Israel would ultimately defeat itself, not on the battlefield, but in the court of international opinion.

There is little reason at this point to believe that the Iranian regime will not survive this war as it is currently being waged, nor that it is losing the capacity to wage conflict through asymmetric means indefinitely—through proxy forces, regional destabilization, and other non‑conventional strategies. 

An aside: After two years of war, massive destruction, loss of life and ruination, and a ground invasion and occupation by the IDF, Hamas is still in control of almost 50% of Gaza. 

The real long‑term cost of this war may not be the battlefield losses of Iran, but the lasting damage to the international rules‑based order itself. By sidelining international law and consensus, the United States has weakened the very norms that restrain conflicts and preserve stability, creating a world in which power, rather than law, increasingly dictates outcomes.