Thinking Fast and Slow

 

So King Donald drops the bunker buster bombs on Iran's mountain protected nuclear facilities.

And he announces it, not from the Resolute Desk, but as Obama did when Obama announced the death of Osama Bin Laden, standing behind a podium. And standing behind him, nodding obsequiously,  were Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and Pathetic Hegseth--the three stooges of the apocalypse.

The fast thought is: What a stupid thing to do! Not to mention illegal, as this is clearly an act of war and Congress, not even this rubber stamp, spineless Republican Congress voted an act of war.

On the other hand, we have long recognized there are circumstances the President may have to act in a timely way and Congress never does, so we accept he acts first and begs forgiveness later, rather than asking for permission.

And, of course, President Obama killed various Muslim leaders, terrorists, bomb makers with drones, and while this is an order of magnitude different, it's still just sending in U.S. military lethality to stop fanatics from acting.

And, as Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi noted in a recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg  of The Atlantic the regime in Tehran has been obsessed with annihilating Israel, which it has daily called the second Satan, second only to the United States, which is the Great Satan.  They erected a doomsday clock in the middle of Tehran which counts down the time to when Iran will wipe Israel from the face of the earth.

So, there can be little doubt, if and when the current Iranian regime gets its hands on an atomic bomb, it will drop it on Israel, or if it has more than one, it'll drop all of them.

Now Halevi is every bit as appalled by Netanyahu and his apocalyptic, Warsaw Ghetto like destruction of Gazza as I am, but he finds it difficult to say Netanyahu is wrong about Iran.

So, when Trump finds the airspace over Iran clear, he sends in the B-2 bombers and tries to take out the production lines for the Iranian doomsday machine they are building to deliver to Israel. 

It may not have been successful, despite Trump's claims, which we all know cannot be believed, but can we blame him for trying?

He did not drop these bombs on civilians. He did not say he wanted to convert Fordo into another French Riviera. He simply tried to eliminate a death factory.

The arguments against this rash action:

1/ It will provoke Iran into revenge attacks: We'll suffer repeat 9/11 attacks in the US.

2/ It was illegal, as it was an act of war without Congressional approval.

3/ It will do exactly what Trump promised his voters he would not do: Draw the US into another Middle Eastern war, like Iraq or Afghanistan.

Only the first really requires response. The illegal thing is debatable; whether it involves us in a wider conflict remains to be seen but is not a done deal by any means.

So, the argument about provoking an Iranian retaliation: The fact is, when Libya blew up that American plane over Lockerbie, Scotland you could point to any number of US acts to which this might have been a response, but from the vantage point of 2025, it looks as if the Muslim fanatics simply found they had in their possession the means to blow American planes out of the sky and they did it. They did not need to point to any specific act they were avenging. And once captured, they did not point to a specific act for which planting that bomb was an act of revenge--they were simply doing violence to a United States they considered their enemy, which had visited so many depredations against them they did not even need to bother to justify any specific act.

All they needed was hate.

When the Twin Towers were destroyed, and Jim Lehrer asked a Middle East pundit on the PBS News Hour, "But why do they hate us?" he was asking in genuine perplexity, and the pundit said there are Muslim fanatics who hate us for any number of reasons, general and specific. We are infidels. We live debauched and depraved lives. We arm Israel who kill Muslims. The list goes on and on and you do not need a specific incident, only the baseline hate.

And, of course, not all Muslims hate us. Specific fundamentalist fanatics hate us.

So, given that background, that Iranian leaders are obsessed with us, hate us, want to destroy Israel and to the extent they can, the US, trying to argue that dropping bombs on Fordo will provoke them, will stoke the hornet's nest--not convincing.

Iran is already a hornet's nest. And I have to admit, even though I try to allow creatures to live their lives--I do not hunt or trap squirrels on my property; I do not trap chipmunks or even rabbits (who eat my flowers), when a hornet or wasp nest appears in the corner of my garage door frame or anywhere on my house, I go full nuke on that. You cannot live with a hornet's nest on your threshold.

Now, I am very aware some will say, "But that's also the case with Gazza." 

No, Gazza is not a hornets' nest. Gazza is different from Tehran. I can say that while also agreeing my knowledge of the Middle East and Israel is superficial and based on American and British journalism, not on professional or personal experience. I can only listen to people who might know, like the former head of the Mossad, who said explicitly Gazza has been a disaster from the Israeli point of view and has long ago become a "useless and counterproductive" effort.

But Iran--like most Americans I have seen enough of the Iranian ayatollah's for long enough to believe, even if I do not know--they are fair targets.