The Iran Thing

I owe you my thoughts on this, and I know I’ve been slow in providing them. Partly this is down to personal relocation chaos, but partly it’s because I don’t always have strong, strident opinions on every last thing that happens and I’ve learned to be cautious in throwing my ambient thoughts onto the internet. I want to write pieces that will age well and that I won’t regret having written next week, next month or next year. That can be a hard thing to do.

As always, there’s a few enduring commentariat industries active in this sphere, with positions you can predict in advance. There are for example the MAGA loyalists, who will defend every last action of the Trump administration, whatever that happens to be and whatever contradictions these defences force them into. There are the antiwar America critics, who will deploy the same blind pessimism about U.S. military power and who are always predicting imminent disaster, whatever is actually happening or likely to happen. Over both extremes and others besides there looms pitfalls like the just world fallacy – an unthinking assumption that to the extent the Iran campaign is held to be wrong it is bound to devolve into an enormous self-defeating catastrophe just short of a third world war, or conversely that if the strikes can be defended as necessary or geopolitically sophisticated it will all turn out fine.

I don’t think that kind of reasoning makes much sense, and I also think a few different things can be true at the same time:

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