With the Israeli election this week and America’s midterms next Tuesday, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have reportedly spent weeks debating not whether to restart their war with Iran, but when they should do it.
Netanyahu reportedly wanted to renew the bombing before Israeli or American voters went to the polls. He has officially denied that, but it fits his well-documented strategy of using an ongoing war to shield himself from political and legal accountability.
Trump, meanwhile, has publicly ruled out another US attack until after November 3. But, according to several recent reports, the two governments are genuinely preparing for another major round of strikes once the American election is over.
Already, this episode has made the narrative put forward by both leaders even more ridiculous. After all, if renewed attacks on Iran are as necessary to protect the American people, as both have claimed, why would that necessity depend on whether those people have already voted?
The truth is, as I laid out here earlier this year, that the war on Iran is not a drastic but necessary measure to thwart an imminent threat from a rogue regime. It’s just another military action, on top of all the others our government is carrying out, that is beneficial for a coalition of unique, well-connected interest groups—from the Israeli politicians who want to direct American power towards weakening their main regional rival to the domestic weapons companies getting paid to restock America’s dwindling munitions stockpiles.
The narrative that Iran is months or even weeks away from starting a nuclear war with two far more heavily-armed nuclear powers; that they are not just willing but are actively trying as hard as they can to sacrifice their entire country to take out a few Israeli and American cities; and that this will be carried out with weapons and weapons-delivery technology that they do not possess and are not close to getting is obviously not the truth. But it is the most effective way the pro-war coalition has discovered so far for getting a sufficient portion of the public to at least passively accept a war they all want for reasons they’re not as willing to publicize.
That effectiveness, however, has clearly waned in recent months. Today, around two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump’s Iran policy, with widespread concerns growing about the impact on energy prices and all the terrible consequences that brings. This is a deeply unpopular war. And yet, it is set not only to continue but to escalate in the coming weeks.
This also highlights another, even more important aspect of this story that is getting far less attention than the war’s unpopularity: the sheer inadequacy of democratic elections as constraints on political power.
According to the standard narrative that most of us are taught growing up, for most of human history people have suffered under kings, oligarchs, and rulers of all kinds who used political power selfishly. Wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a small sliver of society, while everyone else was forced to live in either literal servitude or material conditions no better than servitude. However, this was supposed to have changed with the invention of democracy.
