Trump’s aggression in Iran keeps triggering feelings I’d rather not have. They’re complicated, overwhelming, and, at times, conflicting.
I don’t disagree with disarming a terrorist state on the cusp of nuclear arms; that seems like a common-sense, preserve-the-planet objective. I also don’t mind spending tax dollars to help desperate Iranians cast off religious rule; their brutal oppression has caught in my throat for years. When that 22-year-old was beaten to death for not covering her hair a while back I thought, wow, this is it. Finally. She will be the catalyst, the inflection point where Iranians rise up and smack down roving bands of morality police who enjoy punching girls. I mean, the center can’t hold where a bunch of religious men get to kill women for their lack of religiosity or personal choices, right?
Wrong. Iranians didn’t revolt. But neither did we. The Dobbs decision is over four years old and now pregnant women in red states are dying at twice the rate as women in blue states. What’s a little femicide among friends, amarite?
Same as it ever was
Those not-entirely-false equivalencies aside, Trump’s rotating justifications on Iran, and his obvious lack of concern for what comes next, cause high blood pressure. His side-ape’s messaging on “death and destruction”doesn’t impress either, it just confirms that humans haven’t really evolved since Homo erectus. Stone clubs or Tomahawks, what’s the difference when it comes to brute force meted out by morons?
Please, if there is a god, can I just sleep for the next 5,000 years and come back when people know how to live in peace and preserve their only home?
Anguish over Gaza feels much the same. Who benefits from reducing an already poor nation to rubble, other than munitions dealers and developers? When Gazans’ plight—starving, thirsty—is in the news, I can’t take a drink of water in the night without internalizing their depth of thirst. If I were dehydrated, sleeping under a tarp, and my children and mule were also parched, how would I split a cup of water? Would I give it all to one child in hopes one of us would survive? Or would I divide it among all of us, two tablespoons each, just to share the life-affirming, if fleeting, joy of wetness on our tongues?
Are we back to an eye for an eye?
Hamas terrorists are inhuman. Who or what made them that way is a question for another day, but what they did to innocent Israelis dancing under the stars in 2023 justifies their erasure from the planet, no further questions.
But who thinks a thousand eyes for an eye is morally just? Who, other than an unpopular criminal politician using war as a deflection, offers up 70,000 lives as sacrificial lambs just to keep himself in power? Don’t answer that. I’m aware that we have our own psychopath in charge. So it’s not moral superiority I feel, it’s grief for the human condition. Grief, and more than a little disgust.
Bibi, with Trump’s help, reduced Gaza to a dystopian nightmare, an uninhabitable hellhole where 2 million people used to live. Now they have nowhere else to go and what, we just move over a thousand miles to Iran and do it again?
I feel guilty for looking away to write this self-indulgent essay, but when I opened today’s NYT video of parents sobbing outside the school we bombed, killing over 150 children, I broke down. I mean, I lost it. Those could be my parents crying for their dead children. That could be my little boy buried in mortar, crying for me as he takes his last breath. Mostly, I’m choked with shame. This is my country doing this horrible thing to Iranian people who have done nothing, absolutely nothing, to harm me.
Don’t blame Iranians for their leaders unless you want to be blamed for Trump
I keep reminding myself that Iranians are no more responsible for their leaders than I am responsible for Trump, but in truth, compared to Americans, Iranians are far less responsible for their leaders than we are.
Iranians have been ruled by armed religious freaks since the Islamic Revolution which we caused by imposing the last shah, whom everyone hated. American hubris and oil greed led to Iran’s theocratic regime 47 years ago, and Iranians have been brutalized under Sharia law ever since. When I hear Christian Nationalists promote theocracy in the U.S. I want to slap them: they have no clue what the Establishment Clause has done for our country, or for them.
Thanks to theocracy, Iranians now live under roving patrols of armed thugs. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command terrorist cells on every block, of every city, of every district in Iran. Expecting unarmed citizens to challenge them is worse than ignorant, it’s ghoulish.
We are no better
Compared to what Iranians have had shoved down their throats, Americans look like idiots for electing an imbecile criminal. Any American with a TV saw what happened on J6, confirming that Trump will do anything for power, and we still re-elected him. Now we, too, have roving bands of armed paramilitary creeps driving around with guns. What does that say about us??
I’ve read political essays and credible analysts who say Trump's plan in Iran is to provoke another 9-11, so he can expand presidential powers in the name of national security to stay in power. That’s more than my head can take today, so I’ll conclude with one certainty: Iranians’ culpability for their horrid rulers is not equal to Americans’ culpability for Trump. It’s not fair to blame them, even though Death to America jihadistswill blame all Americans for Trump’s barbarism. The world is unfair like that.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.