Netanyahu and Trump Are Trying to Have It All

Israeli strikes left homes and residential buildings destroyed in Tehran Iran on June Photo SABA Middle East Images AFP via Getty In the early morning hours of June Israel launched an attack that had been prophesied in several form or another for nearly years a full-blown assault on Iran s nuclear campaign and in a move that shocked plenty of observers its entire military structure The top brass of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and of Iran s Armed Forces as a whole has been assassinated Critical nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordow were bombarded with the intent to destroy On Friday Iran retaliated with multiple rounds of ballistic missiles in the heart of Tel Aviv targeting Israel s Ministry of Defense and reportedly other military bases in the area Israel s justification for its attack hinged again on the specter of the preemptive strike It s a mythos dating back to the fiction that Egypt was planning an imminent attack on Israeli forces in and thus Israel was justified in preemptively destroying Egypt s military power and occupying the Sinai the Golan the West Bank and Gaza Here the stakes are treated as just as high Videos from the Israeli military extoll that they are fighting for the West s future and that they had no other choice but to act against an existential threat not just against the State of Israel but against every country within range of Iran s vast missile arsenal Israel s propaganda machine has been running full steam lobbing proposes about the amount of weapons-grade uranium Iran allegedly possesses how plenty of nuclear bombs it could thus produce and how urgently Israel needed to strike at a perceived moment of weakness This cavalcade almost obscures the extent to which the narrative surrounding the outbreak of this war has become one obscene contradiction in which what one sees from President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can mean everything to everyone Related Did Israel Just Blow Up Trump s Bid for an Iran Nuclear Deal By completely igniting the war the Israeli establishment has been dreaming of for decades Netanyahu can both work toward achieving the long-term goal of subjugating the region and in the short term shift domestic and international attention away from the horrors his military is committing in Gaza Now the focus will be on war with Tehran the capital of an adversary unparalleled in the Western mind Reservists can be called up en masse not to do another tour in what is known to be an untenable quagmire but for a higher cause one that has not yet proven un-winnable Any prevailing concerns about religious parties in the Knesset overthrowing the Netanyahu cabinet can be put aside as can worries about his corruption trial or his desire to overhaul the judiciary Even the growing fear that Israel s war machine is destroying its reputation can be overlooked for now How the thinking goes can Israel be a pariah state if it is working in full coordination with the United States for its own self-defense By casting this new warfront as a bold move to preempt a fictional attack from a nonexistent nuclear bomb Netanyahu can even confer the benefits of being a supposed peacemaker driven to reluctant action He will be boosted by the narrative that he is the one pushing for a deal that was good for Israel despite trying to assassinate one of the primary negotiators Rear Adm Ali Shamkhani in one of the strikes on Tehran Trump for his part is also attempting to play both sides Despite Netanyahu s report claiming U S coordination on the attack Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed it was a unilateral Israeli decision but one of lesson that America fully supported Even so Trump s communications since the attack have indicated nothing short of full unbridled assistance acting as if he had no hand in an assault that achieved all of America s preexisting objectives Related Hawkish Israel Is Pulling U S Into War With Iran Like Netanyahu Trump can continue to claim he still wants a diplomatic fix for Iran to return to talks After all the hardliner s are all DEAD now as he wrote on Truth Social so they should accept terms before it is too late Both the faux anti-war crowd who backed Trump and the pro-war hawks have gotten what they longed at the same time an America supposedly uninvolved in intricate regime change wars that unleashed a proxy as an attack dog to slaughter Iranians however it sees fit The deceit that has led to this moment has been open and unabashed Trump and his aides were only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in population Barak Ravid writes in Axios and didn t express opposition in private We had a clear U S green light one claimed The question remains now how long this massive contradiction in messaging can sustain itself A probable war with Iran has invariably been the quagmire of all quagmires a maelstrom which all previous U S and Israeli administrations have avoided speeding into Now that the bombs are falling it s clear the sails have been set Can such a ship survive reality The post Netanyahu and Trump Are Trying to Have It All appeared first on The Intercept