High upon his perch atop the New York Times editorial page, Bret Stephens offers a full-throated call for the United States to launch a war of aggression against Iran. This featured opinion piece in the “paper of record” is noteworthy because it reflects the detritus that’s currently swirling around the minds of U.S. foreign policy elites concerning a big war with Iran.
Mr. Stephens serves up so many glaring omissions in this op-ed that when you finish reading it your eyes will burn as if you had been staring at the sun. He begins with a paragraph-long quotation from the late Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel assassinated on September 27th with over 80 two-thousand pound “bunker buster” bombs in the Dahiya Shia quarter of South Beirut. He uses the quotation to strongly suggest that Nasrallah’s only real motive in fighting against the Israelis was to “kill all Jews.” Stephens knows how to get a rise out of his readers.
By smearing Nasrallah as nothing more than an “antisemite” he purposely overlooks the reasons for Hezbollah’s existence in the first place. There was no Hezbollah until after the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its military occupation of the country that lasted for eighteen years. The IDF and their Lebanese proxies killed approximately 17,000 civilians. Nasrallah was born in Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon on August 31, 1960. He was a young man during the years of Israeli occupation; and like many Lebanese, he wasn’t very keen on seeing a large piece of his country become another Gaza Strip or West Bank. In 1985, a new resistance group bounded onto the scene as part of the ongoing struggle to push the Israelis out of Lebanon: Hezbollah, “The Party of God.”
Glaring Omission Number One:
De-historicizing and de-contextualizing the origins and objectives of Hezbollah.
Next, Stephens asks the rhetorical question: What if those missiles Iran fired at Israel on October 1st had been “nuclear tipped?” This hypothetical scenario indeed would be very scary. But scarier still might be Israel’s response since it’s well known that the IDF has at least 90 nuclear bombs at its disposal. (And B.S. knows this). Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires United Nations experts regularly to inspect and monitor its nuclear facilities. Also, Iran was abiding by the requirements of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the most exhaustive nuclear non-proliferation agreement of its kind. It took the Obama Administration two years to negotiate the 2015 agreement. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu told a joint session of the U.S. Congress that he and the Israeli government bitterly opposed the deal.
The JCPOA stood until 2018 when President Donald J. Trump unceremoniously yanked the United States out of the deal over the vociferous objections of France, Germany, Russia, China, the European Union, and the United Nations – countries that were all signatories to the multilateral contract.
Glaring Omission Number Two:
Israel is the only nuclear armed nation in the region.
Slogging onward, Stephens then raises the dubious claim made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon “within a week or two.” First, if this were true, it would sure make Stephens’s call for a huge U.S. bombing assault on Iran even more reckless and stupid. It’s also intellectually dishonest because it creates a “ticking time bomb” scenario where kinetic military action must be taken now, or else. “Now is the time to do something,” Stephens howls. This cliche is standard warmongering like we heard in the run-up to the Iraq War. The implication here is that the U.S. has been doing “nothing” and now must do “something.”
Yet the U.S. is already doing a lot of “somethings.” The U.S. has slapped on Iran the most severe and longest-standing economic sanctions in history. The U.S. has worked hand-in-glove with Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear facilities through aggressive and sophisticated cyber-attacks, such as “Stuxnet” and others. The U.S. has assisted, enabled, and cheered on Israel’s multiple assassinations of Iranian scientists, including their top physicist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was gunned down with an A.I.-automated robot machine gun in Absard, Iran on November 27, 2020. And on January 3, 2020, the United States unilaterally assassinated Iran’s highest-ranking military commander, Qasem Soleimani, outside the Baghdad airport in a drone attack that burned him alive and turned the car he was in into a pile of molten metal.
Maybe these flamboyant U.S.-Israeli actions targeting Iran in recent years don’t constitute doing “something” in Stephens’s mind, but to the United Nations Security Council (where Iran has brought many formal complaints against the U.S. and Israel) they appear to count as “something.”
Glaring Omission Number Three:
Pretending the U.S. and Israel have never done anything untoward to Iran.
Stephens declares the current status quo with Iran is “utterly intolerable,” and that Iran is a threat “to the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we’re supposed to lead.”
This statement is astonishingly myopic coming after a year of U.S.-facilitated atrocities and genocide in Gaza, which contravene the U.N. Charter, multiple U.N. resolutions, the Geneva Conventions, and the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), the latter of which has placed under scrutiny both Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for possible violations of international humanitarian law. Where is this “liberal international order” that “we are supposed to lead” to which Stephens is referring? And who is responsible for tearing it up?
Glaring Omission Number Four:
Make-believing the U.S. and Israel have not been perpetrating ghastly violations of international humanitarian law thereby undermining the “liberal international order,” which the author believes will be somehow restored only if the U.S. unleashes a giant bombing assault on Iran.
Stephens’s J’accuse! against Iran goes on to include the contested charge that Iran had plotted to assassinate Trump, hyperbolically labeling it a “direct assault on American democracy.” Elsewhere he declares that the Iranians recently offered to negotiate because they “fear that Trump might return to office.” For a columnist who the New York Times hired primarily because of his center-right “never-Trump” bona fides, it’s strange to hear him in October 2024 sounding like a shill for the Trump campaign.
And after many paragraphs of this bullshit as a set-up, Stephens then transforms himself into an armchair general whose blood is boiling. He cries out for a “direct” and “unmistakable” U.S. strike on Iran, and takes special note of a missile production facility in the city of Isfahan: “At a minimum, Biden should order the [‘missile complex’] in Isfahan destroyed.”
“Destroyed” – now we’re getting to the meat of his argument. In the next sentence he points out there’s a “uranium enrichment site near Isfahan, too,” making clear to his readers that he would love to see that sight “destroyed” as well. But that was just the appetizer; now comes the main course: “Iran’s economy relies overwhelmingly on a vast and vulnerable network of pipelines, refineries and oil terminals on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf.” Stephens believes the wisest path forward for the U.S. right now is to threaten Iran with annihilating its oil infrastructure and inform the dastardly Iranian government: “the only way it will save this infrastructure from immediate destruction is by ordering Hezbollah and the Houthis to stand down and pressure Hamas to release its Israeli hostages.” There’s that word again: “Destruction.”
Glaring Omission Number Five:
Ignoring the fact that Iran has already (on multiple occasions and through multiple channels) communicated to the United States, Israel, and to the world that if they bomb Iran’s oil infrastructure Iran will ensure the oil infrastructures of U.S. client states in the region also will be obliterated, (which one might think is a pretty dangerous oversight in an op-ed calling for the U.S. to bomb Iran’s oil infrastructure).
Now on a homicidal tear, Stephens declares: “We can’t simply go on trying to thwart Iran by defensive means only – fighting not to win but merely not to lose.” He then narrows the options to a binary; “we” are either going to “win” or “lose” (just like the Bush regime did in the run-up to the Iraq War). He has shrunk the parameters of U.S. policy options down to only one: blowing shit up.
Glaring Omission Number Six:
He doesn’t tell us what “winning” means. Does it include “regime change?” Or the Gaza-ization of Iran? After we’ve all witnessed a live-streamed U.S.-backed genocide for a year, the author is now demanding more death, destruction, and human suffering only on a larger scale.
And what, exactly would the U.S. “win” after unleashing this aggression on a nation of 90 million people? Two-hundred dollars-a-barrel oil? Another trillion dollars drained from the U.S. treasury? What the fuck is this respected public intellectual really saying?
Stephens denounces “Iranian aggression.” Yet it was the United States that overthrew Iran’s democratically-elected government in 1953 and installed an unelected tyrant who ruled for 25 years; trained the unelected tyrant’s brutal secret police; and armed Iran’s enemy in a war that claimed a million Iranian casualties. It’s the U.S. that has imposed waves of crippling economic sanctions on Iran; assassinated Iran’s top military commander; engaged in cyber warfare against Iranian industrial and research facilities – and now the U.S. is threatening to destroy Iran’s oil infrastructure and other targets.
Glaring Omission Number Seven:
Erasing the “aggression” the U.S. has directed and continues to direct at Iran over the past 70 years as if it never happened. (I suppose the author believes “they just hate our freedom?”).
“Bully regimes respond to the stick,” Stephens writes, channeling his inner Teddy Roosevelt. He asserts that the recent missile attack on Israeli military targets would have resulted in the deaths of “hundreds or thousands” of Israeli lives had it not been for their extensive missile defenses. Yet Iran has been extremely careful not to kill any Israeli civilians in their two missile strikes so far. In both cases they gave early warnings to the U.S. beforehand. And in both cases, they announced that as far as the Iranian government was concerned there was no need for further retaliation; the score had been settled for the two IDF assassinations, one an Iranian military officer, Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, the other in the heart of Tehran targeting Hamas’s chairman of its political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh. If Iran assassinated a high-ranking IDF officer in Tel Aviv I wonder what would Stephens be calling upon Israel to do in response?
In the middle of this desolate commentary, Stephens gets philosophical, transforming himself into the Clausewitz of Westchester County. “Wars,” he intones, “once entered, need to be fought through to an unequivocal victory.” “Unequivocal victory?” Like the ones the U.S. fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq? By tossing down the memory hole those three demoralizing, costly and catastrophic U.S. wars while calling for yet another war, Bret Stephens is engaging here in nothing more than bloodthirsty agitprop.
Glaring Omission Number Eight:
He offers zero history and zero context even while he waxes philosophic about the underlying purposes and requirements of “Wars.”
The only thing the meta-text of this piece accomplishes is removing all agency from the Israelis. The Israeli government, the IDF, Mossad, along with their actions in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and now Lebanon, all recede into the background. They disappear. He describes a society of sitting ducks, neither acting nor reacting to anything. And in the process absolves them of any responsibility for their deeds over the past year that have left the entire world aghast. And in so doing, Bret Stephens is helping us all collectively to forget about the first genocide of the 21st Century. “Never Again.”
