Two Senile Retards Fighting

America Should Disengage from the Middle East

I think the kinds of people who like “geopolitical” commentary are like old men at Balkan cafes who want to slam their umbrellas or canes on the pavement while screaming to each other about political opinions. Online, the Quora forum was always like this. Unfortunately the “feeling up of the internet” has mostly just made it the arena for Balkanoid-style piledriver Politics commentary. Mexican boomers on Faceborg also love this. Self-important pundits who want to be on TeeVee assert with confidence on all kinds things they don’t know about, one year invoking Fukuyama, the next year when the news cycle changes invoking Samuel Huntington.

I remember in 2004-5 Israeli friends telling me of secret rumors that Israel was about to bomb Iran. This was told to me in suggestive whispers, as if they were privy to exclusive information: “I know someone high up in the Air Force,” and this kind of thing. I assume journalists and politicians who were much better placed than I was were getting similar “exclusive leaks” of imminent happenings. This continued in a regular cycle throughout the screaming simian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency: Iran was always two weeks away from getting a nuclear weapon and Israel was always two weeks away from bombing them.

Now finally in 2025 Israel is bombing Iran after a series of back-and-forth escalating proxy battles between the two “rivals” in the Middle East going back at least a couple of years. Again, I don’t have any special knowledge of the region and I despise “geopolitical” piledriving wankery so I’ll try to make my simple and humble common sense layman case for why I hope the United States stays out of this war and does not bomb Iran.

The debate about when Iran will or won’t get a nuclear weapon aside, I don’t understand what the problem is with Iran having a nuke. The assumption is made, but never substantiated, that Iran is an apocalyptic insane country that will “use a nuke” or pass it off to someone else. This is a mainstay of hawkish American discourse on the region for at least twenty years, but there’s no evidence for it. It’s based on a pundit’s or “geopolitical commentator’s” emotional assessment of things, which in turn is always based only on a consideration of rhetoric or analysis of oratory. Similar apocalyptic rhetoric was used by the Soviets and others, but it’s for show and everyone knows it’s for show. Ahmadinejad certainly said very extreme things at times and was a rabble-rouser but Iran’s ruling clerics chose him specifically for that purpose, to drive foreign opinion crazy and goad opponents into similar rhetoric or premature impulsive overreactions. In practice however, they were quite moderate. For example after the Soviet Union fell and Central Asia became independent, it was widely assumed that Iran would become super-active in that region, in which it has had an interest and a tradition of meddling stretching back more than a thousand years. But they acted in a very moderate, small-c conservative way. They weren’t expansionist. General restraint and moderation was also the practice throughout Ahmadinejad’s presidency with its fiery rhetoric: it was all just words for pleb reaction.

Despite its revolutionary rhetoric the Iranian regime isn’t one of energy, military adventures, prowess or the passions of youth and fanaticism. It’s an aging society, with a low birthrate and with a sclerotic establishment of old men with white beards, very similar to what existed in the East Bloc in the 1980’s. It has a security and ideological class eager merely to survive and maintain its hold on power more than anything else. This may be highly unpleasant and I think the Persian people deserve much better, but it’s not a danger to the broader world, and it’s their place to take hold of their own destiny if they wish. And Iran’s regional ambitions are limited and should be of no concern as such to those who don’t live there.

But I want to emphasize that the Iranian regime consists of old men who are interested in their survival, and therefore fundamentally rational and conservative, meaning risk-averse. (A friend points out that China is also ruled by risk-averse old men, while younger Chinese are far more fanatical and wish to humiliate whitey: I think that’s true). If they seek a nuke it’s not so they can drop it on Israel or use it on someone, it’s because wanting a nuke is entirely a rational and common sense move if you want to survive in a time when you can observe what happened to Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and North Korea. A comparison between the three is most educational for any modern nation. Saddam Hussein wouldn’t have been deposed if he actually had nukes or serious weapons of mass destruction; Gaddafi made overtures of friendship to America, gave up his nuclear program, and American officials like Condi Rice or Susan Rice this or that—I forget all of the officials named “Rice”—shook hands with him on camera; his reward was to be killed in a brutal lynching orchestrated by France, England and the United States. North Korea managed to get nukes before a serious effort could be made to overthrow its government, and through its nukes assured its own security. The lesson couldn’t be clearer: if you want to survive in the modern world you need nukes. If America didn’t want nations to reach this conclusion it shouldn’t have behaved as it did from 2003-onward. But these aren’t the actions of a fanatical regime seeking nirvana in murder-suicide operations, it’s old men trying to keep their hold on power.

I think Israel knows this—how could they not know this? The people who run Israel aren’t incontinent pundits for the Daily Wire or Bulwark—which makes the motivation for these recent attacks on Iran unclear. I can only guess here: that maybe Israel is using the “crazy Iran” justification for the attack but in fact working with the consent not only of America, but of Saudi Arabia and some of the other Arab states, and possibly other nations or world powers who may be concerned not so much that Iran will detonate a nuke in a national suicide attack, but that, being emboldened by the security provided by a nuke, the Iranian leadership might attempt things like extorting the world with threats of the closure of Strait of Hormuz, sallies into the oil fields of its Arab neighbors, and so on. And that even if nothing ever comes of that, such threats and trouble can be used as a pretext to extract cash and other concessions from various world powers. And that maybe they all find the mere thought of that all unpleasant and unacceptable. But I have no idea about this, nor does anyone else who is talking in media. I only know that Israel’s public justification is itself a piece of delusional paranoia and should be dismissed.

(I want to make it clear that I don’t think the threat to close the Strait of Hormuz is something terrifying: if Iran tried this, it could be opposed by conventional means in a conventional conflict even if Iran had a nuke. I think it’s clear they want a nuke for existential last-measure self-protection from “regime change,” which is a rational step for any country to take after what the United States, England and France did to Gaddafi).

The current situation regarding Iran and Russia is an anomaly. Iran and Russia are historical rivals: they compete over the Caucasus, the Caspian and Central Asia, and there were several wars in the 19th Century and tensions throughout over things like this. The Islamic Republic itself wasn’t born with any natural friendship for the Soviets or Russia. The contemporary friendship between Russia and Iran is unusual and a result of unwise American policy in the region, which drove two traditional rivals together. (Traditionally America kept “three feet” in the Middle East, attempting a presence in Iran, Israel and the Arab world. Problems with Iran and an unhealthy relationship with Israel has hurt America’s interests in the region for decades now—but that’s a matter for another time). When I look at Russia and Iran on a map, I can understand why the two would have some conflict.

Less so when I look at Iran and Israel on a map. They share no close borders, compete over no land or resources. They can’t even plausibly compete over such, and never have in the past. The wildest of Israeli nationalists dream of an expansion to the Euphrates, but they have as high likelihood of ever ruling as those who seek the establishment of a Catholic monarchy do in the United States. Israel has no plausible interests nor any realistic prospects of ruling over or even having influence over Arab nations. On the other hand, the pretense that two aged countries like Iran and Israel are animated primarily by religious or moral considerations and such war passions is absurd. But maybe they are indeed senile and have the destructive brittle energy of the senile—in that case both should be shunned.

Whatever the causes of this conflict, the United States should not only stay out but ideally disengage from this region as a whole. I’ve tried to make this case for a while and I wrote an article about Israel here:

Bombing Iran would at the very least put American pilots at unnecessary risk, and invite retaliation by Iran, which could harm the lives or property of American soldiers or citizens. This isn’t justified by any threat that’s been made clear by anyone. If Iran and Israel want to have two old mens’ retard fight-spat so their rickety governments can shore up domestic support, or whatever, other world powers should leave them to it.

This is especially so in the case of the Trump administration, as Trump ran on staying out of further wars, and a significant portion of his coalition on both the right and in the center is motivated by Trump as a president who stays out of pointless Middle East conflicts, in which there is nothing to gain. American has already squandered its reputation on losing interventions in that region: nothing good ever came from it.

Ultimately this is the reason why any intervention in this region (or really, elsewhere) is unwise. Trump was elected in large part because he campaigned against wars and he did so in turn because America no longer has a real identity and therefore no real understanding of what its own self-interest is. That needs to be rebuilt before there can be any talk of interventions or foreign conquests. I myself for example much oppose China but I wouldn’t for a moment trust the present security and military establishment to engage China even if they did so “for the right reasons” or with the right intentions. For Trump it is important to keep his word on the basic things. Otherwise he might as well bury his exuberant spirit and obscure it, exhume the corpse of the Gipper, bring out the Huckabees speaking in tongues to display for the world how boring, sclerotic and cringe America still is. There is no “winning” in the Middle East especially in same way as there’s no winning in arguing with a girlfriend, or fighting anime accounts online. Strutting in like conquerors when you’re not conquerors is going to be humiliating no matter how successful the military operations are: what is being achieved, and for who?

Otherwise, if there are real risks, and not journalists’ hysteria about Iran the suicide-bomber nation that will blow up the world, explain clearly and explicitly what these risks are. Unfortunately, seeking a nuclear weapon for self-protection is, again, an entirely rational step for any country to take today given America’s erratic behavior starting especially in 2003.

Trump was elected in part as a corrective to America’s mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he should be respectfully reminded of this. I remember his debate in South Carolina where in front of an audience of mostly Evangelicals who were in large part veterans, or employees of the defense industry, he boldly shamed the GOP establishment, pointing out the stupidity and the lies behind the Iraq war. All the pundits who now ask him to get involved in Iran excoriated him at the time and predicted his political demise. But he won South Carolina in that primary by a large margin. I supported Trump, unlike others, from the day he announced almost ten years ago to the day in 2015. I hope Trump remembers this common sense position. America has nothing to gain by involvement in the retarded region of the Middle East. It should be abandoned.

Let them all annihilate each other. Let the region be covered with salt and populated by snakes for the historical infamies that arose from there.