Закреплённый твит
On the Iran strikes, the only legitimate vector of critique I can see at this moment is this:
Negotiation became impossible because of Netanyahu's decision to start bombing Iran for no visible reason. He started bombing Iran because he knew that it would ultimately leave Khamenei with no choice but to take negotiation off the table, which would leave Trump with no choice but to use force as leverage to bring the Iranians back.
If we assume that those were Netanyahu's calculations, then they were obviously correct. But Netanyahu is a violent war criminal, he's viciously evil, which means that there's a caveat: rewarding Netanyahu's foreign policy objective is always the worst possible outcome.
I'm sympathetic to this critique. But I'm not sympathetic to 99% of the criticism floating around Twitter, which is completely ignorant. We aren't in a war with Iran, we aren't going to be in a war with Iran; Iran isn't going to bomb us, we aren't going to put boots on the ground; we didn't kill anyone in the strikes, we didn't release any radiation in the strikes, all of this is nonsense. The world isn't any more dangerous today than it has been for the last 16 months. It's probably improved somewhat since Trump got into office, although I obviously don't think he's doing a good enough job on Gaza.
There's also the uncharacteristically dense critique from Massie that the strikes were unconstitutional - maybe by nineteenth-century standards. But we have about a dozen even more unconstitutional super-precedents. So it's not high on my list of concerns in that respect, even if it is unconstitutional, which I don't really think it is. Mainstream congressional Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries are only picking it up because it's their only way to criticize the strikes, which most of them actually support on a policy level. The Progressives, like Bernie and AOC, are only picking it up because they're attracted to the label of "bipartisan criticism" - obviously they don't care at all about unconstitutionality, they just reflexively oppose all military action. So nothing interesting from the Democrats, as usual.
Of course, all of this is irrelevant if something massively escalatory happens that I don't expect, for example if Iran kills U.S. troops in response. That would be very bad, and we would have to look back on Trump's decision with a much harsher gaze. But at this moment, I think that's very unlikely (c.f. Soleimani). We seem to be headed in the right direction: Iran will offer a token response and then come to the table, hopefully.
The only issue that makes me really uncomfortable, on some level, is the reality that we are continuing to reward Netanyahu's shrewd, genius, evil politics. If you want to say, "good for Netanyahu" = "bad for humanity", I can't really disagree. I just hope that in the end, once he's gone, we're at least in a more peaceful world as a result of the negotiations that Trump is trying to find. But I don't think his compass is broken.
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