Late Thursday night, the Israeli military launched a preemptive strike against Iran, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said targeted Iranian nuclear scientists, ballistic missile sites and Natanz, one of the country’s top enrichment facilities. The strike also reportedly killed the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, as well as several other top-ranking Iranian officers.
As the world anxiously waits to see if Israel’s strike against Iran dramatically increases the possibility of a greater conflict or all-out regional war, with America soon targeted along with Israel, it is worth noting that there was an aggressive lobbying campaign directed at the White House by various neocons and “hawks” with the goal of Israel taking just such an action. Did they have information no one else had, or were they running on raw and potentially inflammatory emotion?
Earlier this week, Politico ran a piece headlined, “Inside the MAGA vs. hawk battle to sway Trump on bombing Iran.” The article begins, “An influential group of GOP hawks has launched a behind-the-scenes lobbying offensive pressing President Donald Trump to not only back off his administration’s quest for a nuclear deal with Iran, but greenlight an attack on Tehran by Israel.”
This group was not only lobbying Trump to give the “wink and nod” to Israel to attack, but worse, were trying to scuttle the president’s ongoing negotiations to get a nuclear deal with Iran and to bring peace to the region.
Lobbying against the elimination of a nuclear threat and against peace. The world has surely turned upside down.
Be it Iraq in the past or Ukraine and Iran now, there never seems to be a shortage of those advocating either for the U.S. to put “boots on the ground” in a “forever war,” for another nation’s young soldiers to march into the teeth of a vicious war machine, or for the U.S. to use another nation as a proxy to preemptively attack a “rogue state.” These calls always seem to emanate from thousands of miles from the battlefield, within the safety and luxury of elitist bubbles. But at what cost to the world if such an action leads to a miscalculation that triggers a nuclear weapon strike?
What does a “nuclear weapon strike” even mean? Many people — including those hawkish politicians, pundits and members of the media — have simply forgotten the truly horrifying aftermath of a nuclear weapon. Or perhaps they never knew or simply view the macabre process of accidentally or purposefully initiating a nuclear weapons strike as part of the board game they are playing with others from the privileged and protected class.
Whatever the reason, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard rightfully decided that it was critically important to remind the ignorant or the reckless of the nightmarish reality of a nuclear weapons strike. Earlier this week, she posted a video doing just that.
“I recently visited Hiroshima in Japan,” Gabbard said, “and stood at the epicenter of a city that remains scarred by the unimaginable horror caused by a single nuclear bomb dropped in 1945, 80 years ago … This attack obliterated the city, killed over 300,000 people, many dying instantly, while others died from severe burns, injuries, radiation, sickness and cancer that set in in the following months and years. … Yet this one bomb that caused so much destruction in Hiroshima was tiny compared to today’s nuclear bombs. The bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of just 15 kilotons of TNT, whereas today’s nuclear warheads range in size from 100 kilotons to over one megaton. A single nuclear weapon today could kill millions in just minutes.”
For years, various hawks and neocons have been claiming that “Iran is just weeks away from having a nuclear weapon.” No sane person wants Iran to get a nuclear weapon. But at some point, the Chicken Little “sky is falling” cries must be questioned.
Tucker Carlson decided to question them in a very big and public way. Carlson wrote in a post on X, “There is zero credible intelligence that suggests Iran is anywhere near building a bomb or has plans to. None. Anyone who claims otherwise is ignorant or dishonest … there are very few Trump voters who’d support a regime change war in Iran. Donald Trump has argued loudly against reckless lunacy like this. Trump ran for president as a peace candidate. That’s what made him different from conventional Republicans. It’s why he won.
Going back to the disastrous war in Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the drumbeat for war from certain hawks and neocons was that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” and was prepared to use them. We know now that was false. As it turned out, Saddam was playing a cat-and-mouse game of pretending he had such weapons for his own means, which backfired on him and his nation.
Were the leaders of Iran playing the same game? A bluff that forced Israel to launch a preemptive strike for its own protection? Most believe escalating retaliatory attacks by Iran will follow. As Iran strikes out at Israel, does it also order its murderous terrorist proxies to target the U.S.? Where does such escalation stop? Could a nuclear strike be triggered?
Be it Ukraine or Iran, Trump has long warned against the horrors of nuclear war. During the World Economic Forum in January, the president said with regard to nuclear weapons, “the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it. It’s too depressing. ”
It is “too depressing” — which is seemingly why Gabbard chose to amplify Trump’s repeated warnings via her video, which closed with these words: “So it’s up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness. We must reject this path to nuclear war and work toward a world where no one has to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust.”
The “madness” just got exponentially dialed up. Our “fear” has increased. Trump, Gabbard and Carlson are on the correct side of this issue.
Since when did trying to prevent a nuclear war — deliberate or via hubris or miscalculation — become “isolationist” or “controversial?” Arm-chair warriors need to understand that reasoned restraint is the moral and sane path to take — before it’s too late.
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official.