Almost exact­ly five years ago, the first post on this site includ­ed the quote:.“ And so, to the end of his­to­ry, mur­der shall breed mur­der, always in the name of right and hon­our and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and cre­ate a race that can under­stand.” The Iran war encap­su­lates the gods task in one word: futile.
That’s because “right, hon­our and peace” have no bear­ing on it. The civil­ian vic­tims, both in Iran and Israel, are treat­ed as a con­se­quence of defeat­ing evil, and there­fore the fault of the oth­er side.
Unless it suits their nar­ra­tive, the moun­te­banks in charge offer lit­tle more than pass­ing ref­er­ence and empa­thy to the human con­se­quences. The dead, maimed, wound­ed, wid­owed, orphaned and trau­ma­tised, the mounds of rub­ble that were once homes, busi­ness­es, hopes and dreams, are an adden­dum at best.
Vic­tim­hood and suf­fer­ing are por­trayed and mea­sured by the effects on those far from the front lines and tar­get zones.
The scale is  “pay­ing at the pumps”, tum­bling stocks indices, adverse effects on food prices and any­thing else that might in some way detract from our sense of secu­ri­ty and well-being.
Mil­i­tary briefers pre­fer to dwell on the means to reach and jus­ti­fy their ends.
Rev­el­ling in his vain­glo­ri­ous title of Sec­re­tary of War, Pete Hegseth snarls out num­bers of tar­gets struck and vows of “death and destruc­tion from above.”. Oh, and can he please have anoth­er $200 bil­lion, because: “Obvi­ous­ly, it takes mon­ey to kill bad guys,”
Any thoughts about the inno­cent, Your War­ness? Oth­er than denial of any cul­pa­bil­i­ty that is.

                           DEFINING WINNING

Israel’s inter­pre­ta­tion of rea­son­able cost seems to be to dri­ve Iran into what it calls “state col­lapse” by relent­less­ly decap­i­tat­ing the polit­i­cal, mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence hier­ar­chy and destroy­ing its main source of revenue.
One would think that a nation with one of the most sophis­ti­cat­ed (and in the case of Iran appar­ent­ly per­va­sive and deep-pen­e­trat­ing) intel­li­gence ser­vices in the world, and can boast that  22 per­cent of all Nobel prize win­ners since 1901 are of Jew­ish ori­gin, Israel would have fig­ured out the futil­i­ty of seek­ing long term secu­ri­ty through war.
How­ev­er, between 1978 and 2024, Israeli invad­ed Lebanon six times, and declared vic­to­ry after each one.
Round 7, to try (again) to destroy Iran’s proxy Hezbol­lah, will no doubt end that way too.
Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Binyamin Netanyahu has said the war against Iran will take “as long as necessary”.
But Israeli Jews, more than any oth­er peo­ple in the world, ought to know that the will to fight for the place you call your coun­try can­not be exterminated.
Nor, in my expe­ri­ence of the march of fol­ly that human­i­ty seems set on, can the resilience of inno­cent vic­tims to plow on against  all odds, be extinguished.
By what ought to be a won­der­ful coin­ci­dence, today marks the first of four man­i­fes­ta­tions of a force that unites the pro­tag­o­nists and vic­tims of the Iran con­flict — grat­i­tude for what they see as bless­ings, all from the same God.
Today is Eid al-Fitr, the end of the Moslem holy month of Ramadan, an occa­sion to express grat­i­tude for bless­ings, and  extend  com­pas­sion and gen­eros­i­ty to others.
It is also Nowruz, the Per­sian new year, a 3,000 year old tra­di­tion that cel­e­brates the spring equinox, the end of dark­ness and the rebirth of nature.
Next in line is Passover (Pesach), which cel­e­brates the eman­ci­pa­tion of the Hebrews from Egypt­ian slavery.
And in the mid­dle that eight day cel­e­bra­tion, is East­er, when Chris­tians mark their belief in the death and res­ur­rec­tion of Christ.
And there­in lies an iron­ic clue to the futil­i­ty of war.
It always entails destruc­tion, yet peo­ple keep rebuild­ing, no mat­ter who knocks them down.
The Ira­ni­ans may despise their lead­ers, and dream of a new order, but they are unlike­ly to for­give and for­get what is being done to them under the guise of help­ing them attain it.
It also seems not to have reg­is­tered with either Netanyahu or Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, that for all their claims of hav­ing dec­i­mat­ed the Iranian’s capa­bil­i­ty to fight back, they are show­ing a remark­able deter­mi­na­tion to do so, with no appar­ent con­cern about con­se­quences, short or long term.
How do you set a dead­line for and define vic­to­ry against that incar­na­tion of folly?
The win­ning entry — if only for its unselfconscious ambi­gu­i­ty — is this one from an Op-Ed in the New York Times:
“At least anoth­er two weeks of attacks will be nec­es­sary to ensure the regime can­not pose a seri­ous mil­i­tary threat for sev­er­al years — if it sur­vives at all. Forc­ing the threat from Tehran into remis­sion cer­tain­ly would con­sti­tute a mil­i­tary vic­to­ry, arguably the Unit­ed States’ first in Iran since 1979.”
If  “remis­sion” is vic­to­ry, does that mean the gods’ job is done?
Ask me in anoth­er five years.

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