A Long Way from Over

At least those questions have now been answered, though what is to come remains highly uncertain. All last week, various news outlets reported that President Trump wanted Israel to attack first, an absolutely absurd request from Israel’s point of view, as it would provide limitless fuel to those of right and left claiming nonsensically, as we shall see, that Israel controls American foreign policy. Happily, that did not come to pass, as the initial American and Israeli strikes were closely coordinated and simultaneous.

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S lead negotiator with the Iranians, Steve Witkoff, told Fox News last week that Trump was unable to understand Iran’s refusal to accept America’s demands for strict limits on its ballistic missile program and on its funding of terrorism, given the overwhelming firepower that the United States had mustered nearby. What he failed to understand is that the late and unlamented Ayatollah Khamenei operated according a theological-ideological calculus utterly foreign to Western definitions of rationality.

Haviv Rettig Gur, Israel’s foremost policy analyst, outlines that framework in a must-read article at the Free Press, “This Is How the Islamic Republic Falls.” That doctrine is called muquwama in Arabic. And it begins with “a sustained, never-ending campaign of violence accompanied by a willingness to absorb catastrophic levels of damage.”

It involves the sacralization of sacrifice as a means of obtaining divine favor and thereby allowing the pious weak to overcome the arrogant strong. In this view, “damage inflicted on the resistance is validation, and destruction is not defeat, but devotion.” The tens of thousands of children sent to their deaths as human minesweepers in the Iraq-Iran War, with a key to heaven around their necks, provides a classic example of sacrifice as devotion, sanctified by Al-lah.