A Terrible Jam in Iran

Country Joe nailed it then and now

Well come on all of you big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
He's got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Iran...

Or maybe I’ve forgotten some of the lyrics, but it goes something like that.

If John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Give Peace a Chance” moved the world with its simple and direct appeal for sanity, Country Joe McDonald’s “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” provided a generation with the barbed sarcasm that unveiled the deep insanity of the war in Vietnam:

Be the first one on your block
to have your box come home in a box

Humor doesn’t get more acerbic than that, and it tore open the psychological wound that was Vietnam. Country Joe nailed it like a modern Jonathan Swift, and in four short verses he also pulled apart the military-industrial complex -

There’s plenty of good money to be made
Selling the army the tools of the trade

and the desperate anti-Communist logic of the massive murder spree.

On Saturday, March 7, Joe Allen McDonald finally made good on his threat to die, just as his most famous song once again became sadly relevant, all but lending its rhyme scheme to the latest Vietnam.

The Persian Wars

Only muted opposition was heard to the U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, mostly on grounds of international law and effectiveness. Obviously the bombing of a nation with whom we are not at war has no legal basis, and the degree of damage that the strikes inflicted was never fully ascertained, in spite of Trump’s usual bluster. But anxiety over the possibility of a nuclear-armed fundamentalist regime with a virulent anti-Western bias and an ongoing mission to destabilize as much of the Middle East as possible is probably far more widespread than either nations or individuals will explicitly say.

Iran may have Israel in its sights, but having hijacked one of the world’s oldest civilizations in the service of a Jihadist mission to rid the Middle East of western influence, the Ayatollahs and their followers are unpredictable actors on the world stage. We are already dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea; no one wants to see Iran under its present leadership join the club of fanatical cults with weapons that can destroy civilization. It’s not that anyone is complacent about the nuclear capabilities of the U.S. and Russia, or others with the ability to wipe out millions in a first strike; but an ideologically driven nation like Iran cannot be neatly weighed on the balance scale of nuclear offsets, and nuclear instability is the devil itself in international relations. So it was hard to argue with setting back the Iranian nuclear program as much as possible, even if one had to suppress a gag reflex at watching Trump and Bibi take on the task.

This time, when the current war began, there was initially a similar sense that “they had it coming”. No decent human being would fret much over the targeted death of Ayatollah Khameini, Iranian Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh, and commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Mohammed Pakpour, who had so much blood on their hands that their own would barely fill an eyedropper in comparison. They had just murdered thousands of protesters, and their long list of crimes against humanity stretches across the entire region. Once again, it wasn’t exactly a “Let’s toast Donald Trump” moment, if there is such a thing; it was a moment when you could only manage a shrug as the world’s rogue leaders took potshots at one another.

But this is a different moment. What is clear now is that Trump and his alcoholic Secretary of War, delusional to begin with, and now infused with an inflated sense of their own power after the successful rendering of Venezuelan dictator Maduro, thought they could impose regime change on Iran by selective bombing of the nation’s capitol, some Revolutionary Guard outposts, infrastructure and oil refineries. Imagining that Iranians would rise up to welcome American-sponsored mayhem, they are essentially demanding that the regime abdicate. The likelihood of that is indicated by the installation of Khameini’s son, a product of the far right Revolutionary Guards, as the new Supreme Leader. The Guards are now more or less directly in power, and if there were no holds barred before, in the context of a regime under attack they have both the means and the will to commit more massacres in order to stay in power.

Trump’s threat to put “boots on the ground” is serious, and far more disturbing even than the invasion of Iraq. His objectives in Iran can’t possibly succeed. This is not Kuwait, it is an extremely well-armed, well-organized nation of 90 million people, where the IRGC alone has four to five times the number of people under arms that Hamas had at its peak - and Hamas, in their tiny strip of land, has not been fully defeated even with a lot of Israeli boots on the ground. The Iranian military is estimated to have well over half a million personnel, and they also have a significant number of paramilitary forces known as the Basij. We are looking at a total of nearly a million fighters, not to mention a significant air force, drones, missiles and a small navy. This is not a nation to take as a joke. The U.S.- Israeli assault would have to be kept up for years, with no more hope of regime change than Putin has of turning back the Orange Revolution.

Is Trump actually contemplating an invasion that would dwarf the U.S. peak ground force of 170,000 in Iraq? This former isolationist, who once canceled a retaliatory bombing mission due to the projected loss of life, who campaigned against U.S. interventionism and objected to the expense of helping Ukraine resist an invasion, is now the nuclear-armed cowboy of the West.

Image produced by ChatGPT

But almost as soon as he threatened an invasion, the typically delusional President backed away from the idea. Pete Hegseth, that insult to the national intelligence, had the gall to say we “reserve the right” to send in the troops, pathetically assuming that we have the “right” to do any of what we are currently doing in Iran. This is not about rights, and the fact is that we don’t have a clue what it is about - even conservative podcaster Joe Rogan says “we can’t even really clearly define why we did it” and calls the war “nuts”, saying that “a lot of people feel betrayed”.

I think people on the left tend to write off antiwar sentiments among Trump’s supporters, because their opposition often has more to do with footing the bill than a concern for international justice. But whatever motivates it, Trump’s turn from the critic of “forever wars” to his status as warmonger-in-chief is causing him to lose support even among stalwart followers. Public support for any action against Iran is low, and for ground troops extremely low, while Trump’s already low approval rating has dipped since the attacks.

That can only be a good thing, but the price in lives is not the way we would like to dispatch this would-be American Ayatollah and his party of sycophants. Most of those lives have been Iranian, with no good count of how many could even be considered supporters of the regime. But with Iran striking 17 U.S. sites so far, seven Americans dead and 140 wounded, 11 Israelis dead, as well as casualties in Arab states, this is only going to get worse.

Lost bearings and loose cannons on the left

The general disorientation of the left on all things Middle Eastern continues and deepens with the latest assault. Some leftist supporters of Israel are for the most part pleased with Trump’s undeclared and unauthorized war. Iran had it coming; Iran would destroy Israel if it could; Iran sponsors terrorism throughout the region; Iran would only have rebuilt its nuclear program. All true, but politics is a place for cold, objective logic, not wishful thinking. These attacks will not help Israel very much if at all, and will harden Iranian resistance to control by the West, not embolden the forces of democracy. They will quite possibly make the lives of ordinary Iranians worse - those, that is, who are not collateral damage in what is so far mainly an air war. The only objectives anyone can make out for the attacks is to distract the nation from the rolling revelations about Trump’s ties with the late Supreme Abuser Jeffrey Epstein. Other than that it is gratuitous violence - maybe with the hope of scoring some more oil, but even that cynical objective is unlikely.

Others have cited attacks on the U.S. via Iran’s proxies. This is true, but the attacks have inflicted very little damage. Border skirmishes between nations all over the world have resulted in far more casualties without escalating into all-out war. It is hypocritical to argue that Iran’s indirect responsibility for attacks by Iraqi rebels, the Houthis or Hezbollah constitute a justification for a massive bombing campaign, which is not to say they don’t constitute a rationale for it. But Trump’s aggressive new foreign policy does not always have a rationale, and in any case, to the extent that there is a one it is primarily Iran’s nuclear program.

The lack of any real justification for ongoing U.S. aggression has led to the claim that Israel is really pulling the strings. In spite of Trump’s assertion that he actually forced Netanyahu’s hand, the age-old trope about Jews secretly controlling the world has taken on its latest form as an effort to blame Israel for acts by the U.S. war machine. A Marine veteran was forcibly removed from Congress after a one-man protest that involved him repeatedly shouting, “No one wants to fight for Israel!”

It is typical of these times that it is almost impossible to distinguish the anti-Israeli stance of people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes from those on the left for whom Israel is the Evil Empire. Thus, according to Jacobin magazine,

It’s part of a dark money–backed network of neoconservatives and Israel lobbyists that has been working quietly over the past year to push the Trump administration to launch a military intervention in Iran…

Those dark-money Jews have done it again. The DSA paper In These Times similarly affirms that “Netanyahu has worked strenuously to ensure negotiations with Iran did not succeed, and thereby scupper his wish to break the Islamic Republic.” The link in that quote is to a NY Times report, and it is worth looking at it more closely, because it shows that many on the left see what they want to see, and what they want to see is the Jewish pushcart leading the American stallion.

The article begins with a summary line below the title: “President Trump’s embrace of military action in Iran was spurred by an Israeli leader determined to end diplomatic negotiations.” But the content of the article does not justify this editorial claim, in spite of making points that could mislead the reader into believing this. There is no doubt, of course, that Israel is the nation most directly threatened by Iran, at least of those whose sovereignty Iran’s proxies have not already undermined, like Lebanon and Yemen. But Iran and its proxies have frequently attacked not only the U.S. directly but our allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. As I said, it is not enough to justify a war, but Trump didn’t need Israel if what he wanted was a war anyway. Greenland, Panama, Canada - didn’t quite work out. Venezuela - now we’re getting somewhere. Iran - there’s a target no one would want to defend.

Israel absolutely wants the nuclear program scuttled and the proxies weakened to the point where they no longer constitute serious threats to their security, but so do Trump and Iran’s numerous enemies in the Middle East. We should not forget, for example, that Saudi Arabia has fought a proxy war with the Houthis for many years. Neither Israel nor the “Israel lobby” is capable of leading the U.S. and all its Arab allies into a war unless they wanted it anyway.

So what is the evidence that Israel is leading the charge now? Three points are made in the Times investigation:

1. Rubio used this claim to justify Trump’s impending action to Congress, thinking they would be moved by the idea “that the United States should act in concert with Israel, since America would be dragged in anyway.” But Democrats in particular were not moved by it. Rubio apparently made a tactical error in twisting reality to drum up support, and ended up being contradicted by Trump.

2. Before launching the attack, Trump apparently told Tucker Carlson that he would be forced to act if Israel did. Carlson was nonplussed, being one of the leading voices on the right to insist that the U.S. hunker down, and screw Israel if they don’t like it. Trump obviously didn’t want to blurt out that he is no longer in the J.D. Vance isolationist camp and will bloody well bomb Iran if he damn pleases. Again, the tactic of blaming Israel didn’t work, but it was obviously just that, a tactic. Trump needs Carlson to stay moderately sympathetic, but doesn’t need him so much that he is going to abandon his campaign against Iranian nuclear capabilities because Carlson doesn’t like Israel, or Jews.

3. Netanyahu did not want Trump to sign a negotiated agreement with Iran; he wanted Iran disabled. Trump met with Netanyahu in December and discussed the possibility of resuming the attacks on Iran, and Netanyahu asked him to wait until Israeli defenses were more secure. Great maniacs think alike, okay? There is nothing in this that suggests Netanyahu has the ability to force Trump’s hand.

Trump would love it if he could end Islamic extremism with a snap of his fingers, and so would a lot of other people in both Israel and the U.S. But the convergence of interests is no proof that Israel, highly dependent on the U.S. economically, militarily and diplomatically, is able to twist the arm of the most pigheaded president in history. Let’s recall that it was Trump who scuttled Obama’s non-proliferation agreement with Iran during his first term in office. He and his negotiators (Kushner and Steve Witkoff) have long pushed for Iran to completely forego the enrichment of Uranium. The article depicts Trump as having basically given up hope that they would do so, and ready to go to war if they didn’t. It also it makes clear that the belief that the attacks could lead to regime change was his own fantasy; no one who really understands the Middle East or Iran would have been that clueless.

But if the left has a perverse tendency to agree that the Jews control the world (if it’s not Netanyahu then it’s AIPAC, which is even more ridiculous), some defenders of Israel have taken positions too morally depraved for me to begin to sympathize with. Some rushed to justify the bombing of an elementary school for girls, in which more than 170 children and teachers died, on the ground that it was part of an IRGC complex. What is the logic here? “We had every right to bomb the complex, how should we know they had a school there?” Please. We had no such right to do any such thing in the first place, so our poor intelligence is no justification for a war crime.

Indeed, some actually seemed to go further: it was an IRGC training ground, fair game isn’t it? “The kids are just future suicide bombers anyway, right?” The school, in fact, does not seem to have been connected with the IRGC except by proximity (and their overall influence on education); and this is a depraved argument anyway. Logic of this sort wasn’t even used by the most vocal supporters of Israel’s tactics in Gaza; instead, it was usually objected either that the death toll was exaggerated by Hamas, or the missiles didn’t come from Israel, or it was an accident, etc. Trump, in fact, initially claimed that an Iranian missile hit the school. The attack on the school was very likely a result of misidentifying it as part of the IRGC facility; yet some unconscionable defenders of the war applied essentially the same logic as the equally unconscionable defenders of the October 7 massacre: the kids were part of the regime, they were future soldiers, they’re fair game. Shades of Vietnam -

Gotta go out and get those reds
Cause the only good Commie is one that’s dead

Thanks again, Country Joe. Substitute “Islamist” for “Commie” and you have the political logic of this disturbing position.

Quite a few leftwing critics of the anti-Zionist movement went all out in defense of every Israeli military action during the Gaza war. That was bad enough - to say it was “not genocide” does not mean it was morally acceptable. But the posts I am seeing on Facebook suggest that some of these anti-anti-Zionists have now gone full-on pro-imperialist, backing Trump’s naked aggression, as if the Trump-Hegseth-Rubio axis were a legitimate vehicle to correct the wrongs of the Islamic Republic. This badly compromises their critique of apologists for Islamic extremism. Many of them never adequately tempered that critique with an equally serious moral assessment of Israel’s crimes. But support for the gratuitous U.S. attack is a step over the line; they seem to have bought hook, line and sinker Trump’s own line that previous administrations have simply “kicked the ball down the road”, and the determined and righteous Trump is doing what should have been done long ago. Presumably they will be voting Republican this year, since the Dems are all but united against the war.

On the other hand, even more crackpot views come from corners of the left that increasingly sound like their membership is mostly undercover FBI agents. The Worker’s World Party (WWP), often a reliable barometer of off-the-wall extremes (they support the leadership of North Korea and have stood behind Belarus dictator Lukashenko), organized a rally to mourn the leader of the Islamofascist republic. Online they opined that, “Not only was Khamenei the beloved leader of the Iranian nation, but he was viewed as a respected leader of the Muslim world.” Right. Every authoritarian dictatorship is “beloved” by the people whose support results in privileges; the IRGC, for instance, control much of the nation’s oil production, shipping and other parts of the economy. Nice work if you can get it.

The second claim is not only sick to the extent it’s true, but it is also largely a distortion of reality. The only “respect” he ever had outside Iran is from Iranian proxies, but the strongest ones frankly didn’t always give a crap what he thought. The evidence suggests that Hamas leaders did not share plans for October 7 with Iran. The Houthis practice a different form of Shi’ite Islam from most Iranians, and Khameini was never their spiritual leader. Hezbollah grew powerful enough to all but run Lebanon, and operated largely on its own. Assad owed him nothing. Khameini was respected mainly in Iran, the way the barrel of a gun is respected.

The left has been dancing a bizarre tango with the Democratic Party, embracing them at a distance, joining them as internal critics, holding them responsible for what they did not prevent, boosting their tentative pushbacks, assailing their support for Israel, praising their support for Ukraine… and that is to say nothing of the incoherent stances of the WWP and their offshoots, or other self-styled purveyors of Marxist wisdom. Most Congressional Democrats have been staunchly opposed to the latest Iran adventure, and tried to pass a resolution that would prevent Trump from escalating without Congressional approval. That is, they tried to pass something that says the U.S. Constitution is still in effect, but were blocked by Republicans, though not without a handful of Dems who had their doubts.

I don’t know how or when this is going to end, but higher oil prices, higher interest rates and a significant stock market decline are already underway. The marauders presumably have enough bombs to keep dropping them for quite a while. In the long run I can only see them crawling away with egg on their faces, while claiming victory - easy to do when you have set no goals that you might fail to achieve. Trump had better go back to invading Greenland if he needs to boast of his military prowess; after all, our military is already there, he just needs to declare victory.

I also do not have any idea how or when the people of Iran will be able to rid themselves of the moral blot that is the (new) Khameini regime. A nationwide general strike, a significant armed revolutionary movement, defection of large numbers of RG’s, or massive protests that can overwhelm government offices - they all seem unlikely, though unlikelier things have happened. I only know that Iranian freedom will not be won with American bombs and Israeli missiles. There is no U.S. war of Iranian liberation, it’s a contradiction in terms, a political non-starter. Progressives, including those who reject the anti-Zionism of today’s radical left, need to say no to this misadventure.

***************************************************************

Fixin’ to listen

Country Joe’s famous Fish rag is hardly the only thing he wrote. Many of his songs were recorded on his solo albums, and some of these have been covered by other artists, including this one. I swear I picked it out completely at random. However, I should probably mention that if you were to go to Bandcamp and purchase this artist’s pro-environmental album Earth to America it will not make the author of The Lamppost any poorer. Listen all the way to the end of the track and you will be rewarded with one of the better fiddle solos by the mysterious Tony Ultimate, who is also the photographer responsible for all the images you see.