Getting Real

The 12-day air war between Israel and Iran, with a brief cameo bombing by the United States on three of Iran’s nuclear enrichment and weapons sites, appears to be coming to an undramatic end. It is unclear which is more stunning: the power of the Israeli assault and their intelligence operations, or the weakness and porousness of the Iranian regime. Within hours, the Israelis had achieved air dominance over western Iran and Tehran. For some perspective, Israel is a country of barely 9 million people; Iran has 90 million. For more perspective, in three years of war between Russia (population 140 million) and Ukraine (population less than 40 million), the Russians never achieved air dominance.

In the roughly 20 months since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has redefined the strategic landscape of the Middle East. However you view the situation in Gaza (whether you believe, as does former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, that Israel is committing ongoing and unremitting war crimes there, or you believe that the destruction of Gaza should be blamed first on Hamas), the assaults by Israel on Hamas, Hezbollah and now Iran have shattered the Iranian axis in the Middle East. Iran’s client in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, has fled. Only the Houthis in northern Yemen remain relatively unscathed, but they are also backing down. Iran still retains considerable sway over Iraqi politics through its patronage of Shi’i political parties and militias, but the recent devastation to Iran’s military capabilities by Israeli drones and planes may well weaken that influence.

The focus on Israel’s devastation of Gaza has obscured the fact that, for decades, large swaths of the Middle East have been dominated by groups dedicated to the physical eradication of Israel and to the dark revolutionary transformation of Arab society into fundamentalist regimes akin to the Taliban in Afghanistan and ISIS in its brief heyday in Iraq and Syria—groups whose goal is the enshrinement of an authoritarian, narrow, anachronistic, and brutal interpretation of Islam. These groups have never represented anything near a majority of public sentiment, but their zeal and willingness to use cinematic violence have allowed them to gain significant, albeit fleeting, power. We will see how long the Taliban endure in Afghanistan, but the mullocracy in Iran has long since lost any moral and religious legitimacy at home and relies on a combination of terror and corruption to retain control.

The Middle East should stand as a reality check for those of us deeply agitated by ‘goings-on’ domestically in the United States. There is a spectrum of human behavior and governance. I have and will continue to call out the many and manifold ways that the United States has violated the rights of citizens that it claims to uphold and breaks the international laws that it swears it honors. That has happened repeatedly long before the First and Second Seasons of the Trump Show. But in sheer proportional terms, it is ridiculous to compare what is going on in the United States today with what has long been the norm in much of the heartland of the Middle East.

The combined effects of ISIS and Assad’s regime in Syria displaced half of Syria’s 22 million people, led to at least 500,000 civilian deaths, inflicted untold torture, and destroyed ancient cities such as Aleppo. By some estimates, it will be 50 years before Syria returns to the GDP level it had prior to 2011. The U.S. invasion and half-hearted occupation of Iraq after 2003 led to another 500,000 civilian deaths in the ensuing civil war between Shi’i and Sunni factions. Hezbollah’s ascendancy in Lebanon stabilized some aspects of daily life in the south of the country but also prevented any viable Lebanese government from addressing the needs of the nation as a whole. The Houthi civil war in Yemen, coupled with Saudi Arabia’s ham-fisted bombing campaign, caused hundreds of thousands more deaths. Then there are the post-Qaddafi civil wars in Libya and the repressive government of Sisi in Egypt after the 2011 Arab Spring, along with the newly returned Taliban in Afghanistan.

The mantra of the groups Iran funded was a loose combination of theocratic absolutism draconianly enforced and the stated goal of eradicating Israel. Their anti-Israel language was sometimes subdued in favor of demanding a more equitable solution to the statelessness of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza, but these groups never abandoned the terror and brutality they used to silence dissent in the populations they ruled.

And that silencing wasn’t subtle or procedural the way dissent is silenced by Fidesz and Victor Orban in Hungary, let alone the Trumplandia attempts to rattle its critics with frivolous yet punitive lawsuits and regulatory harassment. It was deadly, deathly. It was rounding people up and killing them, or torturing them, denying families the right to bury the victims, and turning those victims into symbols and reminders, like the bodies hanging on the wall in the fictional state of Gilead in the Handmaid’s Tale.

Getting real means recognizing that, no matter how shrill the language used to condemn what happens domestically in the United States or Europe, there is simply no comparison with these realities. However one characterizes Israel in Gaza, it remains a democracy behaving according to the rule of law domestically, with full rights to 2 million non-Jewish Arab citizens. In a similar vein, the wanton destruction of Iraq perpetrated by the United States in toppling Saddam Hussein left America a functional democracy at home, even with the gross human and civil rights violations against Arab-Americans and Arab immigrants in the United States under the Patriot Act (now echoed by the Trump administration against various undocumented immigrants and some legal ones).

This perspective matters. Deeply. If you were an alien plopped into the United States today and listened only to the hyperbolic rhetoric of partisans on all sides, you might think we were living in Syria, with society literally coming apart amid wanton destruction of life, property, and community. Trump declares that Los Angeles would be “completely obliterated” without the National Guard, as if it were some American Aleppo. Harvard professor Steven Levitsky co-authors an article in Foreign Affairs about the death of American democracy and the new authoritarianism in language not much different than how one would characterize Turkey today, and Turkey today is almost benign compared to Egypt today, making the language issue even more acute. The United States is vastly freer and more open than either place, or than Hungary or Singapore for that matter. Hyperbolic language flattens these distinctions.

It cuts other ways as well of course. The United States bombs Iran, and the government claims it isn’t war, and other countries support that dodge, even though any country that gets bombed tends to think of itself as “at war” with whomever is doing the bombing. Language can sugarcoat just as much as it can exaggerate.

The reality of the Middle East should stand as a stark reminder that the language we use to describe domestic affairs in the United States—at least in the public square—is woefully out of whack. Just because someone screams and uses extreme language doesn’t make what they’re screaming true. The United States is messed up, no doubt, but not in the way, or to the degree, we so often claim. Ask anyone in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, South Sudan—ask anywhere. The answers should make us think twice about how we talk about our own problems.