Bombs are the wrong tool

“If I had a hammer
I’d hammer in the morning. . .
I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over the land. . .”

Original song by Pete Seeger, 1949, with these revised lyrics by Peter, Paul, and Mary, 1962

The United States has a hammer.

I was in junior high school when I sang along with Peter, Paul, and Mary in my parents’ Chrysler Newport with its AM radio. I never thought about whether a hammer generated love. In adulthood I learned that we often have the wrong tool.

As a financial advisor I learned everyone has problems, even prosperous people. The frustration for prosperous old people is that their money, wonderful as it is, rarely fixes their most pressing problems: their own declining health and the mistakes their children and grandchildren make.

This comes to mind because of our war with Iran. The U.S. faces a real problem, exacerbated by our ally Israel and the tribal and religious schisms of the Abrahamic religions. The U.S. has a legitimate wish, that the countries of the Middle East all get along with one another, with Israel, and with the West, and that Iran in particular not be a hostile power. Ideally, it would be a region of Switzerland-style countries. That is impossible, alas. The countries’ national consciousnesses are centered around their own particular form of religion, and each is sure that God and justice is on their side.

The U.S. is stuck in this insolvable mess because we and the world need the oil that comes out of the region; because the U.S. has political and emotional ties to Israel; and because the U.S. has a guilty history with Iran. Many Americans have forgotten that we organized a coup to overturn the democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953 and installed a pro-West dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in its place; Iranians have not forgotten. In 1979 they staged a revolution against that dictator, energized by revenge against the U.S. We are still dealing with the aftermath of this history.

President Trump has a tool: the U.S. military. He -- or rather “we,” because most of this blog’s readers are Americans and our polity elected him -- is using it to bomb Iran. The USA can destroy nearly anything we want anywhere in the world, an extraordinary tool. We have bombed military sites and oil facilities. Trump announced that he planned to destroy the civilian electric and water infrastructure of Iran, which might well result in millions of civilian deaths if water-borne diseases spread in the absence of clean water and sanitation. That action may be popular in Israel and among many in the U.S. After all, they are Muslim, believers in the wrong prophet.

Bombing Iran is almost certainly the wrong tool to get what the U.S. wants: a friendly Iran, or failing that, a perpetually harmless Iran. Either would require an Iran with government legitimacy formed around something other than anger at the U.S. and Israel. Bombing Iran and eliminating its leaders, including ones with the potential of forming a government dedicated to anything but revenge against the U.S., is the least likely way to get the Iran government we want.

The potential new government dangled by the West is a return of the dictatorship we established in 1953, in the form of Pahlavi’s son. How likely would it have been in the U.S., 50 years after our revolution, to welcome back a British monarch to replace James Madison? The answer, if we remember our own history, is that we fought a new war against the British, the War of 1812. They burned down our White House, but they did not get regime change.

Israel squandered much of the goodwill Americans felt toward it in the decades after WWII. Israel appears to be yet another intransigent belligerent in a region of diehard tribal zealots, in a cycle of new vengeance for past vengeance. Scorched-earth bombing may be in Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s political interest. I expect it is. Trump let the U.S. be the impetuous hammer for Israel’s foreign policy. We confirm to Iran and the Muslim world that we are the “Great Satan” being led by the “Little Satan.” Our bombs won’t hammer out love, peace, and justice. The war we are waging isn’t a move toward reconciliation, or a lasting anything, except more war.

Good goal. Wrong tool. President Biden got played by Netanyahu. Trump is getting played even worse.