Politicians don’t often speak for their country – correction, our politicians don’t often speak for our country. But, yesterday, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said yesterday:
“We need to have a serious conversation about what the fuck is happening to this country, and who in the hell are these decisions being made for, and who is making these decisions.”
Good question.
For once, an American politician accidentally stumbled onto the central mystery of our current political system: who exactly is making the decisions that lead the United States into catastrophic wars? Because if one listens carefully to the explanations now being offered by the Trump administration and its allies in Congress, the answer seems astonishingly clear.
It isn’t the American people. It isn’t Congress. It isn’t the President of the United States. Instead, according to the administration’s own account, the timing of this war was effectively chosen in Jerusalem.
The admission is remarkable. According to reports circulating in Washington, Trump privately told Tucker Carlson that he had “no choice but to join” the Israeli attack that was already going to happen. Secretary of State Marco Rubio then repeated the same basic argument publicly on Capitol Hill: Israel was going to strike Iran regardless, therefore the United States had to act first to avoid suffering casualties.
In other words, the world’s most powerful military superpower was compelled to launch a pre-emptive war because a small foreign country had decided to begin one. If that explanation is true, it represents one of the most extraordinary confessions of geopolitical subordination in modern history.
Imagine an American president explaining that Canada had forced the United States into war with Russia. Or that Denmark had dictated the timing of a U.S. military assault on China. The idea would be absurd. Yet when Israel is involved, Washington’s political class suddenly treats the situation as normal.
Even some members of Congress seem to recognize the bizarre nature of this arrangement. Senator Mark Warner bluntly described the situation as Israel “wagging the dog,” acknowledging that the timeline of the conflict had been dictated by Israel’s goals rather than America’s interests.
This admission cuts directly through the fog of official propaganda. Because the Trump administration’s explanations for the war collapse under even minimal scrutiny. We are told the war was necessary because Iran’s missile and drone arsenal would become too large within a year or two. That is not an imminent threat; it is a hypothetical future problem. The Constitution was designed precisely to prevent presidents from launching wars on such speculative grounds. If the danger were truly so grave, the administration could have done the obvious: go to Congress and request authorization. They did not. Instead they launched the attack first and searched for explanations afterward.
The result has been a cascade of contradictory talking points. Some officials claim we are defending Israel. Others insist we are preventing nuclear proliferation. Some say we are responding to terrorism. Others claim we are merely protecting American troops.
Still others, like Senator Markwayne Mullin, have attempted the most comical argument of all: that the United States is somehow not at war.
This kind of rhetorical nonsense is always a sign that the underlying policy cannot withstand serious examination. After all, the facts are obvious. American aircraft and missiles are striking targets across Iran. Iranian missiles are striking American bases. American servicemen have already died. If this is not a war, the English language has lost its meaning.
The deeper question remains: why did it happen now? The administration’s official explanation—that Iran posed an “untenable threat”—is almost comically vague. It is not a legal argument. It is not even a strategic argument. It is simply a phrase designed to sound alarming while saying nothing specific. And that emptiness is revealing. Because the most plausible explanation lies not in any sudden change in Iranian behavior but in the political dynamics of Washington itself.
For decades, regime change in Tehran has been the central strategic objective of Israel’s leadership. Iran represents the only major regional power capable of resisting Israeli dominance of the Middle East. Removing that obstacle has therefore been a persistent goal of Israeli policy. That objective has now merged with the interests of the American military-industrial complex, which thrives on endless war, and with the political incentives of American leaders facing domestic crises.
The result is the familiar machinery of intervention: a buildup of forces, a media campaign about imminent threats, and finally the inevitable “pre-emptive” strike. The American public has seen this movie many times before. Iraq was supposed to possess weapons of mass destruction. Libya was supposedly a humanitarian intervention. Afghanistan was supposed to defeat terrorism.
Each war was sold with great confidence. Each produced chaos and failure. Iran will not be different. Indeed, the scale of the potential disaster is far greater. Iran is a country of nearly 90 million people with extensive missile capabilities and regional alliances. It has spent decades preparing for precisely this scenario. American bases across the Gulf sit within easy range of retaliation, and the Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows—could become a battlefield overnight.
Yet Washington has launched the conflict anyway. And perhaps the most revealing fact of all is the administration’s inability to explain what victory would actually look like. Destroy Iran’s missiles? That would require a massive and prolonged campaign against dispersed and hardened facilities. Prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons? Bombing a country rarely eliminates its motivation to acquire them. Topple the regime? That fantasy has already failed in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.
In other words, the United States has once again entered a war without a coherent political objective. So Marjorie Taylor Greene’s crude question may turn out to be the most honest statement made by an American politician in years.
What exactly is happening to this country? Why are these decisions being made?
And—most important of all—who are they really being made for?
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
US political objective is clear-clear coherent. Remove the mullahs from power so they are not able to fulfill their oft-stated goal of “Death to Israel! Death to the US!” The mullah’s plan is to rebuild their missile arsenal to the point that this provides a shield, behind which they can build nuclear weapons. Then mount the nukes on missiles to hit the US and Israel.
Israel didn’t start this war with Iran. For decades, Israelis have been attacked by Iran’s paid proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis. So, the threat is not just “imminent”, it has been and is ongoing. What raised the stakes most recently, and triggered the resumption of the war in Gaza, was the Iran-led and Iran-financed attack by Hamas that killed 1200 unarmed Israelis, many attending a peace concert (a much higher proportion of Israel’s population than 9/11 was for America). ~200 were taken hostage (including some US citizens), subjecting them to brutal treatment including gang rapes and mutilation. Hezbollah has been routinely firing missiles into Israel, deliberately targeting civilians. Houthis have been hurting the world economy by shooting at merchant ships, interfering with traffic through the strategic Suez Canal. Iran has also deployed IEDs that killed and maimed thousands of American soldiers.
Israel has the right to self-defense. The US doesn’t have the moral authority to intervene to prevent Israel from defending itself. Your anti-interventionism is selective and applied when it helps defend Jews or Americans but not when it hurts them. If the US had not joined Israel’s attack, Iran would have had more capacity to attack and more Americans would have died.
You have selected Marjorie Taylor Greene as your foreign policy guru. That’s the same MTG who speculated that California wildfires might have been caused by a space-based energy weapon, allegedly linked to a wealthy Jewish banking family. Your “@#!*”rhetoric does not add credibility to her “Jewish space lasers” theory.