The “War” on Iran and the Extraordinary, Overreaching Hubris of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu

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When Ancient Greek thinkers first began analyzing and categorizing the world around them, the role human beings play in it, and the workings of the human body and the human mind, one enduring concept they came up with was hubris, conceived as a dangerous revolt against the natural order, whereby those who became so caught up in their own sense of self-importance — via “extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, often in combination with arrogance” — would be punished by the gods.

Last October, in a post on Medium, Manfred Kets de Vries, a Dutch psychoanalyst, described how, for the Greeks, hubris “wasn’t just poor judgment. It was a serious moral failing, a kind of arrogant blindness that led people to overstep human boundaries. Those caught in the grip of hubris begin to believe that the world should conform to their view of it. They overestimate what they can do, ignore the consequences, and often reject criticism entirely. Even when things go wrong, they remain convinced they were right all along.”

As the world reels from the decision by the United States and the State of Israel to launch an illegal and unprovoked “war” on Iran on Saturday, everything about the attacks screams ”hubris” at the highest amplification imaginable.

Netanyahu’s malignant 40-year dream, and that of the US neocons

For Benjamin Netanyahu, the launch of a “war” on Iran fulfils a malignant dream that he has cherished for 40 years, and which, having finally secured a pliable US president, he is able to do. As he stated in a video message in Hebrew after the attacks began:

We are in a campaign in which we are bringing the full force of the Israeli military, as never before, to ensure our existence and our future. But we’re also bringing into this campaign the assistance of the United States, my friend US President Donald Trump and the US military. And this combination of forces enables us to do what I have long hoped to do for 40 years. To strike the terror regime decisively. That is what I promised and that is what we will do.

For the US, the destruction of Iran has also, for decades, been a cherished dream for the neocons behind the destructive horrors of the “war on terror”, and the military quagmires of the occupation of Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq.

As Gen. Wesley Clark, the former commander of NATO’s forces in Europe, explained at the time of the Iraq invasion, a senior military officer in Washington, D.C. told him in November 2001 that the Bush administration was planning to attack seven countries, beginning with Iraq, and followed by Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Iran.

Through various means, including the mobilization of the US, Israel, NATO and the UAE, six of those countries have subsequently been torn apart by the horrific violence envisaged by the neocons, but Iran has always been the elusive target that evaded US-ordained destruction — and for good reason.

Iran’s proud and unbowed history

The biggest and most populated country on the list, with a population of over 92 million, Iran is a huge and proud regional power that was never conquered by westerners during their remorseless and genocidal colonization of most of the world. It traces its history back for millennia, as one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilizations, first established in the 7th century BC.

However, Iran’s more recent history is the reason that the US and Israel are consumed with destroying it. This animosity dates to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when Shiite clerics and a significant number of the Iranian people, including secular and left-wing campaigners who otherwise had no common ground with the clerics, overthrew the hated authoritarian Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Pahlavi had been been installed as a result of a US- and UK-backed coup in 1953, which took place after Iran’s elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, dared to seek to nationalize the country’s massive oil industry, in which the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (the precursor of BP) had bought a controlling share in 1914.

For 47 years, the Iranian regime has established and supported Shiite movements throughout the region — Hezbollah in Lebanon, resistance movements in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen, and has also supported the Sunni resistance in the Gaza Strip, this latter example particularly emphasizing its opposition to Israeli and US influence in the region as a whole. It also has strong ties with Pakistan, and, until the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, was also closely allied with Syria, and it also has strong economic ties with both Russia and China.

Despite the long-standing animosity towards Iran of both Israel and the US, until now US leaders have wisely concluded that it is too formidable an enemy to attack, and have alternated between cautious engagement and economic sanctions to achieve what it regarded as workable containment. Those pushing for direct military action against Iran were few in number, because Iran was clearly perceived to be a significant adversary — hence the failure, until last Saturday, of the neocons’ ambitions.

Now, however, hubris has won out over common sense and containment, and the repercussions are already spilling out across the whole of the Middle East, with economic implications for the whole world.

The hubris of Netanyahu and Trump

Israel’s hubris is that of Benjamin Netanyahu, whose cherished 40-year dream has only been reinforced, over the last 29 months, by his demented obsession with redefining Israel’s entire existence as one of total war, waged incessantly, and apparently without end.

It includes the most sickening crime of all — genocide — undertaken, and still ongoing in Gaza, increasing settler (and state-backed) terrorism in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, continuing aggression in Lebanon, incursions into Syria, attacks on Yemen, and now — the crowning delusion in Netanyahu’s ever-increasing hubris — the proposed Gaza-style obliteration of Iran.

For Donald Trump, it remains unclear how much, if at all, he is influenced by the neocons’ long obsession with Iran’s destruction.

Incapable of sustained coherent thought, Trump is obsessed with grand one-off gestures involving military action, imposed on startlingly complicated situations, which he can portray as “victories” that reflect well on his farcical opinion of himself as a great peacemaker who has ended a fictional number of conflicts since he took office, and for which he believes that he deserves obeisance like some crazed medieval emperor.

With Iran, it is clear that, between the US and the Israelis, intelligence assessments, undertaken for some time, had established the locations not only of Ayatollah Khameini, Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989, but also of numerous other senior officials, who were all killed in the first wave of attacks.

However, killing Khameini in particular, which Trump, evidently, foolishly hoped would usher in regime change via a people’s revolt, hasn’t materialized at all.

Instead, as any serious analysis would have concluded, killing Khameini while he was at home — with his daughter, his son-in-law and his 14-month old grand-daughter, who were also killed — has unleashed a wave of indomitable patriotic fervour that appears to be inextinguishable.

As observers have noted, the 86-year old Khameini wasn’t trying to hide, and may have even recognized that his willing martyrdom would ensure the survival of the regime, especially as martyrdom figures so prominently in Shiite society, and particularly in Iran, where 90 to 95% of the population are Shiite, because of the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first Shia imam, in the 7th century.

As the US’s regime change fantasy crumbles, it remains profoundly uncertain what — if any — its actual aims are in this deranged “war.” Clearly, as Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, admitted two days ago, the US’s primary aim is not “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”, as Trump declared in a pre-recorded video before hostilities began.

Instead, as Rubio admitted to a small group of Congressional leaders on Capitol Hill, the “imminent threat” of an attack by Iran was only in response to planned attacks by Israel, and the US decided to preempt retaliatory attacks on US bases and assets in response to Israel’s attacks by joining in with the initial aggression.

To quote his exact words: “There absolutely was an imminent threat. And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked — and we believed they would be attacked — that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.”

In other words, as Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, described it, Rubio admitted that the US “entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel.” Whether this was through Trump’s tendency to make sudden and unexpected decisions — or, as I suggested two days ago, because of blackmail exerted by Israel though its possession of incriminating evidence from the Epstein Files — remains to be seen.

Underestimating Iran

What’s particularly absurd about all of this, however, as Iran’s response to the initial aggression has been to attack US bases across the Middle East, and to launch attacks on Israel that have pierced its missile defense systems, is that the hubris of both countries is such that they seem to have completely forgotten that Iran has very evidently been preparing for these attacks since last June, and the so-called Twelve-Day War, when the US and Israel both attacked Iran for the first time.

That was when Trump bragged of destroying Iran’s nuclear program (despite incoherently reviving it now as an excuse for this new “war”), and it was also when, despite Netanyahu’s excitement at his first glimpse of his cherished dream coming true, Israel’s vaunted missile defense systems — the “Iron Dome”, for short-range rockets and artillery, “David’s Sling”, for medium-range rockets and cruise missiles, and “Arrow 2” and “Arrow 3”, for ballistic missiles — failed to prevent a significant number of Iranian missiles from subjecting the Israelis to a karmic taste of what they had already been subjecting the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip to for the previous 21 months.

For the last nine months, while Israel and the US were compiling targets within Iran, the Iranians themselves were also compiling their own targets, but evidently with much greater determination and planning.

As the New York Times has been reporting since the attacks began, based on analysis of satellite imagery and verified videos, Iranian strikes have “damaged structures that are part of or near communication and radar systems on at least seven US military sites across the Middle East” — in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

As the Times article added, “Visuals show damage on or close to mechanisms used to track incoming ballistic missiles, satellite dishes and radomes, which are weatherproof covers that protect sensitive equipment used by forces to communicate over long distances. US military communication infrastructure is highly classified, making it difficult to determine which exact systems may have been affected. But the targeted locations appear to indicate Iran was aiming to disrupt the US military’s ability to communicate and coordinate.”

To add to this problem for the US, which, beyond the careful couching of words by the Times, may mean that the US is operating held-blind and half-deaf, is the problem of weapons supplies.

The problem of weapons supplies for the US and Israel

As Bloomberg explained in an article on March 2, “Just three days into the conflict, the Iran war has become attritional. Waves of drone attacks by the Islamic Republic are putting pressure on the defenses of the US and its partners from Bahrain to the United Arab Emirates, depleting weapons stockpiles. The outcome of the fight may depend on which side runs out of munitions first.”

As the article added, Iran’s drones are “Shahed-136 one-way attack drones, small, rudimentary cruise missiles”, which cost just $20,000 each, and have been widely and successfully used by Russia in Ukraine. According to the UAE, “US-made Patriot air-defense missiles have been largely successful in stopping the Iranian Shaheds and other ballistic missiles”, but the problem is that each Patriot missile costs $4 million – or 200 times the cost.

As NBC News reported on March 3, Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., warned, “If this goes on longer, they’re probably going to have to find more sustainable ways of doing this.” She “calculated that for every $1 Iran spent manufacturing a Shahed drone, it costs the UAE about $20 to $28 to intercept it.”

Speaking of the drones, Kyle Glen, an investigator with the London-based Center for Information Resilience, added, “A war like this is literally what Iran built them for.”

In a social media post on March 3, Donald Trump made outrageous claims about the US’s stockpile of weapons. “The United States Munitions Stockpiles have, at the medium and upper medium grade, never been higher or better”, he suggested, adding, “As was stated to me today, we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons.”

He also claimed, “Wars can be fought ‘forever’, and very successfully, using just these supplies (which are better than other countries finest arms!).”

Absolutely contradicting his words, however, Reuters reported on March 3 that Trump has summoned the CEOs of major US arms companies, including Lockheed Martin and Raytheon’s parent company RTX, to the White House on Friday “to discuss accelerating weapons production.”

In January, Trump issued an executive order condemning US arms companies for “putting stock buybacks and excessive corporate distributions ahead of production capacity, innovation, and on-time delivery for America’s military”, later singling out Raytheon for particular criticism in a Truth Social rant in which he declared, in the trademark capitals that he uses when he wants to emphasize his position, “MILITARY EQUIPMENT IS NOT BEING MADE FAST ENOUGH.”

Israel, meanwhile, as Al Jazeera reported on March 4, “has endured repeated missile and drone strikes”, as its expensive defense systems have been breached once more, “forcing widespread air raid alerts, school closures, and the mobilization of tens of thousands of reservists. Cities like Haifa and Tel Aviv have faced sustained attacks, emergency services are stretched, and a public, unused to war on the scale their government has inflicted upon others, has spent the past few days in and out of bomb shelters.”

“For now”, as Al Jazeera explained, “enthusiasm for the war is high.” Daniel Bar-Tal, an academic at Tel Aviv University, said, “It’s like the UK blitz in World War II. Then, the British accepted this bombardment because they saw themselves as fighting this ultimate evil. Israelis have the same feeling. We are indoctrinated into believing, almost from birth, that Iran is evil, which is reinforced through kindergarten, high school, and the army.”

Bar-Tal worried about the future of Israeli society, however, noting that its “past moral certitude in the righteousness of its establishment had not been dented by the massacres committed during the 1948 Nakba, nor the recent Gaza genocide.” He found it troubling that Israel now has “a generation who are still more militaristic and more rightist, with Netanyahu telling us we now need to live by the sword. It’s just more evidence that Israel needs enemies to survive.”

For “endless war”, however, Israel also needs an endless supply of weapons, and on that front defence analyst Hamze Attar warned, “In the first three days of the war, Iran launched more than 200 ballistic missiles at Israel. To put that into context, during the 12-day war, they launched around 500 [in total], each requiring that Israel counter by launching an interceptor rocket. That’s probably more than Israel has the capacity to counter, so, without US help, it would probably have lost control of its airspace by now.”

As Al Jazeera noted, “The Israelis do not disclose the number of interceptors they have in stock, but Israel began to run low on interceptor stocks during the 12-day war, indicating that it will become more difficult to maintain a high level of interceptions if the war continues for a lengthy period. This would lead to a rationing of interceptors and a focus on defending military and political targets, potentially leading to more civilian casualties.”

Global shocks

Even more troubling for the US and Israel, however, is the extent to which their unprovoked and illegal “war” is collapsing the global economy, as insurers refuse to insure vessels carrying oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz, between Iran and Oman, and several producers have shut down oil and gas production for safety reasons, including at Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura oil refinery, after a drone attack, and QatarEnergy’s shutdown of its LNG (liquefied natural gas) production, via a “Force Majeure” declaration, which as TRTWorld described it, “allows companies to suspend contractual obligations due to events beyond their control, temporarily relieving them from delivery commitments without penalties.”

How much more of this western markets and the rest of the world can take is unknown at present, but it’s certain that the hubris of both the US and Israel — both sickeningly giddy at the prospect of mass death and destruction against a particularly demonized “enemy”, and without any interest in the unforeseen consequences — may end up hastening the demise of both Trump and Netanyahu.

I certainly hope so, as their hubris represents an unparalleled and clearly unjustifiable menace to all of us.

Note: Last night I was delighted to talk to Chris Cook for his ‘Gorilla Radio’ show in Canada about the US and Israel’s sickening and illegal “war” on Iran, the dangers of militarized AI, and the latest monthly vigils for the closure of Guantánamo, which took place across the US and around the world, and which I’ll be writing about soon. The show also featured Salam Hamdan, a Palestinian political activist from Ramallah, now living in Canada. Listen to it on Substack here.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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