Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] But I've literally just seen a tweet in recent hours that he posted and in that new tweet his tone is a lot more cautious. He's now saying what is actually obvious and had been was obvious to anybody who was thinking, well, at the very beginning, it is not clear how this will turn out at all.
[00:00:18] Hi everybody. Welcome along to another episode of the Dispatchers podcast. My name is Brendan Malone. It is great to be back with you again and today we're going to be talking about the issue that is on everyone's lips right now as of the events that have unfolded over the weekend and that is the Iran war.
[00:00:37] I know that I have been trying to make a concerted effort this year not to be the reactionary kind of guy. So I didn't just want to make a sort of quick off the fly reactive video. So I've deliberately jotted down some thoughts. I feel, I feel like a real newsman. I've got notes on a piece of paper in front of me.
[00:00:57] I want to engage with this issue in a way that hopefully is both relevant and also reasoned, rational, not given to any sort of overly insane emotive hyperbole, etc. But I think there are some important things that we need to consider in all of this. And before I go any further, I should say if you hear noise, there's a bit of a storm brewing in Canterbury at the moment. It's been going for the last 24 hours or so and so we've had hail storms and intense rain and squalls and all sorts of stuff coming through. So please forgive me if any of that makes it on to the recording of today's episode.
[00:01:37] This is, and this is, I think, the first and important place to start with. As I said, I've got some notes here, some thoughts I want to share and also I've got some questions I want to conclude with. And I think this, in the midst of all of this, hopefully there'll be something, some food for thought for everybody and some relevant takeaways for us all to consider. And the first port of call, I think is, is worthy of us starting with is that we should be careful of avoiding euphemisms. I think, like I've heard people talking about this as if somehow this is just a missile strike.
[00:02:12] No, this is absolutely a war. And I think we need to be wary of using dishonest euphemisms to describe what this is. Once upon a time we were very clear headed about this. But in the age of Orwellian Newspeak and the propagandised age in which we live, generally speaking, there's just, there's a lack of honesty about things as they really are. If you fire missiles into another country intentionally, you have a coordinated goal in mind for doing that. It's going to be a prolonged process, and you are trying to achieve your objectives through military means. Even if you don't put troops on the ground, that's absolutely a war. It might not be a ground invasion, but it is a war, and we should be honest about that fact. And I know over the last couple of days, people have been trying to suggest, oh, no, this is just a precision strike, it's just a, you know, a missile strike operation. You know, those kinds of euphemisms. I think these things are being used because obviously Trump has branded himself and he ran and campaigned on the whole claim that he was not going to be the perpetual war guy, you know, the eternal US wars, you know, the never ending war. He was going to withdraw the US from all of that. And also he clearly campaigned on the claim that he was not going to start a war with Iran.
[00:03:34] And here he is at war with Iran. So it's not surprising that you have these euphemisms. They're a way of trying to avoid admitting the obvious here, that in actual fact, this is a war.
[00:03:45] And so there's a whole ton of this floating around, but we should avoid it. We should be honest about what's going on here. And really with what's happened in the last few hours at the time of recording this, Trump has now come out publicly and said that this war, he's expecting that this war will be fought for at least another four weeks.
[00:04:05] By the way, incidentally, that's about the amount of time that George Bush waged his initial Iraq war for and then declared that he had achieved victory. It was about four weeks, very similar time, slightly less, but around about that same amount of time.
[00:04:22] But now that, that Trump has come out and said, this is, there's going to be four more weeks of war, there's no way that you can just write this off and say, oh, it was just a sort of precise. It's, it's not like Maduro, it's not Venezuela, it's not like what happened previously.
[00:04:37] This is absolutely a war and there's a lot more at stake this time. So we should avoid the euphemisms and we should be honest about what's going on here. Which brings me to the second point that I think is worthy of our remembrance in all of this. And that is that the first casualty of war in any war is truth. And we are now in a highly propagandized environment and social media only really makes this worse.
[00:05:04] We are being propagandised by all sides in this war. So the reality is, I think it's important to be prudent about anything that is being said by either side. Casualty claims, claims about targets that are being hit.
[00:05:18] I would say just be very, very prudent and very, very careful. And also be very, very careful and prudent about the claims that are being made about why this war is being fought, how it's going, all those kinds of things. Because this is the reality of war. Truth is the first casualty propaganda.
[00:05:35] That's how you ensure ongoing support for your war. You've got to win the propaganda war first. So there's a whole ton of propaganda and as I said, more so because of the fact that, you know, we're on social media here. So it's something that I'd be really, really cautious about.
[00:05:53] One of the things about the propaganda so far is that there's obviously a bit of an issue here because the claim has been made that, or some were trying to make the claim initially anyway, in the initial hours after this war started that this was about ending the Iranian nuclear program. But already, and it's on the Trump Admin's own website, it's been there for months actually that, you know, their strikes, their previous strikes already destroyed the Iranian nuclear program. So if the Iranian nuclear program is gone, then what's going on now? It's not that, it's clearly something else. I saw a clip actually with Ted Cruz today who's being interviewed in the media and I believe this is in the past 12 hours or so. But in that clip he basically was at pains really to say, and he's a supporter of this war. He was at pains to say, well no, in actual fact, we destroyed, we dropped, he claimed, a third of a nuclear bomb, effectively with their bunker busting bombs previously. And so we've destroyed their nuclear program.
[00:06:52] And so clearly this isn't about a nuclear war.
[00:06:56] What seems to be coming to the fore now because there's still a lot of lack of clarity about what's actually going on here. As I heard one highly regarded expert in this field ask, or he posed this question earlier today, is there even a plan like for a new regime? It seems regime change is absolutely the primary goal. But where is that new regime?
[00:07:18] And it's not clear that there is actually A new regime here, which makes this even more morally problematic. We'll get to that point in just a second. But if the primary focus here is we want to free people from tyranny in a tyrannical regime that is doing great evil to its own people en masse and has a history of doing this, and that's not an unfair ambition to try and free the vulnerable, the oppressed from unjust and evil oppressions.
[00:07:49] But the obvious question, and some people are starting to ask this now, is, well, why is it only this country that you're targeting? Because there are multiple other countries. I've seen people suggest as many as 10 or 11 different countries that you could have on that list of names of countries that are doing exactly this to their people. And as some have kind of uncomfortably pointed out, including some who are on the list of US allies.
[00:08:13] So this whole thing is very fraught.
[00:08:16] And I think the thing that we should keep in mind in light of all of this, that basically every war is effectively necessary until it's not.
[00:08:27] And what I mean by that is it's sold to us. This is part of the propagandistic thing we need to be wary of. It's sold to us as being necessary until it's no longer necessary. The Iraq war was necessary until it became apparent that in actual fact it was a great folly.
[00:08:42] And so it's very easy in the fervour and the passion of this thing, I think, to get caught up in this whole idea that this war had to be fought.
[00:08:52] That's probably the most powerful and enduring and consistent form of war propaganda. You hear, we have to fight this war. There's no other way. And it's, you know, if the case is made emotively and compellingly enough, it's very easy to fall into that trap.
[00:09:07] But the question still remains, did this war actually need to be started at all? My wife, who is not at all a political gal, she just, she, she's not someone who's political.
[00:09:22] When we have conversations about these issues, she's, it's just not her space. And it's one of the things I love about her, it's a beautiful thing.
[00:09:29] But she made an interesting comment yesterday when we were talking about this. And by the way, we've got family over there who her brother and sister in law and a niece and a nephew of ours are in one of those countries which has been targeted by Iranian missile strikes since this war kicked off. And they are stuck, shelter in place.
[00:09:49] And so the stakes sort of have a, there's a certain meaning and, and, and there's a depth to the stakes here that we think about in our family at the moment in light of all of this.
[00:10:00] But one of the interesting things she said to me yesterday was she said, well, what have they actually achieved? They've killed the Ayatollah, they killed an 86 year old man who only recently gave a speech in which he said, look, I've got a frail body, my body is disabled. And I think he in fact used that word is disabled and is on its way out, but I'm prepared to give my all for the cause. So they've killed this 86 year old man and obviously other members of the Iranian regime.
[00:10:30] My wife made an interesting point though. She said, well, but what's the point? Like that man was going to be dead soon anyway, very soon. He just wasn't going to last much longer. So what have you really achieved here? You've killed an 86 year old man, you've killed members of the regime leadership, Certain members of the, of the regime have been killed. But what has actually been achieved here? And especially in light of people claiming, oh, this has been a 47 year old war and this is just the latest action in that war, some are trying to make that claim. I think that's kind of dubious. It's been a 47 year also problem with the authoritarian and dictatorial and evil regime in Iran. And by the way, I should say, I think this is important to point out up front the Iranian regime. I won't lose any sleep if this evil regime is overturned. And you know, no sane moral person will. What they've been doing in the barbarism of this place, in the regime is not good. So this is not. Please don't interpret any of this as a defence of the current regime. That's absolutely not it. And one of the reasons, in fact I wanted to make this video was because I feel like there's been this false dichotomy going on for the last couple of days, a false binary where basically people are saying either almost mourning over the regime and suggesting things are not really as bad as people claim in Iran. And then on the other side you've got people who are just saying that if you question this war, somehow you're a supporter of this evil regime. It's sort of, we're sort of stuck. And so part of me making today's episode was really about trying to, I guess, tread a third way and say in actual fact, we need to think more wisely about this. And by the way, I'm starting to see a little bit of movement now from people who initially, like Constantin Kissen, for example, someone who represents the liberal camp, was really glazing and praising this thing in the initial hours after the war was started. But I've literally just seen a tweet in recent hours that he posted.
[00:12:22] And in that new tweet, his tone is a lot more cautious. He's now saying what is actually obvious and had been was obvious to anybody who was thinking, well, at the very beginning, it is not clear how this will turn out at all. And this is not like previous military actions that we've seen from the Trump regime. There's something very different at stake here. The stakes are a lot higher. It is uncertain, it is very uncertain how this will all go. So this is a very different kind of thing. And so all of a sudden there's a more measured tone being made here.
[00:12:49] But as I said, going back to my wife's point, an 86 year old man who was going to die soon anyway, this has been ongoing for 47 odd years and this is now we're doing this and this is the outcome of it. This kind of feels more like a emotive, symbolic kind of claim of victory rather than anything of substance. There's certainly no signs of any victory at this stage. As I said, Trump's come out and said the war is going to be ongoing. I have seen recent commentary from experts also indicating that in actual fact, the Ayatollah wasn't even running the show and hasn't been running the show for some time. The indication seems to be that his son has actually been running things. And I think as far as we're aware, his son is still alive. I don't know. I mean that, I guess it's a war, right? So things could change at any moment. But at the end of the day, it seems to me trying to discern the motivations, the hope seems to be, and this is certainly what the supporters of this war are claiming, the sort of, the jingoistic claims, Iran, this evil regime is going to be overthrown. And then the hope here is that suddenly democracy will reign supreme, the old regime will be overthrown. I've even seen a lot of people making the comparison or pointing back to Iran in the seventies before the revolution happened. And you had the takeover of this evil regime. And people are saying, look at Iran back then. It was this beautif beautiful place. And it, you know, it was open and very sort of westernized and, and the the suggestion clearly is, hey, look, this, this is gonna. It's gonna go back to this, or this is, you know, this is the hope anyway. This is what the outcome will be, that people will rise up.
[00:14:28] This is very much the liberal claim, and it has been really pretty much since the end of the Enlightenment liberal period is this idea that if you just unshackle the people from all restraint, all prior traditional, then they will, you know, freedom will arise. If you unshackle them from what has gone before, the good ideas will all float to the top. They will choose for themselves.
[00:14:50] Yeah, freedom will arise. And in the last 70 or 80 years, a lot of wars have been fought based on that belief. And consistently that belief has shown to be completely false.
[00:15:00] By the way, I don't think it's at all sound to make comparisons with what happened in Japan and Germany in World War II. They're very different cultures to what we see in the Middle East. It's not the same thing at all. And so you've got to understand that this, again, this is the liberal mistake. The liberal mistake is to assume that human persons are kind of blank slates and you strip away all the traditions and everything else. They're all just the same as if that stuff doesn't really matter and it has no sort of bearing on shaping peoples and how they view themselves and what they consider important, et cetera, et cetera, in the world.
[00:15:35] But in actual fact, it's a lot more complex than that.
[00:15:38] And so this is the claim, though, the hope is that we overthrow the dictatorship. Freedom will reign. That's the suggestion. But as I've already said, people are pointing out, well, where is the replacement regime? Who do you envisage actually, you know, taking control here?
[00:16:00] What's the outcome? Let me share with you a, a quote about this war.
[00:16:06] The purposes of it, it is to disra. Sorry, disarm. Disran. To disarm Iran of weapons, nuclear weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Iran's support for terrorism and to free the Iranian people.
[00:16:26] Actually, sorry, no, that's not a quote about the Iran war at all. That is a quote and it was the justification that was given for the Iraq war.
[00:16:36] Here's the exact quote. To disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism and to free the Iraqi people.
[00:16:48] So the same claims are now effectively being made.
[00:16:53] Slight adjustment.
[00:16:55] It's nuclear weapons instead of weapons of mass destruction in the Iranian case. But history is starting to repeat. And the question that I have, and I keep Coming back to is this, and I think it's an important one.
[00:17:08] What happens when the missiles stop.
[00:17:10] Right now there's even a question about how many missiles are available and what that all means.
[00:17:17] I believe doing a little bit of reading, the suggestion is that the stockpile of defensive missiles, so these are missile anti missile systems that shoot down incoming missiles.
[00:17:32] I believe the stockpiles are about 2,000. That seems to be the claim that's made online about the ammunition levels.
[00:17:40] And that's going to be important because right now a lot of those defensive weapons, those missile systems, they are using their ammunition to try and prevent Iranian missiles from getting through. Some are getting through. But at the moment things seem to be holding. As one military expert commentator I saw said today, it will be very interesting to see where things are at next weekend because that will, at the current rate, that's when you'll start to see the depletion of the defensive missile system stocks.
[00:18:12] I believe, although these things are not clear. There's a lot of vagaries, as I understand it, that Iran is supposed to have about two and a half thousand ballistic missiles, but then you've got to add in drones into this. And there's a lot at stake here. Like I said, this is, there's no guarantees, there's no outcomes. And the key question is even if you do manage to wage a successful war over the next four weeks, what happens when the missiles stop flying? What goes on? What happens at that point? It's not clear.
[00:18:44] And as we have seen and as history proves to us, there are no guarantees.
[00:18:49] If you conduct regime change wars, there are no guarantees. And so I think we should exercise prudence and particularly around anyone who's claiming certainty about they know what's going to happen. So people who say this is going to be World War Three, you know, I know for certain that kind of stuff or this will definitely happen or that will definitely happen.
[00:19:10] And also those people who are claiming, no, this will be a successful victory, it's going to be a new free, prosperous Iran like we've never seen before.
[00:19:18] There's no certainty here. There are no guarantees.
[00:19:21] And we, I think we need to learn from history. I think this is really important.
[00:19:27] One of the things that I posted, I guess rather cryptically, but those who understand the lesson to be learned from this will know what I was trying to suggest. I was trying to make this point about prudence by posting an image of Lawrence of Arabia from the film Lawrence of Arabia.
[00:19:48] And if you know the real life of the real Lawrence of Arabia. And, you know, the morality tale of that film, you know that that movie is about a man who initially is sort of resistant to the violence in the Middle east, who then gets embroiled in the military campaigns and becomes increasingly desensitized to the military violence and is very much waging wars and thinks he can solve the problems in the Arabic world and then ends in a state of disillusionment and sort of a realization that, you know, the Western saviour of the Arabic worlds and the Arabic peoples is a lot more complex and there are no guarantees and it's a lot more difficult than people would like to believe. And I think that's an important lesson to keep in the front of our minds. Because if we think about history, what have we had? Let's just think about recent history. We've had the Iraq War. Now, this is not the same as the Iraq War in the sense that so far there has been no ground invasion. So at this stage there's no ground invasion. So there is a difference there. Let's be clear about this. It's not exactly the same, but the Iraq War was fought under a similar pretense, as I said, a similar period of time. Actually, assuming that this is a four week war, as Donald Trump is claiming, by the way, those who want to say, well, it's not really a war if it's only four weeks, I would say, well, then why do so many people who make that claim also tend to say that, you know, the Five Day War, the Yom Kippur War, was actually a war.
[00:21:15] It's not really how wars are determined. The length of time is not the important factor in all of this.
[00:21:20] But Iraq, which initially we had the declaration, you know, we've achieved our aims, you know, we've. We've liberated the Iraqi people.
[00:21:29] And then we saw what happened afterwards. And one of the things I'm kind of ashamed to say now actually, is that I initially supported the Iraq War. I really bought in. I thought it was necessary. As I said, all wars are necessary until they are not. I thought it was necessary. I thought it was a good war. I thought it was justified.
[00:21:46] One of the first moments that actually gave me real pause was some years after the war and I am at an event in Auckland and I met a group of Iraqi Christians and I was kind of a bit shocked because I expected them to be quite happy about the deposing of Saddam Hussein and what the US had done there.
[00:22:06] These people had fled Iraq before the war because they understood and they saw what was going on in Iraq as not being good under Saddam Hussein. And but at the same time they were also very upset and in fact some of them were quite passionately angry about what the US had done by invading Iraq. And that gave me real pause.
[00:22:28] And it took a little bit longer unfortunately for me to sort of fully renounce my, my unwavering commitment to the Iraq war and its supposed justification.
[00:22:37] But eventually I came to realize that this war was not a good thing at all. But at the time it felt like this was good, it was justified. Saddam was this evil dictator. This was the way to solve the problem.
[00:22:50] Two things can be true at once. You can have an evil dictatorial regime and also war can be the worst possible way of trying to resolve that problem and can end up with bad outcomes. So Iraq is one very clear example. Another would be Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is quite an interesting case because there's a little interesting parallel here with Iran.
[00:23:11] If you don't believe me, go and Google images and read a little bit about the history of Afghanistan in the 1960s and 70s.
[00:23:19] And similar to Iran, Afghanistan was an open country and you had like, you will see images if you Google images. In fact, I think it's. Was it from 1963 to about 73 or 73 to onwards. I can't remember what the exact time frame is, but there was about a 10 year period and I think they actually call it the Golden Era or the Golden Period or something like it's got a name with golden in it to describe this free and open Afghanistan that they had. And you have, you can see the images. You've got women over the age of 12, so females over the age of 12 who are in, you know, being educated and who are. And there's no burqas and like things that are absolutely outlawed right now in Afghanistan. And a very lengthy war of liberation was fought. Operation Enduring Freedom was part of that, was fought in Afghanistan by the United States.
[00:24:10] And the whole point was to secure freedom for the Afghani people.
[00:24:16] But look at Afghanistan now. There are no guarantees is the point. And as I said, there's a similar sort of parallel with Iran. If you go back and look at Afghanistan fighting that war didn't result automatically in the people returning to a state or a similar state to what they had back in the 60s and 70s in that country.
[00:24:37] Libya would be another. And Libya is a very stark example because in Libya what you have is you have a country where they go in with airstrikes as a coalition. The US is very involved in this, this is the infamous incident where Muammar Gaddafi, who is a dictatorial, authoritarian leader, tyrannical leader, who is committing human rights abuses and he obviously goes on the run.
[00:25:04] He is killed and I'll try not. Yeah, I'm not going to go into the gory details, but let's just say he's some eerily executed. And he is.
[00:25:14] He is subjected to a form of barbaric sexual assault. I won't go any further about it. And shot and killed and left in a roadside ditch.
[00:25:25] And that incident was the one that Hillary Clinton famously joked about. Was it on, I think a 60 Minutes interview where she said, you know, we came, we came, we saw, he died, and then laughed? It was something like that. It was a line like that. She laughed about it. And it's clearly something that would constitute a war crime. Wasn't. This was not something the, the, the coalition who conducted the airstrikes and attacked the country did, but it was absolutely a barbaric and brutal end to a dictator. And regardless of whether you believe, as a Christian, I don't believe anybody should be treated that way. I think that justice demands that we act with virtue. And that was not a virtuous thing to do, even to an evil man. You put him on trial, you imprison him, you hold him accountable that way. But leaving all that aside, the end result of toppling Gaddafi and freeing the Libyan people was not actually freedom for the Libyan people. What they've ended up with is a failed nation state, which I don't know if it's still going on, but after the liberation and the freedom, there was open slave trading, there was an open slave market going on in Libya. And if I understand correctly, it is still happening. That sort of stuff is still going on in Libya. So it went from a place where you had actual order under a authoritarian dictator who was committing human rights abuses to a failed nation state and all sorts of other barbarism in its place. So you haven't achieved anything good there. So it's. That's a really stark warning. Another one is Syria. And Syria is kind of interesting because it's a more recent case and Syria perhaps initially could seem like, oh, look, it's an example of success.
[00:27:12] Even though the guy who's taken over was, well, he's ex Al Qaeda. Right.
[00:27:17] But he's taken over. And look at success. But in actual fact, literally in the last couple of days, the media reporting out of Syria. This was an article I read in the Guardian about this.
[00:27:29] What's happened now is that ISIS is back and they are publicly back, they are out. They've released the head of ISIS in this one particular region has published a 30 minute video. There were nine different terror attacks they conducted over the last. I believe it's over the last week or so, including one where four or five people were shot and killed in a gun battle. I think they attacked checkpoints and stuff like that.
[00:27:56] The locals there are saying people are now just openly siding with ISIS again. They're starting to make their presence felt again. They are recruiting, actively recruiting people again.
[00:28:06] That's Syria.
[00:28:08] Freedom was brought to the people. Right, but there's no guarantees. I guess that's the point I'm trying to make here, is that I think we really do need to learn from history because there are no guarantees here.
[00:28:17] Which brings me to some questions I think are worthy of our consideration. Will the US be trusted again in light of this? Because what has happened in this example with the Iranian war is they were openly and seemingly with great magnanimity, were actually engaged in diplomatic negotiations with the Iranian diplomats and the Iranian government, the regiment, photo ops and all that kind of stuff.
[00:28:46] And then they went and did this.
[00:28:48] So this is going on as in the days leading up to this and then suddenly there is this war that is launched against the Iranian people. And what you're going to have to say is this is the second time this kind of thing has happened. And what it does is it does raise the stakes now and effectively other nations almost certainly are going to look to what's going on here and say, can you actually trust the United States? So even if they're negotiating with you and you assume like typically what would be happening is good faith, diplomatic negotiations are underway.
[00:29:21] They did that with Iran and it looked like it was good faith, but in actual fact they then launched a war against them.
[00:29:29] That that's going to create an interesting problem, I think for them going forward.
[00:29:34] We'll see what happens. Like I said, no one knows for certain, but you'd have to say certainly with the current regime, if you're in one of those other countries that has to negotiate with the US Basically, you'd sort of. There would be a big question mark of uncertainty there. The moral question, I think let's keep this in mind, at the forefront of our minds. And I've spoken about this on previous episodes. So if you want to go and dig back through those and look at the Christian just war teaching, Christianity does have a teaching on when a war is moral and when it's not.
[00:30:00] So when People claim all wars are necessary. That is simply not the Christian position when people say all war is inevitable or this war had to be fought. In actual fact, if the war does not meet the. And they're not hard to understand by the way, that these principles are pretty straightforward. There is a handful of principles, they are very clear. And if you don't meet those principles, then you are actually violating Christian just war teaching. And what you are doing is not morally good at all. And one of the key things is about pre emptive strikes.
[00:30:34] And so when you are engaging in preemptive strikes. Now I know some have tried to claim, oh no, this wasn't a preemptive strike, but that's the language of the administration and the coverage of this. But those, I guess we're trying to justify this as saying, oh no, this is an ongoing war, so this is just the latest action.
[00:30:51] I think that's a highly questionable claim. But preemptive strikes are certainly not something that are considered at all to be morally acceptable to the Christian just war teaching.
[00:31:04] Also there's other criteria like the, the means that you use must not be excessive. The outcome must be guaranteed. And in particular what they mean is that it must not be. You must have a reasonable degree of certainty that what you're about to do will not actually produce a worse outcome.
[00:31:20] That I don't think that's been satisfied. It's, it's very uncertain what the outcome will be here. And thirdly, and this is really important for a war to be legitimate, morally speaking, all other non military means must have first been exhausted. And that is clearly not the case here because negotiations were ongoing, you cannot claim that. You can say, well, what would they have been fruitful or would they have lasted? These are all valid things. But to say that all other means had been exhausted and there was no other way but the military way, which is a requirement for a war to be just that. That is, that's not sustainable in this situation. So I think that's important to keep in mind. Regardless of whether people claim there's a good fruit or a good outcome, that's not our way. The end does not justify the means for Christianity. The means you use must be moral. Even if you can get a good outcome by doing an evil thing, that doesn't mean that the evil thing suddenly becomes justified. So we need to keep our eyes on the prize there. I think there as well one really important observation, a salient observation that was made, it was a question that was posed by someone who actually is very pro life They're Christian and they're an expert, actually, in the area of just war. And they posed this question online yesterday. I thought it was a really valid one.
[00:32:40] And this person said, the left has an abortion problem. They just, they love abortion, the deliberate killing of unborn human beings. It's almost like a sacramental sort of worship and rite of passage, a test of loyalty for the left. And he said, so the left have an abortion problem. But he said he now thinks that the right may well have a war problem.
[00:33:04] And as uncomfortable as this makes me in saying this, I think he might be right.
[00:33:11] And I've seen people on the right in the last couple of days.
[00:33:15] It's not a question of people saying, I think this was necessary or justified in me disagreeing with them. That's legitimate disagreement.
[00:33:22] This is people celebrating rah, rah, rah ing this war.
[00:33:27] Yeah, there's a. There's a really troubling. And then attacking people like me who are just questioning and saying actual fact. I don't support this war, and I don't think it's a good thing. And that's enough to have you branded as, like, a regime supporter. You know, you support the Iranian regime, you don't care about the people, you're weak, et cetera. In fact, I saw a couple of people using the phrase suicidal empathy. Now, suicidal empathy is a real thing. It's when people allow empathy not to be properly tempered by prudence and justice, and so they fall into what is not empathy anymore at all. Actually, people call it suicidal empathy, but it's not really empathy at all. Once you fall out of the mean with a virtue, you're no longer in that virtue.
[00:34:15] But there is a real thing. And suicidal empathy is when people don't actually measure empathy according and make sure it's operating within the bounds of justice and prudence and authentic morality, you know, moral laws and other important virtuous norms, that must be considered.
[00:34:32] But it is absolutely not at all suicidal empathy to say, well, hold on a minute, I don't think we should be starting a war with Iran or with any country, really. You know, war is evil. That's not suicidal empathy. That's a very different thing altogether. And in fact, when I see people saying this, you know, it's weakness not to want the war. It's suicidal empathy.
[00:34:50] This is a troubling Nietzschean, as in Friedrich Nietzsche. This is a troubling Nietzschean neo pagan worship of strength that is developing on the right. And it's not a good thing at all.
[00:35:03] This is Very much the Nietzschean idea that Christianity is a great blight and has done it. In fact, for Nietzsche, Christianity is evil. He doesn't just disagree with it, he thinks it's evil because in his perception of Christianity, you know, Christianity is obsessed far too much with mercy and compassion. And he says, you know who is always talking about mercy and compassion? The slavers, because they're a slave. But you know who doesn't need to care about mercy and compassion all the time? The slave master, because he's powerful. And so he talks about this idea that Christianity is effectively creating a master slave mentality. It's weakening society, it's a blight, it's holding us back. And we need to look back to the pre Christian pagan cultures who worship strength, who used that strength, they wielded it against the weak and it was celebrated when they did that. And the Ubermensch, the overman, the strongman will lead us forward.
[00:35:57] That's what's being expressed here. This is not Christianity. When you are saying that if you refuse to get on board with this war, you know, you're part of the suicidal empathy culture, etcetera, what you're saying is you're weak and you're a destroyer of the west and we need Trump the strongman to lead us forward. This is very much a neo pagan Nietzschean tendency.
[00:36:21] It's not a good thing at all. And we need to run 100 miles an hour from it because it is not the way of Christ. It certainly does not reflect the face, the authentic face of Christ.
[00:36:32] It's a very different thing altogether. Neither does suicidal empathy when you see that legitimately happening. But this is not suicidal empathy to simply say, hold on a minute, this is not a good thing, or there are moral considerations that must be, that must come into play here. We're not just blind, consequentialist, anything goes as long as we get a good outcome. Another thing to remember here is that we are now in the age of drone warfare, and drone warfare has changed things dramatically.
[00:37:00] So it's not simply a matter now of who's got the strongest army, who's got the best weapons, the most up to date, the most technically advanced weapons.
[00:37:10] With drone warfare, you can do a lot of damage with very little weaponry and very inexpensive weaponry. We've seen that. This is one of the lessons that those who've been watching the Ukrainian Russian conflict will be aware of, that it has completely changed the landscape now. And it is quite a frightening change because it means that you could have spent all sorts of like tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars on the most advanced weaponry.
[00:37:39] And one drone or a swarm of drones could, you know, a couple of hundred dollars each could completely undermine and pull down an entire empire.
[00:37:49] It's really quite a radical shift, and I think that's worth keeping in mind here. It's not simply a matter of, well, America will flex their muscle and they will win.
[00:37:58] Things have changed lately.
[00:38:02] People were criticising the statements that were made by the New Zealand government, Christopher Luxon, and also by the UK government, Keir Starmer. They're two different approaches. So the New Zealand government basically came out and they said, we condemn the Iranian missile strikes on, on neighbors. And their reaction to it, they were. They, they came out and sort of said, oh, you know, we support the. The ending of Iranian, you know, terrorism and the nuclear program. That. So effectively they gave, like, a tacit support for Trump.
[00:38:30] They weren't really, they didn't really glaze him and say, this is a great day for the world. It wasn't kind of that kind of thing. But they were, they were sort of tacitly supporting their.
[00:38:38] Any action without being too specific. You know, they were showing some support and they condemned the Iranian strikes, retaliation strikes.
[00:38:49] And then, interestingly, they ended on a note of saying that they want peace as quickly as possible, they want the fighting to cease, basically.
[00:38:56] And people came out, Helen Clark most notably came out and criticised the New Zealand government for the statement. It's weak, et cetera. Keir Starmer came out and he did something different, effectively. Keir Starmer came out and he said that the UK has got nothing to do with this. It's not like, in other words, we're not part of this attack.
[00:39:15] And people have criticised him in a different way. This is weak. He should be getting on board with it. Here's the thing that I think is worthy to consider in both of these cases. So with the New Zealand case, we're a small, tiny country and we depend on trade with foreign nations, and in particular, we depend on US trade. It's essential for us. And so they will know that Trump, who has a very fragile ego, he remembers things and he likes to retaliate. And if you show any, or even if he sniffs disloyalty, his ego is very fragile. He's very prone to this kind of behavior.
[00:39:45] They walk in a tightrope, they're thinking, okay, what do we do here that's in the best interests of our people.
[00:39:51] So we don't want to upset that apple cart. We're too Small to be a big player. It's actually like, I understand why they've done it, whether we like it or not.
[00:40:00] Ironically, what they've done here is they've actually primarily thought, well, what's actually in the best interest of New Zealand? How do we sort of thread this needle and navigate this situation? So I understand why they've done it. The Keir Starmer situation, again, ironically, he would. Well, his advisors probably, and I'm no fan of Keir Starmer, there's plenty of reasons to critique Keir Starmer and his time in office, but the reality is, if you are in his situation, and he's almost certainly, again, this is probably down to his advisors, they will be reminding him of what happened after Tony Blair dragged that country into the Iraq war and what happened there. And so with what Tony Blair did in the Iraq war, the result was disastrous. You saw the war come to the UK soil and terrorism took hold and people were killed and maimed.
[00:40:58] And so Keir Starmer's advisors are probably.
[00:41:01] They're actually doing the. Probably the prudent thing here and saying they're signalling to the Islamic factions who that even within their midst, this is still a serious threat with them without the Iranian war.
[00:41:13] Hey, hold on a minute. This is not. We're not in a war with you. And if you're doing your best to try and protect your people from Islamic terrorism, I understand why he's done it. So I think that's worth considering. We can debate the merits or otherwise, and, you know, you can feel free to propose your own alternative approaches there. But I understand why they've done it. And if I was a leader and I was in that situation and Trump had done something like this, and my first obligation is to protect my people, then I gotta say I'd probably be in a similar situation, particularly as I'm looking at this war and I'm saying, yeah, I'm not convinced this is morally. In fact, I don't think this is morally justified at all. And so in good conscience, I wouldn't be throwing my weight behind it. And then I'd be thinking, well, how do I protect my people in this circumstance? Will this be the.
[00:42:05] And I guess this is the main question I want to pose today is, will this be the ignominious final chapter in the Trump presidency? It's hard to tell.
[00:42:15] There is now a war underway, though, with Iran, and he promised there was not going to be forever wars and there wasn't going to be a war with Iran. And there is a War with Iran.
[00:42:26] What happens at the end of this four weeks is anybody's guess.
[00:42:30] And what happens at the end of this, a war with Iran is anybody's guess. So that will be a big factor.
[00:42:36] But it is pretty clear to me, looking at this over the last 48 hours, I think the populist coalition, the supporter base that Trump is key support base that he managed to pull together, I think it's now been torn asunder, and I don't think it'll probably go back together. It was already straining, there were already problems.
[00:42:58] But I think this is probably. And the longer this goes on, I don't see it surviving four weeks of war.
[00:43:06] So my gut instinct, without knowing the future and that caveat that who knows what the outcome will be, is that I think this could possibly end up being.
[00:43:19] Aren't I hedging my bets? I know I'm hedging my bets. Aren't I this. And by the way, those people are saying, well, yeah, I predicted the Iran war, and, you know, I'm a commentator you should follow. Honestly, the Iran war was one of the most predictable things you probably could have predicted. It's not really rocket science, but I know it sounds like I'm hedging my bets. It's because I'm trying to be prudent. We don't know the future, we just don't.
[00:43:41] But my gut instinct is telling me that this is likely to be the ignominious final chapter in the Trump presidency. He was already going into a very perilous midterms, and I think this could just, yeah, this, this could be, as I said, the ignominious final whimper, the thing that hoisted by his own petard, the thing that actually tanks the whole thing for him, just as it did for Bush, would be a foreign war in the Middle East. So who knows? But, yeah, at the moment, things are pretty precarious in that regard. Will this spike or cause a.
[00:44:33] Another migrant wave like we saw after Syria again? Who knows?
[00:44:39] And Iran is such a massive and populous country that that would be like. That would be a really bad outcome, a very bad outcome. Who knows? We don't know. It depends, as I said, what happens when the missiles stop?
[00:44:53] We don't know. No one knows the answer to that. And what I'm starting to wonder, based on what I'm seeing at the United States and the administration in the last 12 hours or so, is I'm starting to wonder if they actually had a strong, coherent plan here at all. I kind of wonder if something opportunistic arose and they took the opportunity, but they don't have a clear plan and they're fighting a war to try and figure out what they should do next.
[00:45:20] I don't know. It's not clear. Maybe they do have a more complex plan than that. But as I said, what happens when the missiles stop? It's not even clear that they'll achieve a regime change.
[00:45:33] If they do end the current regime, what happens then? Will there be another wave of migrants flooding into Europe?
[00:45:41] I mean, obviously that would be a major disaster.
[00:45:43] One thing that I do wonder about, and this is a question I think worth considering, is will this empower Islamic extremism?
[00:45:50] My gut is telling me, if you look at history, that it probably will.
[00:45:55] As you've heard me say, the reporting is now out there that ISIS is back already in Syria. And I suspect that this fiery action, this war with Iran, will empower the Islamic fundamentalists and it will allow them to increase their recruitment. They will be able to go to young men and they will say, look, this is, this holy war, this jihad is being waged against us by the imperialist West.
[00:46:25] You know, the lion of Iran has been targeted.
[00:46:29] We must fight back. And it is conceivable that this could well have a whole lot of deleterious unintended consequences. Like I said, there are no guarantees. You fight a regime change war, there are no guarantees. This is not Japan, this is not Germany in the 1930s and 40s. That's not what you're dealing with here at all. It's a very different culture.
[00:46:48] Remember the lesson of Lawrence of Arabia.
[00:46:54] And the one last thing I'll say is this.
[00:46:57] There is something extremely troubling, and it's almost like a modern Western consumerism about this war that is really troubling.
[00:47:11] War that has been televised and watched online by people from miles away who have hundreds of miles, thousands of miles away, who have no stake, no skin in the game, who are laughing and joking and celebrating it, but even more so people saying, it's done, it's over. Like we fired missiles into a country and now we've achieved this great change, this great victory. But in actual fact, that's not how these things work.
[00:47:36] It's, you know, there is no quick fix, easy, consumeristic.
[00:47:41] There's no pill you can take, there's no military ozempic here that solves the problem.
[00:47:48] In order to shift and change a culture, particularly one that's been now 47 years or so under this regime, to bring about this kind of change, this doesn't happen. As I said, it's not like buying a product. And yay, you know, I've got six minute abs. But there's something about this war and the way it's being talked about that sort of speaks to that, that great privation in Western man, the privation of the mystical, the privation of the sacred, the loss of sacred enchantment that we desperately try to fill on a daily basis with our consumerism and our quick fixes and our silver magic bullets, which actually are not the way to flourishing and, you know, to true and lasting virtue and goodness. It's the hard graft that's required.
[00:48:36] I think the reality is that no sane person will be mourning the loss of the brutal Iranian regime.
[00:48:45] No sane person will be mourning that.
[00:48:48] But a lot of good, intelligent people could well come to regret, I think the way in which that was achieved, if it is actually even achieved in this case. The one last thing I'll say, and I know this might seem trite, but I think it is important, is that we need to remember, and even more so now, to keep praying for peace.
[00:49:09] I pray for peace. It's part of my daily prayer intentions for peace in the Middle east.
[00:49:14] Something that I got from my deceased, my late father, actually. He prayed that prayer on a daily basis every time he said grace, actually.
[00:49:21] So I think we need to pray and keep praying for peace and especially right now, peace in the Middle East.
[00:49:29] And as I said, I know that might sound trite, but I think it's really important. The other thing I'd say too is, and I can't remember the name of the saint right now, but there's that beautiful quote, you know, don't let anything worry you. All things are passing. And this will pass too. What the end of that passing is, we don't know.
[00:49:45] But all things will pass.
[00:49:47] Christ is Lord of all history.
[00:49:51] And I think it's not just about hope, but it's the kind of hope, Christian hope, that causes us not to try and be utopian world builders ourselves. If we have an eternal hope and a belief that goes beyond the here and now and that recognizes that all things are passing, that Christ is the Lord of all history, then I think that helps us to, you know, it's not about, oh, I'll become aloof to the problems of the world, but I think it helps us to recognize in actual fact God. His justice is eternal. His reach is eternal. All things, all accounts will one day be settled.
[00:50:25] I don't have to become part of some finite temporal, you know, utopian empire building here, and that's a really good thing.
[00:50:35] And I think it helps us to maintain perspective and to maintain our peace in the midst of these times of war and great disruption. Thanks again for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies.
[00:50:51] And I'll see you next time on the Dispatches. Hi there. If you're enjoying our content, then why not consider becoming a paid supporter of our work? You can do that at either Substack or Patreon, and the link for both are in the show notes for this episode. If you do become a supporter, then you'll get access to exclusive content, early release content, and also you'll be helping to fund all of the offline work that we do as well all of the youth camps and the events that we speak at and all that other stuff that happens that you don't see online.
[00:51:22] A huge thank you to all of our paid subscribers. It's thanks to you that this episode is made possible.
