Why are the United States and Israel at war with Iran? No one, least of all the men waging the conflict on our reluctant and terrified behalf, seems to know. A variety of possibilities has been proposed by a variety of public officials, from the lilting Lindsey Graham to the dipsomaniacal Pete Hegseth to our commander-in-chief, all of them bearing the deflated, beery air of a routine resentfully workshopped in the Comedy Cellar. What do we hope to accomplish? When will the lights go up? When can we go to the bathroom without getting heckled from the stage?

“War,” wrote Carl von Clausewitz, “is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” This generously assumed a politics to begin with. By the time the Great War rolled around almost a century later, the paradigm was already exhausted. What politics or policy impelled Europe to slaughter the better part of a generation? A dying map of dynastic inheritance and Napoleonic ambition? The ideological battles of the rest of the 20th century seemed to rescue the theory of war-as-politics: the contest against fascism; the rivalry between western democracies and various flavors of socialism; the struggles of the colonized to throw off the yokes of their rulers.

The 21st century briefly continued the illusion. The attacks of 9/11 were propounded as a new clash of civilizations akin to the glorious Cold War, Islam (or some version of it) serving as the implacable Soviet menace to our imperiled free world. About 90 percent of Americans supported the war in Afghanistan, then we stayed there for 20 years before turning it back over to the very people we wrested it from in our initial campaign of vengeance. We invaded Iraq, again, an effort that also failed and petered out ignominiously. Its signal image remains an American president dressed up like a G.I. Joe figurine, grinning stupidly on the deck of an aircraft carrier underneath a “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner right before things really turned to shit.

The present conflict with Iran has many fathers. Generations of American leaders who have failed to restrain our junior partner in Israel as it has........

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