How I Learned to Love the Bomb and Trust the Emperor

By Haim Bresheeth-Žabner

US President Donald Trump. (Illustration: Palestine Chronicle)

Only one question remains: who exactly will deter or stop the happy couple from carrying out their ingenious last undertaking?

As Americans go to vote in the midterms, the rest of the world is wondering what new perils will be launched by the war-crime duo of the United States and Israel in the near future, affecting not just the long-suffering people of Iran, but also Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and the rest of the region, and all over the world.

The dastardly duo had already inflicted much death and destruction in the Middle East, more than a hundred thousand victims of the Gaza genocide, and the attacks elsewhere.

Gaza is no more; its survivors lie amongst the rubble, with many dead under the 60 million tons of debris strewn everywhere, overrun by mad dogs, rats and sewage. Where there were houses, streets, tower blocks, gardens and cafes, universities and schools, shops and mosques, markets and hospitals, there is now only pulverized concrete, and the remains of life torn to shreds, in pieces, evidence of a past existence of thousands of years in one of the most ancient cities on earth.

This wasteland of death and destruction is the promise made by Trump and Netanyahu to the rest of the region: Obey us or die.

Back to the Dark Ages, in the words of the ignoramus who rules the richest nation on earth, one shrouded in submissive silence while this new Caligula is prancing around demanding the Nobel Prize for peace for the wars he is fighting across the globe, with his paunchy sidekick who, if anything, has started more wars and killed more victims.

In the meantime, while we wait to hear what new atrocity they plan to inflict, the people of Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen are continuing to perish daily, and their homes are turning into rubble.

The people of Iran are facing a terrifying dilemma, as do political leaders all over the Middle East. Most of those leaders are neither democrats nor especially enlightened, and their interests are not their people but their bank accounts; But the many millions of West Asia, Arabia and North Africa, the same who rose in 2011 in the so-called Arab Spring, are experiencing the wrath of the declining West, as it works with Israel, its deadly chaos engine, to inflict pain, ruin and devastation everywhere.

The German Chancellor has candidly described Israel’s mission: “Israel is doing our dirty work for us” – this from a leader of a polity which has committed or partook in numerous genocides, and has destroyed Europe, and much else besides, in two world wars during the 20^th century.

What on earth is its current destructive task? In Russia (not for the first time), in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in Iran, in Africa? Why is the globe exposed again to the mad destruction specialist of the West?  After centuries of industrial slavery, indigenous ethnic cleansing and genocides, rampant colonialism, militarised imperialism, capitalism without borders and with no limits or morals, they now specialize in using the latest technology to do their ‘dirty work’, their ‘mowing the grass’, their ‘collateral damage’, so they build their ‘villas in the jungle’?

Iran is now facing two nuclear powers, the US and Israel, who have time and again changed their war aims, mainly driven by Israeli demands from the US. They keep changing the goalposts – regime change, total surrender, opening the Hormuz Straits, ending the nuclear program, returning to the Stone Age – starting illegal wars while negotiating for ‘peace’, breaking ceasefires, and signing MOUs only to break them within days.

This unpredictability is confusing for the people of two bellicose regimes, as it is for Iran and its civilians. It has become clear that normative rational calculation and assumptions are less than useful when trying to predict President Trump, whose moves have all the delicate precision of a drunken sailor on skates, crashing in a China shop from one disaster to another.

The moves of Netanyahu are not more rational either, and both are hardly following a set of logical priorities, so divining their moves is not an easy task, because Trump himself does not know what he will do in the next minute, hour, or day. And those two carry the portfolio of nuclear ‘keys’ with them, so that they are ready to order the blowing up of this or that part of the globe to radioactive smithereens. Lovely.

So, one thing has become quite clear, though. Both Israel and the US are not ‘normal’ countries and do not meet any normative set of political and diplomatic expectations or take any notice of international law. Both leaders have the fine judgment of Caligula’s horse, combined with the morality of a mafia boss.

President Trump has at his command the largest and most lavish system of research, analysis, decision-making, and implementation of political options. More than a million employees are working on intelligence gathering, spying, influencing, working out options, presenting reports, supplying and marshaling forces, transporting troops and munitions, flying bombing missions, Operation Seattleites, computer networks, and military camps.

The budget required for this massive war machine exceeds that of most states and is without historical precedent. Despite this war machine working day and night to produce scenarios for an intellectually challenged Caligula, he instead prefers to use the information he is fed by Netanyahu and the leading spy master. The Pentagon might well wind up its business and close for the day – it is not important or meaningful.

Caligula prefers the wisdom of its horse instead. You could not run a pub that way, but it seems to be a good enough method to operate the largest empire, in its days of fast decline.

Now, what can the two clowns achieve in a new war (“three days of carpet bombing”) that was not achieved in the last two, in June 2025 and in February 2026 to now? What did Scott Bessent not achieve with his destructive financial sanctions? What has the US not achieved since 1979?

This is a crucial question, as continued and systemic failure is freeing some new and even more dangerous options, ones seemingly raised by Netanyahu and presented to Trump.

I mean, of course, the fact that both hinted that the use of nuclear bombs is one option they are weighing; this is a position which is totally unprecedented, nothing short of criminal madness. Instead of waiting to be exterminated by AI, as recently predicted by the very people working on perfecting those engines of doom and harm, Trump and Netanyahu plan to do AI’s ‘dirty work for them’ and start a nuclear war, whose single likely outcome is Mutual Assured Destruction, as it was affectionately dubbed in the nuclear 1960s.

What we have to fear is not Netanyahu and Trump defeating Iran, which, as most experts have divined, is not at all likely. What we have to fear is their continued failure, and their turning to means of destruction which were meant for deterrence only, as using them was considered beyond the pale.

But what once was unimaginable and taboo seems now to be the flavor of the week in Washington and Tel Aviv, by a President who told his friend Tucker Carlson that “it does not matter, because everyone dies in the end”. Like the mythical Samson, both Trump and Netanyahu fashion themselves as the heroes bringing the roof down on humanity, in their ultimate mission that must be accomplished.

Only one question remains: who exactly will deter or stop the happy couple from carrying out their ingenious last undertaking, and how will this be done?

Prizes offered for wholesome hints or precise predictions.

– Haim Bresheeth-Žabner is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, and the author of An Army Like No Other: How the IDF Made A Nation, Verso 2020. He contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.