By Phil Rockstroh
The dimwit fantasy of smart bombs renders dumb leaders even dumber
Following the war criminality model of the Israeli Defense Forces, the US/Zionist bombing campaign on Iran is engaged in targeting hospitals, schools and private residences, slaughtering all who happen to be on the premises. The tactic, rather than demoralizing civilian populations, galvanizes contempt and the will to resist a foreign aggressor.
Think about it. While I opposed rightwing Christian evangelist’s retrograde (back to the Bronze Age) agendas if the air force of a foreign power bombed their megachurch in my vicinity, I would deem the death-from-above delivering aggressor an existential threat and would find myself, on a provisional basis, in alliance, with my political adversaries.
Every bomb dropped, causing death and destruction, strengthens the Mullah controlled government of Iran.
The true believers in the efficacy of so-called smart bombs are very stupid people.
As an example: a reporter to Secretary Of War(mongering) Pete Hegseth: “As you’ve said, there are a large number of US service members who are in harm’s way right now. What is your prayer for them?”
Hegseth: “First of all, my prayer for them is that I do pray for them… I pray simply for the biblical wisdom to see what is right and the courage to do it.”
How about the biblical admonition regarding “the writing on the wall,” piss-drunk Pete?
The “writing on the wall” episode in the Old Testament is a tale told in the Book of Daniel, 5, in which a disembodied hand of numinous origin, materializes during a feast/orgy held at King Belshazzar’s palace in ancient Babylon.
The hand of divinity scribes four words on the wall of King Belshazzar’s ornate banquet hall: “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” (Aramaic: “Numbered, Numbered, Weighed, Divided”).
The Jewish prophet in exile Daniel interprets this as an augury of impending doom i.e., the imminent fall of the Babylonian Empire to the Medes and Persians.
The phrase has become axiomatic for: ignore looming reality at your peril. Withal, just hours before ordering his attack on Iran Trump attended a bacchanal of moneyed class excess at his Belshazzarian palace known as Mar-a-Lago.
At my son’s Hebrew school today, the class discussed the legend of Purim. Of course, the story is ahistorical; to wit, Queen Esther, the archetypal orphan rises to the throne of a great power, as told as dauntless hero figure for her courage and cunning in saving a besieged — threatened with genocide — Jewish people in perilous exile. Then there is Esther’s striking beauty providing a patina of glamour to the blood-drench story of royal court intrigue and denouncement that setting is ancient Persia, now present day Iran.
Today’s storylines remain being told with an equal lack of veracity. Unlike the tidy ending of the biblical yarn, the unpredictable consequences, engendered by the lies that enabled this war, await us.
A voice within me augurs that in the future the events transpiring in the Levant/Persian Gulf at present will not be celebrated, as, at Purim time, they were in the synagogue of my childhood, with children adorned in costumes of the royal Persian court and the baking of and indulgence in plum cookies and cakes.
The unfolding of events suggest, history will relate the war catalyzing the long overdue collapse of the US as a world-dominating power due to the unsurpassed idiocy and raging hubris of a wannabe US emperor man-infant and the beginning of the end of the Zionist ethno-supremacist state, war criminal enterprise.
So Trump, at Netanyahu’s command, has unloosed the dogs of war, and the snarling pack is peeing on his cackle inflicted leg. How long did Trump and Netanyahu believe they could commit mass murder with impunity? The Gods — i.e., the forces of life that cannot be controlled — strike down the hubristic, and this is particularly true of the God of War.
Israel is being afflicted with a world of hurt. Iranian missiles are raining down on Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. The Iranians have fired only a fraction of their arsenal. Israel has cornered and angered a dog of war with real teeth. This isn’t, as in Gaza, a war waged on women and children sleeping in tents, on emergency room doctors and nurses, on journalists and aid workers.
With Trump, he rained unprovoked death from above upon Venezuelan fishermen but now US soldiers have fallen in his war based on lies. The longer the war goes on, and the more hurt inflicted by Iran — the more Trump is going to long for the days when his biggest trouble was the revelations that remain hidden, for now, in the Epstein files.
Trump is a short con grifter. He lacks the depth, ability to reflect, and possess foresight insofar as apprehending all the variables in play in the dynamics of war. His proclivity, when things get rough, has been to declare victory and turn tail.
His main strength, tactic-wise, has been his cowardice. As a garden variety bully, he had an instinct to only pick a fight with those weaker or had no desire to fight. But as witnessed in Minnesota, when the citizenry, instead of rolling over and exposing their belly, collectively, growled and bared their teeth, Trump and his ICE bully boys turned tail.
The world is now taking note; hence, Trump, the shambling, over-reaching braggart, is the very emblem of US Empire’s undoing.
The current US/Israeli military campaign underway against the nation of Iran, Operation Epstein Amnesia, we are told involves an existential threat from a nation possessed of Weapons of Mass Destruction that poses an immediate danger to the forever blameless, forever innocent people of the US and Israel; hence, we are engaged in a massive bombing campaign upon the citizenry of an ancient civilization in behalf of their liberation.
Somewhere from the precincts of the distant past, ghosts of memory are being roused and are howling, “bullshit!”
Let’s query the people of Iraq, of Libya, and of Syria on the subject. The latter nation now has a US/Zionist installed government headed by ISIS head-choppers created by the US in their war of aggression against the people of the primary nation. As for Libya, they possess the freedom to be bought and sold in slave markets in public squares.
The US/Israelis just liberated over hundred Iranian school girls from this very life.
Of course the first words that come to mind when thinking of Trump would be: man of peace and good will…but never, on the doorstep of dementia, adult diaper-swaddled grifter, featured player in the Epstein files. The same is true with Trump’s war partner Benjamin Netanyahu…the description would never enter the mind: genocide-prone psychopath, with the eyes of a dead shark, perpetrator of massive crimes against humanity.
Perish such thoughts attempting to trespass, like fentanyl smuggling illegals, into the pristine precincts of our innocent and beautiful minds.
US/Israeli desperation is at the rotten, down to the root, military aggression against Iran. The source of the desperation: Recent polls reveal that large and growing numbers of the US citizenry now support the cause of Palestinians over that of the Israeli oppressors.
Thus Israel’s agenda, its standard operating procedure, is to sow destruction and chaos in the region. In this manner, the Israeli leadership believes their internal weakness will be mitigated by the destabilization of surrounding nations, as was the case with Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and now Iran.
But the goal is not regime change. There is not a significant number of US ground troops in the Levant/Persian Gulf region, and the killing of Iran’s supreme leader is not going to do the trick. The latter is not only a war crime but will strengthen the resolve of the Iranian citizenry. Then add to the resolve factor: the slaughter of Iranian school girls.
As for Trump, he is a weak man, inflicted by a howling inner emptiness, who, manically, compensates by perpetual preening and clownish boasting about his greatness.
Thus “Trump’s (risible) “Board Of Peace” goes to war. This has to be reality — because a writer of farce would cut the joke for being too on the nose.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist.
3 March 2026
Source: countercurrents.org