COMMENTARY: By Tucker Carlson
So, the whole Iran war, like so much of life, has turned out to be exactly the opposite of what you thought: You initiate a regime change war against Iran. You kill its elderly cleric head of state. You blow up a girls’ school. You sink its ships. You decapitate its “Air Force,” whatever that was.
You unleash the full fury of the largest military in human history on this country and, in the end, almost inevitably, that country becomes stronger and the countries that attack it become weaker.
Again, only in real life do ironies like this exist, but they are everywhere. In fact, that is the story of life. The opposite happens.
- READ MORE: Trump says Iran MoU signed electronically, Hormuz to open fully on
- Tucker Carlson and John Mearsheimer react over Iran
- As deal is agreed with US, not all in Iran are convinced that peace is here
- Other Gaza genocide and Iran war reports
Who could have called this? Well, certainly almost no one in Washington saw this coming, because they’ve been talking about this war with Iran and the need to decapitate Iran and the need to do something about Iran: “America’s biggest problem is Iran, and their proxies, and the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas.”
Whenever they gather in Washington to talk about the world, Iran is at the top of the list of problems we must solve.
And in almost none of these gatherings has anyone piped up to say, “Well, wait a second, if we do that, the opposite will happen. Iran will become more powerful, and we will become less powerful.”
Almost nobody said that in Washington. Literally almost nobody. And if there is somebody, who is that person? There wasn’t one.
At least one realist
But there was at least one person outside of Washington who said this. His name is John Mearsheimer. He’s been a professor at the University of Chicago since 1982, for over 40 years.
And he studies international relations, the way that countries get along with each other, the balances of power regionally and globally. And he’s smart and he’s erudite, but above all, he is wise.
He draws obvious conclusions from longitudinal data sets. He looks at what happens over time and tries to understand what this tells us about the way nations behave and about the way people behave, about human nature, which is constant, it doesn’t change.
And because he is one of the very few people in the field of international relations who has this ability, married to personal bravery, he’s willing to say things that are unpopular, which is the rarest of all qualities in academia.
Because he has these two qualities, he has been maybe the only guy, or one of the very few guys, to call it right.
Back in 2007, he and a friend of his from Harvard called Stephen Walt wrote a book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, on the so-called Jewish lobby, AIPAC, and the whole constellation of non-profits in Washington that seek to steer the US Congress and the executive of the White House to giving Israel more money and more military aid, to changing the inherent priorities of American foreign policy, which are to protect and enhance the United States and to do things that are good for the population of America, to change that priority to protect Israel, to do what Israel wants.
The two of them wrote this fairly famous book about it back in 2007 and were immediately attacked, can you guess, as Nazis and anti-Semites. Well, turns out neither of them was a Nazi or an anti-Semite, just the opposite.
Normal liberals
They’re kind of normal liberals, not racist in any sense.
The charge itself is ludicrous. You notice what AIPAC is doing, so you’re an anti-Semite? It doesn’t make any sense; it’s a slur.
It’s slander designed to make you be quiet. And in most cases it works, which is why they keep doing it.
But in this one specific case, it didn’t work. Professor John Mearsheimer, who had tenure at Chicago, did not lose his job. And not only did he keep speaking, he upped the volume of his speaking and kept telling the world, though most people didn’t listen, what he had personally seen and how he interpreted that.
Why does the United States military go to war?
Mearsheimer, through close observation, concluded, well, in the modern era, mostly it goes to war, big wars, on behalf of Israel.
Tucker Carlson is an American conservative political commentator who hosts The Tucker Carlson Show.
Professor John Mearsheimer on genocide in Gaza and the looming defeat in Iran — recorded just before the peace deal. Video: The Tucker Carlson Show
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.