You Can’t Talk About Trump’s Iran War Without Knowing Some History
Is it any surprise that child sacrifice is the lead story?
Donald Trump has made many promises to his hate cult over the years, but the biggest was that he would always be their hero against the Deep State’s forever wars. This was always the essence of who he said he was. He was the ballast against the endless wars of the Middle East.
During the last presidential campaign, he promised his stricken cult, which was decimated by a needless plague during Mad King 1.0, that the respect Putin and Zelenskyy had for him was so deeply intense that he’d end Russia’s war against Ukraine before his inauguration.
Like the rest of us, his cult shrugged off the promise as part of his usual useless bluster, but they didn’t mind. He didn’t start the damn thing, they thought. The Ukraine war wasn’t his to solve.
As we are discovering, some of his cult, however, is holding him accountable for not only entering the forever wars, but entering them in the bigliest way possible.
Whether this results in a legitimate fissure within MAGA remains to be seen. Long-time sufferers of Trump’s manic presence will be skeptical. And why not? A quick perusal of comments from the cult suggests that they’re buying it all hook, line, and sinker. Here’s one sample of comments on a Facebook post consisting of a gallery of shots from the Situation Room released by the White House:
Other writers will cover the fun more than I’m willing to bother with.
For our purposes, what is of chief interest is that a man who doesn’t read and has the literacy rate of a third grader (if you’re feeling charitable) is starting a war against a 6,000-year-old culture with 90 million proud people who correctly view America’s 250 year presence on the world stage as a temporary historical blip.
When you go to war with a nation of 90 million people who have been at the cradle of Western civilization for thousands of years, it’s imperative to understand history. Unfortunately, Trump would be, like his cult, unable to find Iran on a map without White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles poking him in his belly with his most recent McDonald’s tray.
I’ve talked about Wiles before, but nobody is paying attention.1 She’s the Florida Woman in all the photos of the Situation Room released by the White House, such as this one:
She’s always there with Trump, wherever “there” is. She’s the Weekend at Bernie’s Presidency’s official presidential string puller. She’s everything everywhere all at once.
However, Wiles, who leads so many efforts in Trump’s war against America but continues to remain unscathed even by our belligerent echo chambers, is no student of history, either. If she were, she wouldn’t be leading the country into oblivion.
But history matters. It always has. It always will.
Iran has a history?
The ancient history of Iran and Persia is too rich and layered for a lone Substack article. The origin story of Iran, after all, is said to date back to around 4000 B.C., nearly 6,000 years before the United States was established.
Americans can’t even get their history right. There’s not a chance they’ll appreciate Iran’s. Sadly, they may wish they had when they start noticing thousands of maritime drones attacking big, expensive American gunships in the Straight of Hormuz. But that’s a subject for the military bloggers.
What I can provide, however, is important historical context. I promise it’ll be painless and short, with maybe a few jokes thrown in.
The first Persian empire is generally considered to have been the Achaemenid Empire in 550 B.C.E. It was quite large for its time. Most “empires” in those days involved one knucklehead in a small dirt town beating the crap out of five other knuckleheads in five other small dirt towns and calling it an empire or kingdom.
But the Achaemenid Empire was a massive knucklehead bulldozer.
They didn’t have much to fight for in those days. So they all fought for whatever turned them on, which were, usually, shiny things, or the occasional bejeweled woman (also considered by the men of that era as shiny things).
The march of empire (by Iran and others) stumbled along until gunpowder enhanced warfare’s killing process, but during all those years in between, the Persians and Iranians were responsible for stunning cultural and scientific achievements.
Whenever we discuss the possibility of war in the Middle East, we are, by extension, talking about destroying many of the antiquities associated with those achievements. Outside of some regions in Asia, the Middle East is the closest thing the world has ever had to a living museum. Bombing these countries is like running around a museum, breaking all the protective glass in a fit of pique, and then burning the place to the ground.
What is lost is never returned to humanity.
More importantly, war against Iran means declaring war on 90 million proud people whose ancestors have lived in their nation for thousands of years. When guys like Pete Hegseth beat their chests saying, “Only Trump was willing to do this,” they aren’t kidding. American presidents have shown restraint against Iran for reasons that go beyond the financial crunch of taking on such a large country.
Currently, Iranians are stuck in the middle of a terrible regime that makes the Republican scourge in the United States look like a Disney movie. The ayatollahs are a repressive, misogynistic, hateful bunch.
But Americans have never been given an honest reason about why the ayatollahs took over Iran in the first place.
For that, we must meet a man named Mohammed Mossadegh.
He was the 30th Prime Minister of Iran. Elected by the Iranian parliament, known as the Majlis, he leaned a bit too hard toward socialism for American policymakers of the 1950s. When he proposed nationalizing the oil industry and claiming Iran’s resources as their own, the oil companies sued for peace.
Just kidding. They spoke into the ears of a fella named Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Theodore’s grandson. He mastered the art of spycraft while working for the Office of Strategic Services during World War Two.
Kermit helped arrange to remove Mossadegh from power at the behest of the British, who had been vying for control of Iran’s oil fields since World War Two. The British talked President Eisenhower into helping depose Mossadegh, and Kermit went to work.
Kermit hired Iranian mobs to protest2 Mossadegh in a complicated plot that resulted in his overthrow.
His replacement, the Shah of Iran, was a popular figure at the time, and pro-American, so it didn’t take long for Western powers to gain control of Iran and its oil fields.
The Shah became increasingly authoritarian (sound familiar?), setting up a ruthless secret police service and pushing secular business onto a deeply religious population.
Sure enough, the people revolted.
The Shah’s reign ended with the famous slogan, “Iran, Iran, said the Shah” as he fled to Italy, making way for the ayatollahs who are currently running the show there and who, themselves, are now walking on eggshells laid down by a restive population, that, thanks to Trump, will probably now rally around the Iranian flag.
It might not shock you that Kermit was an active Christian nationalist. Shortly after the war, he joined an organization called the Institute of Arab American Affairs. Around the same time, in 1948, he and about a hundred or so Christian men joined the fight led by the American Council for Judaism against giving Palestinians any semblance of human rights during the partition of Palestine that followed World War Two.
To be fair, the world was visibly shaken by Hitler’s rampage against Jews. He killed millions of them, often in a grotesque manner. It was one of human history’s ugliest events, if not the ugliest. Relocation seemed like a good idea at the time.
But Kermit wasn’t interested in that as much as he was in making sure that the Palestinians didn’t get a two-state solution to the partition of their own nation. So he fought against it, along with the rest of his chest-thumping fundamentalist Christians.
The rest of that well-known history culminated in the current atrocities in Gaza perpetrated by a war criminal who has masterminded a new theater in the forever wars in response to atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
Such is the nature of the forever wars in the Middle East. One Abrahamic religious group commits atrocities against the other, and the cycle repeats forever.
There are many reasons for this, but most of it involves the insane internecine warfare in the name of an old prophet named Abraham, whose story is shared by three religions that have been at each other’s throats for two thousand or so years.
The Forever Wars Should be Called the Abrahamic Wars
The grandest story of old Abe, not to be confused with America’s old Abe, was the moment that he willingly laid his son down on a rock, and, unbeknownst to the poor young lad, prepared to slice off his head as a sacrifice to the God of Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Who was Abraham?
Abraham is the uber-prophet of three religions and is said to be buried in what is now known as modern-day Hebron at the Ibrahimi Mosque. Modern scholars seem to think he’s a myth, but trying to dig up his remains for evidence at the Cave of the Patriarchs/Sanctuary of Abraham is one of the easiest ways to get yourself killed, so nobody knows for sure.
If you believe the Bible, all Muslims and Jews share Abraham as an ancestor. That they share his story, myth or otherwise, is not in dispute. Christians, Jews, and Muslims are still engaged, thousands of years later, in the mother of all family squabbles. Children are getting slaughtered, entire neighborhoods are being razed, and hundreds of thousands of people have been starved out of their homes because each member of the family thinks their version of the story is best.
The Abrahamic family lobs missiles at one another like they’re playing a grand game of lawn darts.
All of this is born from a myth about a dude who was willing to kill his son because he heard voices in his head.
For a long time, tradition held that Moses was the author of Genesis. Then, scholars got real and figured out that references to post-Moses locale names like “Ur of the Chaldeans” and “Dan” couldn’t have been referenced by Moses because that’s not how people in Moses’ time referred to those places.3
Archaeologists got to work and determined that the story of Abraham was probably fiction, or, at the most, an amalgamation of stories about different men.
This is not the result of a grand conspiracy. Ancient scribes and translators were pretty bad at their jobs compared to modern translators. Not only did they make a lot of mistakes, but sometimes they filled a clerical agenda with embellishments:
“Thaddeus! We need a story about how we must submit to God at all times!”
“Cool! I’ll write a story about how God asks the great prophet to sacrifice his son!”
“Splendid, Thaddeus! Maybe don’t actually kill the kid?”
The Bible, along with its deeply flawed translations and transcriptions over the years, has always had an outsized impact on history.
As science fiction author Isaac Asimov noted in his unheralded but deeply researched tome, Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The Old and New Testaments4:
Millions know certain minor Egyptian Pharaohs, such as Shishak and Necho, who are mentioned in the Bible, but have never heard of the great conquering Pharaoh, Thutmose III, who is not. People whose very existence is doubtful, such as Nimrod and the queen of Sheba, are household words because they are mentioned in the Bible, while figures who were colossal in their day are sunk in oblivion because they are not.
The problems with Bible translations start at, appropriately enough, the beginning. The Old Testament, which describes Abraham in the Book of Genesis, was originally written in an ancient version of Hebrew. It was later translated into Greek by seventy scholars.
We can’t get seventy scholars to get things right in our era. Especially if you get them in the same room. Imagine what it was like when people were sleeping with their sisters and wearing the same tunic 365 days a year.
The story of Abraham, which Bible thumpers still claim was entirely written by Moses, is told in The Book of Genesis, a book of mythology that is as much fiction as another ancient story, the Book of Gilgamesh5.
People wrote books like this back in those days as a way of coping with levels of disease and hardship far beyond anything the most frustrated smartphone users could ever imagine. It was an outlet of sorts. A way to explain away the crap of daily existence.
Genesis is the same book that gave us the world’s first dysfunctional family. And people have been fighting wars over it ever since.
And now, thanks to a longstanding battle between religions, two of our small human families on a small strip of land are destroying each other in the name of their God while the self-proclaimed leader of America has decided to start bombing the snot out of one of the world’s most culturally rich nations.
It’s not as frustrating as a bunch of dumb shits electing Trump, but it’s close.
The Parable of the World’s First Dysfunctional Family
To fully understand the absurdity of Genesis (beyond the silly notion that the world was created in six days, after which God took a one-day breather), consider the story of Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel, his brother. This would have left, according to Genesis, three people left in the world: Adam, his wife Eve, and Cain, their one remaining son.
But Cain, in asking mercy from God, says in Genesis 4:14, “Whoever finds me will kill me.”
Huh? Who might that be? Mom and Dad? Maybe, but then you’d think he’d just say, like we all have said at one time or another, “Mom and Dad are gonna kill me” after he misbehaved so egregiously.
The bigger problem, however, comes just a bit later, when he gets married, which leaves us with the minor issue of marrying one’s mother, especially with dad still around.
“Son, I’m not very happy about this turn of events.”
“But dad, who the fuck else am I supposed to betroth? Fuckin’ planet is as barren as Mars.”
Let’s move on to the assumption that Cain got married after Adam and Eve “begot sons and daughters” (Genesis 5:3-4). That still leaves the uncomfortable notion of marrying one of his sisters. I guess you have to start the world somewhere. Of course, I suppose it is also fair to guess that anybody who’d kill his brother might marry his sister, but there is a further challenge in Genesis 4:17:
Cain made love to his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch.
— Genesis 4:17
I’ve always considered myself an optimist, sometimes naively so, but I don’t quite understand the need to build an entire city for a clearly dysfunctional, and tiny, family.
A couple of houses should do. And I don’t even want to try to guess where Cain’s son Enoch found his wife. On second thought, maybe building a city was a good idea. Get everyone out of that crazy house and skip the inevitably weird holiday dinners.
Sometimes the best explanations for biblical events come from the scientific community, and here again, we turn to Isaac Asimov, who suggests that the Cain and Abel story is simply a parable of the frustrations of what he calls nomadic virtue: that the encroachment of civilization on nomadic life was painful for the nomad. Such a parable holds value today, as many modern nations experience significant political conflict between rural and urban areas.
None of this changes the overall message of the parable that clerics wanted to push onto their flock — that God provided everything we needed, and we “ate from the apple” — we sinned. We became greedy, manipulative, and murderous. We became the only animal that kills for sport, and we kill each other, not only other animals. This general behavior made God angry and gave us what the Bible tells us is a fallen world. Innocence lost.
Whatever. At the end of the day, it’s just a story that preachers told their scribes to keep people in line.
American Bible thumpers have used various fictions found in the Bible for a long time to suppress the rights of others. They used it to justify slavery. They used it to justify the ethnic cleansing of North America’s indigenous population. They’re using it now to harass the LGBTQ+ community and ban books on Black History and the difficulties of growing up as a gay teen.
And now, Trump is invoking a God he doesn’t believe in an attempt to throttle a country he knows nothing about.
In a way, this isn’t Trump’s fault. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the history of war, and the Gaza conflict, where each side is in a contest to see who can commit the biggest war crime, and now Iran v. Israel and Trump, is steeped in an argument between three religions whose shared mythical first prophet was asked to sacrifice his son. And that he said yes.
Trump is most certainly not aware of any of this history. Few Americans are. Most Americans think what Fox News has been telling them since its birth: Ruthless Iranians took Americans hostage for no reason aside from their savagery, and have wanted to kill us ever since.
But the truth is different.
The truth lies in the mythical ghost of a young boy about to be slaughtered by his father in the name of a god its worshippers think is a barbarian just like we are.
Until we come to terms with the history of the Abrahamic religions and tell them all to grow up and stop trying to sell their favorite version of the story, the world will remain mired in its awful family squabble.
Notes
Full disclosure: I consider myself a Christian, but along the lines of A Course in Miracles, which says pretty much what I’m saying here, only in a much nicer way.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes
“The 1953 Coup D’etat in Iran on JSTOR.” 2025. Jstor.org. https://doi.org/10.2307/163655.
“Google Books.” 2016. Google.com. 2016. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Historicity_of_the_Patriarchal_Narra/o91vmgEACAAJ?hl=en.
What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?
For centuries the Hebrew Bible has been the fountainhead of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The Book of Gilgamesh used to be required reading in public schools, but now that there seems to be no required reading in public schools, I have no idea if that is still the case.
Excellent summary and refresher for this history. And the little funny asides made for great reading.
Hot damn, you're good at this writing gig. I'm impressed by the breadth of knowledge you bring to your work. It's a relief to know that I'm not the only one who takes all of history into account when looking at the current events. Actually, it's comforting.
Thank you for this informative essay.
I don't find much benefit to organized religions so I have not allied myself to any of them. I find they do more harm than good for humans. However, I strongly believe in personally doing as much good as possible and trying not to cause harm. Admittedly, I'm not yet completely skilled with the latter.