War between America and Iran? "Avoid history at all costs. History is too big, too abstract, too dangerous."

They're doing it again.

It sounds like Trump is going to get the United States involved in another damn war in the Middle East.

Heard the same thing going from 3 to 2 pic.twitter.com/8yHK5Wpeql

— Nancy Just Nancy (@NancyJustNancy) June 19, 2025

It took Netanyahu 29 years, but he finally found an American president who was itching to go to war with him against Iran. https://t.co/BmIAftzPgV

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 18, 2025

Watch @Timodc on the Israel-Iran conflict: "There's one thing I do know, I wish that a genocidal maniac was not leading Iran and that a corrupt, indiscriminate, prime minister was not leading Israel and that a fucking moron was not leading our country." pic.twitter.com/uDTL5xaklJ

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) June 18, 2025

Journalist Gary Kamiya wrote this article for Salon magazine in 2003, two weeks before the US invasion of Iraq. 

It remains eerily prescient today: 

Gary Kamiya / Salon March 11, 2003 

Sleepwalking toward Baghdad 

As the sand runs out on peace, America drifts alone toward a strange and unjustified war. 

 ... we have gone from being in a political moment to a historical one.
I use the words somewhat eccentrically, to distinguish between events that are simple enough to be fully explicable ("political") and those that are too complex to be defined ("historical"). The war against Afghanistan took place in what I am calling the political realm: It had a clear, limited and achievable goal, one understood by all -- and widely supported around the world. The impending war against Iraq, on the other hand, is a historical event. It cannot be explained or defined. When it comes, it will simply exist, with the opacity of history. Its outcome is not foreseeable.
The distinction also has a moral dimension. To exist in history is to have passed beyond the pieties and slogans of the political. History is tragic: politics is not. History is glorious. It is also fatal.
The two great competing ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism, were both self-consciously historical movements. As Czeslaw Milosz brilliantly noted in his classic study "The Captive Mind," it was precisely the abstraction of communism, its claim to have attained the summit of morality and to have incorporated into itself all possible contradictions, that made it so meticulously horrifying. In similar fashion, fascism contained a kind of blankness at its core: the self-glorifying violence of the state simultaneously concealed and revealed the emptiness of its founding concept, the national tribe.
The lesson every government should have learned from the bloody 20th century, one written in blood across the tortured soil of old, very old Europe, is very simple: Avoid history at all costs. History is too big, too abstract, too dangerous. Avoid men with Big Ideas -- especially stupid men with Big Ideas. Take care of politics: let history take care of itself. In a word, don't play God.
George Bush is a deeply religious man, and he deeply believes in the God-given mission of the United States to shed light -- Auden's "affirming flame" -- upon the world. But as we wait for the bombs to fall, we can only pray that he does not release darkness.

(Painting is Paul Nash, Landscape from a Dream)