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As I write, American and Israeli warplanes are bombing targets in Iran at will, since its Russian-supplied S-300 air defense systems were shredded in earlier attacks. Today’s strikes on pre-selected and unprotected targets were known in previous wars as “turkey shoots”—which is to say there’s no significant opposition. Another example would be the Israeli Air Force’s unchallenged bombing attacks in Gaza, which have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands, if not more, in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel. The bombing of Gaza is still going on.
Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s unfit choice for secretary of defense, cannot stop bragging about the unopposed air war that has been tearing Iranian military and civilian targets apart. Hegseth has told journalists that the US combat operations, code-named Epic Fury, are “crushing the enemy,” whom he has labeled “terrorist cowards.” A few days ago he told a news conference: “We have only just begun to hunt. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
In terms of reading newspapers and beginning to understand the world, I came of age in the late years of the Second World War, when America’s newspapers were full of US heroics abroad, as they are now full of murderous deeds in Iran. During the war, as kids in our pre-teens, my twin brother and I would be taken to afternoon movies—the local theater in Chicago was named V, for victory—by our older sisters. We would cheer madly at the blatant propaganda that was being produced about the war on the ground and in the air by Hollywood. We loyal Americans are, I fear, getting much of the same today.
The films I remembered the most involved movie star pilots—John Wayne was one—flying against the Japanese Air Force. The Japanese pilots, all with buck teeth, were known to us as “Nips”—and our American heroes spent their days protecting each other in combat and their nights dancing and flirting with nurses at the base. Years later, as a reporter in Washington, I would learn from a CIA official that American fighter-bombers flying late in World War II out of Brindisi, an Allied air base on the Adriatic Sea, against German industrial targets, repeatedly filmed evidence of what photo interpreters later concluded were Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps being lined up in front of gas chambers and crematoria. There was no doubt about the horror that was going on. The mission was to end the war as soon as possible.
Ending a murderous air war against an enemy with no air defenses that has never had the wherewithal to manufacture a nuclear warhead is not a priority for President Trump or his partner in the enterprise, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. They have chosen to destroy, kill, and maim from the air when there was another option: finding a way to work with and train with the secular Iranian Army and encourage that force to take on the Islamist Revolutionary Guards, who recently murdered thousands of protesters, many of them students who wanted a different future.
That option, which would have involved months of vetting and recruiting the right Iranian Army generals and the efficient training of a force that could take on the Revolutionary Guards, was never in the playbook. Netanyahu and Trump were too eager to get on with it.
What is it about air war that inspires men like Trump, Hegseth, and Netanyahu to choose bombing when there could be other ways to achieve similar results? I remember when as a grunt in the army reading John Hersey’s The War Lover, a brilliant 1959 novel about American pilots who were flying B-17 bombers, known as flying fortresses, in World War II over Germany, risking death at all times. The novel was later adapted into a movie starring Steve McQueen as the pilot whose constant near-death experiences were akin to a sexual addiction, one that was satisfied only by war.
Hersey was famously assigned by William Shawn, then the assistant editor of the New Yorker, in the immediate aftermath of World War II to go to Hiroshima and focus on the survivors of the US nuclear attack. Hersey’s report filled an entire issue of the magazine and changed the way many Americans felt about the bomb. (It was Shawn who hired me in 1970, when the Washington Post and New York Times would not, after I did my reporting on the US Army’s massacre at My Lai.)
So here we are: Trump is conspiring with an Israeli leader desperate to stay in office and avoid a jail sentence for corruption, while also trying to shirk an official inquiry into his role as prime minister in the failure of the Israeli Defense Forces to protect its soldiers and civilians from Hamas on October 7.
Tehran and other parts of the nation may be in ruins, but the American and Israeli air forces have shown the world what they can do to a nation with no operable air defense system.
Iran is down, as Hegseth said. Shame on us.
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