Mel Goodman shares his views on the motivation and conduct of the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, as well as the short and long term consequences for international law, the world economy and the American empire.
Goodman is a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University and a former CIA analyst.
And the story that’s not getting enough attention at all, in fact, it’s hardly getting any attention, is the renewed nakba, the disaster in the West Bank where Palestinians are being displaced from their homes by a combination of Israeli settlers and Israeli defense forces.
So the U.S. position with regard to the Middle East should be—given all of the blood and treasure we’ve wasted in the Middle East—is to create some stability so we can get out, so we can extricate ourself from the region that has really become a briar patch for the United States. Netanyahu’s goal couldn’t be more different. He said he’s trying to change the map of the Middle East and that’s what he’s done essentially over the past two years.
He craves instability in the region because he uses instability in a couple of ways. One is it justifies not negotiating with the Palestinians, not examining the potential for a two-state solution. Not conducting any honest negotiations with anyone. And at the same time, once he’s created this instability, then he can rely totally on military power and its military power that’s saving his political regime because when you think of all of the criminal issues he’s involved with, he’s been faced with court actions for the past five or six years.
It’s the fact that the wars continue and the wars remain popular in Israel. Even the genocidal campaign in Gaza was popular in Israel. You have to ask, why is it George W. Bush was smart enough—even George W. Bush was smart enough not to align himself with Israel—but Trump fell for Netanyahu’s arguments that were totally self-serving and solipsistic that benefited no one really but Netanyahu himself.
So as long as this continues, it’s going to make it very difficult, not only for the United States to have a position in the Middle East that addresses the major issues of the Middle East, but when you look at the Iran problem, now we’re faced with the nuclear program that Trump himself created by canceling the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear court from 2015, which was negotiated superbly by Secretary of State John Kerry and his Energy Secretary Ernetz Moniz from MIT.
So now we’re trying to redo essentially the parameters of the nuclear program, but now we’re relying on the military. So we’re told now that there are 5,000 Marines from the Indo-Pacific from Asia, that are leaving their duty stations in the Indo-Pacific, where we thought that the primary objective was to check China, to come to the Middle East and it begs the question of will we try to use these special forces to rescue the highly enriched uranium that’s stored somewhere in Israel, either the sites that have been bombed in Isfahan or somewhere else. We just really don’t know.
Or we can just continue the military situation, which finds us just using bombs randomly and arbitrarily against Iranian targets, not only military targets, but now we’re hitting infrastructure. And you mentioned the deaths of 160 schoolgirls in southern Iran.
And what really jumps out at me is what we need are negotiations to get some compromise to return to the Iran Nuclear Accord. But remember, it was Netanyahu who came to the United States to address a joint session of Congress in 2018, who tried to block this agreement, excuse me, in 2015 to try to block this agreement.
He failed, but now he’s found a better way, abrogate the agreement and work with the United States for a military solution. Iran has made it clear that they’re not going to bow to the military power of the United States and (Israel). They’re taking a terrible beating. They have no air defense. They have no Air Force. They have no way of stopping what we can inflict on them from the air, but there’s no sign that they’re willing to cave into us.
And even though the regime remains, I think, very unpopular with the majority of the people, once you start bombing these people and they’re afraid to come out of their houses, it makes it ludicrous to say that we’ve done the damage that we need to do. It’s up to the people of Iran to leave their homes and seize the government. Well, that is just totally obtuse on his part. So now we’re stuck with this mess.
And finally, Trump, who told the allies in the beginning, “I don’t need you. We have the best military in the world. Forget that we’ve lost wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 50 years.” But anyway, with this best military in the war and the world, he thought he could get this done in a few days, just as Putin thought he could march into Kyiv in 2022 and get the surrender of Zelenskyy and occupy all of Ukraine.
So once again, we’re reminded by Carl von Clausewitz that once you start a war, you enter the regime of uncertainty and that’s essentially where we are now: a terribly uncertain situation that’s getting worse, that’s starting to have a huge impact on the American domestic economy.
So where this is headed, no one really knows.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right. And I think most importantly, Trump doesn’t even know where this goes. He constantly talks about he feels the next steps, “he’ll feel in his gut or in his bones.” I mean, there’s no strategy, there’s no thinking behind what comes next. It’s pretty obvious. Even the people within his administration, the cabinet secretaries were caught flat-footed. They didn’t know this was coming, many of them. It’s a wholly, just chaotic situation.
MEL GOODMAN: Well, the sad reality is that in the first term, he did have some people who had some moderate political views who could talk him back or to take certain provocative papers off his desk when he wasn’t looking. We know there were examples of that. Now, when you look at the second term, there isn’t anyone who you can trust, who you can point to and say, “This is a good voice, a moderate voice for sanity.”
He has surrounded himself with total mediocrity, so no one’s going to challenge him and there are people who will make things worse, particularly Stephen Miller, who I consider the real villain in all of this in terms of his attitudes toward Iran. And then you have a so-called secretary of state who’s also the so-called national security adviser, Marco Rubio, who’s not up for really conducting either position. He just doesn’t have any capabilities in this regard—who seems to line up with the idea that when we finish with Iran, we can do Cuba. And you have a senator like Lindsay Graham who’s encouraging Trump to move in the same direction.
So until the markets really get worse, and by the markets, I mean the oil market and the stock market and the bond market, I don’t know how you get Trump’s attention.
And as far as what this means for Russia and China, with $100 a barrel oil, the economists who look at this situation closely believe that Putin, who’s having trouble financing his war in Ukraine, is earning about $150 million a day. So we are providing the means for him to secure more territory in Ukraine and now we’ve even lifted, or I think they say they’ve paused the sanctions that were on Russian oil because we were so starved for oil in this terrible market where Trump thinks the answer is “drill, baby, drill.” China to me is the other winner because it shows the unreliable nature of any relationship with the United States and China is not looking for military solutions to its problems. It’s built good relations throughout the global South. That includes Africa and South America and pretty good relations in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.
And it was just announced today, I don’t know if this is official or not, Trump now is canceling or at least postponing his trip to Beijing, which was scheduled to be held on March the 31st. But to me, I’ve never seen in the Chinese press an official date for that visit because they had no idea what Trump wanted to discuss when he got to Peking.
And when I’ve talked to people in Washington, some who were diplomats, they echo this view that there’s really no one to talk to in the Trump government because Trump is the government. Trump is running this by the seat of his pants and there are no important people at the assistant secretary level, either assistant secretary of state or assistant secretary of defense who know what Trump has in mind.
So as Hillary Clinton warned in one of the debates in 2016, she couldn’t imagine a crisis that this government was involved in if Donald Trump were in the White House. Well, here we are in a terrible crisis and we have a lunatic essentially in the White House, a man who I don’t think is compos mentis, which the mainstream media is afraid to discuss.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. We’re speaking this evening here on Counterpoint with Mel Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University and a longtime former CIA analyst. Mel, under international law, this war in Iran is illegal. It’s a war of aggression, a war of choice, not of necessity. And we have defense secretary, or he likes to call himself secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, constant sloganeering about “no rules of engagement,” “lethality over legality” and most recently, the declaration of “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” a policy viewed by the world as a war crime under international law. And early on in the Trump administration, you had all these JAG (Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps) officers fired because they’re supposed to interpret our own domestic and international law in terms of the conduct of warfare. Mel, what’s your comment about Pete Hegseth and his rejection of the Geneva Conventions and any kind of rules of engagement for war?
MEL GOODMAN: Well, he is just a terrible embarrassment to the United States on every level. He’s engaging in jingoism from the platform of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense. It’s frightening to hear him. And on the rare occasions when he does come out, he’s usually accompanied by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Kane, who speaks in reasonable tones and understands all of the dangers and the risk and the violence associated with war—in which once that first shot is fired, you can throw all of your scenarios and predictions out the window because it’s not going to go the way you planned it to go. And that’s been true for just about any war I can think of. And it’s also true for the time element in war. Wars that we thought were going to be short-lived went on forever. So Hegseth, to me, is engaging in classic jingoism, to use a British expression for the 19th century.
This is an incredible embarrassment. He’s embarrassing the professional military. He’s embarrassing the United States. He’s embarrassing U.S. diplomats, but you have to realize when you look around the international community, there aren’t a lot of diplomats in place. The last time I looked at the list, I stopped counting when I got up to 18 or 20 countries that had no U.S. ambassador because Trump just hasn’t gotten around to that. And that includes about a dozen nations in the Persian Gulf, Middle East, Southern Europe region, where we have now committed a huge number of troops and a huge percentage of our air power and our naval power. We have about 30 percent of our active U.S. Navy deployed in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
We are maligning allies who we need in any struggle to deal with the oil market and the closed Strait of Hormuz. There’s no sign of diplomacy, no sign of consideration to return to the disarmament table. Putin himself has been willing to extend the new START agreement, which expired last month. We didn’t give him an answer. So Hegseth is totally out of step with any way of conducting a policy that’s needed at times of a crisis and we don’t see anyone willing to silence him. Trump likes all of that bellicose language. He uses it himself. It’s infuriating.
SCOTT HARRIS: Mel, I did want to speak about asymmetrical warfare. As you noted earlier, the United States military has decimated Iran’s defenses as they were—their Air Force, Navy, any kind of radar, missile defense gone. But Iran has always threatened asymmetrical warfare given these circumstances of their military inferiority and with so many members of the Iranian government murdered in an assassination via Israeli and US bombs, there is a kind of … I think what we’ll see is this quest for revenge and a cycle of violence that may last for years. I’m wondering what your concerns are about Iran’s use of asymmetrical warfare in terms of attacks on the United States, which may very well play into Donald Trump’s hands as he’s threatened to declare an emergency and invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend the elections or somehow use the military to intervene in the elections. From my perspective, I think Donald Trump would like nothing more than to have a terrorist attack in the United States as a pretext to cancel the 2026 midterm election.
One of my biggest fears with this, but what is your concern about Iran and what they may do in retaliation for the murder of so many of their leaders?
MEL GOODMAN: Well, before I get to the concerns about what Iran may do, I’m concerned about what Trump may do because Trump is dealing with essentially a very unpopular war. There was a study done by the New York Times looking at wars going back to World War II to show that there’s never been such an unpopular war at the very start as this one, with fewer than 40 percent of the people in this country who were being polled thinking this war was a good idea. So Trump has a serious problem. The war is not popular. The cost is not only the oil shock and the natural gas shock, but the price of fertilizer, which is going to have an impact on American farmers and agricultural commodities internationally. So he needs to scare the American people, which is something we’ve been doing, I think, since the end of World War II—exaggerating the threat from the enemy.
No one seemed to have prepared for this. And this simplistic notion that merchant Marine captains have to use some courage in all of this and just get their shipments into the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea or from the Persian Gulf obviously don’t know what they’re dealing with because Iran has relied on asymmetric warfare. And you don’t need these large boats that we say we’ve annihilated. You can have these very small craft drop mines into the Strait of Hormuz, which is only 20 miles wide at its narrowest point.
So meanwhile, the price of oil climbs, it’s over $100 a barrel now. There are some projections that call for it going as high as $150 and even $200 a barrel. And so this is the worst oil shock to the international community, even worse than what I recall from 1973, when I remember leaving the CIA building where I was working to go out at lunchtime to fill up my car with petrol.So no thinking was done about that. No thinking was done about evacuating American civilians, no thought given to evacuating American diplomats and their families, no thought to Iran doing anything, but putting up an initial resistance and then caving into our demands.
So we’ve had no planning, no strategic planning. And actually, this is what happened in Iraq in 2003 where we thought we’d go in in March or April of 2003 and be out by September and October. I was at the National War College then and getting intelligence briefings from the Pentagon. That was the plan. We’d be in and out in six months. Afghanistan, we could have been in and out in six months because we really achieved our objectives. We were there for 20 years. So there’s never been any thoughtful understanding about what the United States was up against. But to line itself up with Israel should have been a signal that this is not the direction we should be taking in the Middle East.
Israel is a pariah state in the Middle East. Israel is becoming a pariah state in the international community. International Criminal Court may charge Israel with war crimes, as the South Africans have suggested in their inquiries with the International Criminal Court. So it’s going to get worse before it gets worse, and there’s no strategic thinking taking place on any level about what we need to.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Mel, just a final question for you. Many people in our audience have heard Trump threaten the media, who he accuses of treason for not cheerleading his war in Iran adequately the way he’d like to see the cheerleading take place. What do you make of the threats not only by Trump to revoke the broadcast licenses of media that he doesn’t like their coverage of the war in Iran. But you’ve also got FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr saying the exact same thing.This certainly is unusual and alarming in terms of honoring the First Amendment of our Constitution.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Mel, thank you. This is not a pleasant topic to talk about, but we appreciate your insight and your experience in …
Scott. My pleasure.
SCOTT HARRIS: Take care. Bye-bye. That’s Mel Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University and a former CIA analyst. This is Counterpoint. My name is Scott Harris.
