The Brutal World of Sam Harris: Part Two
No leader in the world has accomplished more in the last few weeks than Benjamin Netanyahu. Two hundred Israeli fighter jets, some flying great distances, probably over airspace belonging to countries that officially forbid it. The largest air strike operation in Israeli military history. Ali Khamenei dead along with much of his regime. Decapitated. Netanyahu managed to marshal, through Trump whom he totally played, full U.S. intelligence support, two carrier groups, massive American air power, Trump publicly owning the whole thing.
Trump made it about himself. Predictable. And Netanyahu knew this was the best way for him to get it done. Praise Trump and let him fire some rockets at live targets protecting the Israeli air force.
Israel ran this operation. Netanyahu built toward this moment for decades — maneuvering, pressuring, waiting, leveraging every U.S. administration that came through, and finally finding one so supportive of Israeli strategic preferences that the window opened. He flew 200 jets through it.
Americans barely mention him. Europeans see him but comment little. Outside the Middle East, he's almost invisible in the coverage. The story is Trump's war, America's confrontation with Iran, the jihadist threat. Netanyahu is a footnote if he appears at all.
Israel is in charge here. Trump is the fireworks from the sidelines. I am staggered by how invisible Netanyahu has become (behind the ever-distractive Trump). Watching YouTube, as is frequent these days, the only “TV” I watch anymore, Sam Harris popped back into my feed. The very blind spot I am pointing out with respect to Netanyahu is prominent in Harris’s otherwise insightful view. This is a perfect example of the Netanyahu blind spot.
As I mentioned plenty of times before (see here and here), Harris is one of our best and brightest minds. A true voice for our times. Unfortunately, Harris’s analysis of the Iran strike by Israel with U.S. support falls into the anti-Trump narrative more than pointing out that Trump is clearly the secondary figure here. That alone would insult Trump despite being far more accurate than the position he puts forth. In it Netanyahu never appears at all. This is the very invisibility I alluded to already.
Instead, Harris runs his analysis on two tracks. Firstly, the Iranian regime has been a legitimate target since it first came to power. "At any point since 1979, it would have been a good thing to unseat the regime in Iran." The U.S. hostage crisis, Beirut barracks bombing, militias killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the Salman Rushdie fatwa, the oppression of women and dissidents. He calls Iran "an engine of terrorism and just awfulness for the world." No acceptable outcome other than regime change. "The nukes and jihadism just do not play well together and we can never lose sight of that."
This is a thoroughly articulated position I fully agree with. Anytime would do.
But, apparently from a political perspective, the execution was a disaster. Congress sidelined. Public unprepared. Almost no allies. Trump was leading "the most corrupt and incompetent administration I think we've ever had." Could "break everything over there and then just declare victory and leave Iran in total chaos."
The war might have been justified. The people conducting it were reckless. That’s a serious problem, I admit. If Trump is getting punch-drunk giddy on Venezuela and Iran what the hell could he cause next?
Harris specifically directs us to these two well-considered thoughts. He's obviously pleased that he holds them both and thinks he’s covered the spectrum. But the actor with the strongest incentive for this strike — the leader of the country whose pilots flew the missions — doesn't get mentioned at all. Harris's entire critique lands on Washington. Trump's incompetence. Trump's impulsiveness. Trump's neglect of Congress. These are the moves of a dictator not wanting to consult with anyone outside his hand picked yes-men.
Harris doesn't discuss the actual military operation at all. Not the scale of it. Not the multifaceted coordination it took to execute. Two hundred Israeli fighter jets. The largest air strike in Israeli history. Harris talks about Trump's missiles and geopolitical consequences. The operational reality — who planned it, who flew it, who built toward this moment for decades — goes unexamined. He theorizes the war without looking at it.
Netanyahu isn't reacting to events. He's engineering them. The Iran strike, the Gaza campaign, the on-going broader regional attacks in Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank, of course, are all one sustained strategic project with the same architect. The terrorists are real. The civilians among them are real. Netanyahu knows both things and attacks anyway.
The Harris video is entitled "The War Was Necessary. The Way Trump Did It Wasn't." Clickbaitable enough. But, again, that same title could be used in the earlier video of Harris justifying tens of thousands of dead civilians. Hamas was counting on that for protection. The tunnels were bombed into oblivion. Unfortunately, all of Gaza was on top of them. I've been through all this before.
"The War Was Necessary. The Way Netanyahu Did It Wasn't." works just as well for me when looking at the war Harris rather twistedly justified. At a cost of many casualties to themselves, Israel could have taken the whole tunnel complex by attacking the complex itself, not the civilian lives and infrastructure above it that Hamas was counting on protecting the tunnels.
They did, in fact, clear portions of it. But bombing the treacherously placed tunnels took away the advantages Hamas was counting on. The terrorists are as much to blame for what happened as anyone, but that is not the point. The point is there were other legitimate military options available instead of "let's bomb the hell out of everything."
Netanyahu has been building toward this moment for many years. In Trump 2.0 he finally found an administration so deferential to Israeli strategic preferences that the window finally opened wide enough. Trump cleared the way. Netanyahu flew 200 planes through it and took out the recognized leader of a sovereign country. This is the stuff that was happening in the Middle Ages.
What Netanyahu did was unprecedented by western powers in the past century. A sovereign power of one country just killed the supreme leader of another country in front of everybody and Harris talks about Trump. It is almost laughable and clearly a bad moment for Harris.
He never mentions his name. Not once. Israel appears in the transcript a single time — the U.S. had "no allies other than Israel." One line. For the country whose air force did the killing, whose prime minister engineered the conditions, whose strategic objectives drove the operation from the beginning.
Under Trump 1.0, the U.S. shocked the world by moving its embassy to Jerusalem. Trump 2.0 renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Pursued extraordinary alignment with the Netanyahu government at every turn. Iranian leadership made the inexplicable mistake of holding a daylight meeting with multiple senior officials gathered in one place above ground without air strike protection. They did not know how specifically they were surveilled. Real time satellite and informant fed military intelligence and timing allowed for very close coordination in the response. This looks less like a spontaneous American decision than a joint play Netanyahu spent much time and effort setting up.
Compare the Iran strike to Gaza. Both offensive operations by Israel with U.S. support. Iran involved actual U.S. personnel from two carrier groups. The bombing of Gaza involved U.S. made munitions. Both represented the same jihadist threat complex in Harris's framing. In both cases, however, Israel made the key military decisions.
Harris evaluates them completely differently.
Gaza is seen as a massive bombardment of one of the densest civilian populations on earth. Roughly 83% non-combatants among the dead. Thirty hospitals destroyed or severely damaged. The entire tunnel network collapsed from above with bunker-busting munitions, whatever happened to be sitting on top. Forty to fifty thousand dead. Harris's proclaims this largely justified. Hamas bears the moral responsibility. Israel had no real choice.
The Iran strike is targeted decapitation of sovereign leadership. Precise. Minimal civilian casualties. The kind of operation some critics of Gaza had been demanding for awhile. Harris's verdict is that the war is past justified, but the political execution was a mess. Wrong administration, wrong process, wrong preparation.
A strike that killed very few civilians gets criticized for how it was conducted politically. A campaign that killed tens of thousands of civilians gets defended as essentially the best available of a lot of bad options.
In Gaza, Harris is more about ideology — Hamas is genocidal, the war is existential, operational choices are beyond scrutiny. In Iran he quickly turns procedural — who authorized this, is Trump capable, what's the endgame.
I admire Sam Harris. His caliber mind and understanding is comparable with many brilliant men of the past. But, even the best and brightest minds have blind spots, some times fatal ones. David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest (1972) showed us how brilliance went astray with Kennedy’s hand-picked administration, where there were multiple extraordinary minds including his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The war was a catastrophe. Brilliance and blindness are not mutually exclusive.
My best guess about Netanyahu's invisibility in this case is that Harris is a secular Jew who genuinely believes Israel represents liberal civilization holding the line against something older and darker. Israel is, by regional standards, a genuine democracy. It is literally surrounded in depth by a stupid and oppressive religious system of belief. The Iranian regime is genuinely theocratic and genuinely dangerous. Hamas openly celebrated mass murder. That is all true.
But once that belief becomes the master key for every lock, the analysis bends. Israeli operational choices get the benefit of the doubt. Trump's get scrutinized. The leaders controlling Israeli interests are background, soundtrack, barely appear.
Red consciousness with an Orange toolbox. The rational analysis is real. The philosophical scaffolding is genuine. Beneath it, the instinct is old. Destroy the existential threat, establish dominance, negotiate from strength. That Harris applies it asymmetrically across two recent wars doesn't make the instinct wrong. It makes his analysis inconsistent between wars and incomplete with respect to what just happened in Operation Roaring Lion.
For god’s sake people look at the Israeli operation. It had its own code name! Epic Fury was Trump having a bunch of buttons pushed with Netanyahu committed what in the specifics was technically murder no matter how justified.
Again, this is the largest air attack in Israeli history. That covers a lot of wars and a near-constant state of anti-terrorism campaigns.
Harris is right that jihadism is a real problem. Right that the Iranian regime was a serious threat. Almost certainly right that the Trump administration was reckless. All true.
It does not follow that a campaign killing tens of thousands of civilians was conducted optimally while a precision strike killing very few was the problematic one. There is much unnecessary on both sides in both wars but Harris doesn't see any of that. He applies military and political emphasis unevenly and unfairly.
His "two thoughts in the head" require a third thought he isn't holding: the strategic interests of the Israeli government, the role of its leadership, the probability that the Trump administration's unusual alignment with those interests shaped this operation far more than Trump's personal impulses. Netanyahu perfectly played Trump's impulses.
Dangerous stuff, really. And again this sits fairly profoundly upon the life of Harris himself, as a secular meditative guru.
Beyond meditation there is a world where brutal forces compete. In this case, Netanyahu is kicking everyone’s ass. Trump is small potatoes with a lot of noise. Perfect to hide behind. Meditate on that and see if it lessens the suffering brutal forces cause in our world.
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