How to Lose the Narrative War

WHO’S WINNING THE WAR, if not on the battlefield then elsewhere? This from the current media portrait: Trump is losing. It was to lose badly that the president of radioactive impulse went to bomb a country without a strategy, but burdened with a needy strategic partner, and blinded by his own ephemeral aura as the emperor of Epic Americana. This portrait is complemented by the persistence of the winner, bleeding but breathing by virtue of being a revolutionary republic hardened by longer wars of history, with a will to turn suffering into resistance, military disparity into original offensive, geography into armoury, the infrastructure of faith into a decapitation-proof machine. And there is the third party—in most portraits the first party—that, steeped irredeemably in its existential paranoia, has brought this war to every nation’s doorstep, forcing the American president to betray his core social base and dragging him into a distant swamp with little nationalist gain but greater political and economic loss. In the making: the next Vietnam, and the disintegration of a presidency that made America small again.

The war on Iran is waged more effectively in the mindspace where ideologies are being rearmed to clarify the winner and the loser. Whatever remains of the subterranean Iranian leadership can afford a smile even as the ruins mount overground. Three things are at play here.

One: The merger of anti-Americanism and anti-Trumpism. Political as well as cultural resistance to America is perhaps the oldest residue of the Cold War. The refurbished anti-Americanism, or anti-imperialism for the ideologically aggrieved, comes to influence the conversation whenever America dares to define freedom on its own terms. The fact that America’s national interest doesn’t necessarily tally with the so-called international morality only hardens liberal self-righteousness. Now that Trump has repainted Americanism after his own image (which continues to horrify anyone who stands by old-fashioned virtues such as truth, the rule of law, and a little bit of humility), anti-imperialism has a suitable demonic face. The war flames across the Middle East magnify this face, as if it is a Persian fairy tale.

Two: Anti-Semitism may be more alive on certain Ivy League campuses and on the London streets, but we fail to see its sublimated form in the denunciation of Israel as a cannibalistic state that justifies its crimes against Palestinians and its decapitation mission in Iran by invoking its mythicised origin story. This Israel may go to war to assert its right to exist—and win. It loses the narrative war, as in Gaza previously. It may have decimated the Iranian leadership one by one, beginning with Ayatollah Khamenei.

And the combined firepower of America and Israel may have mostly destroyed the Iranian defences, though the military industrial complex built by the Revolutionary Guards over more than four decades has not been dismantled. Still, Israel is not winning this war because the Israel that fights this war, in the loudest narrative realm, is not a country that needs to defeat its enemies but a lie imposed upon a stolen land.

Three: In romancing the victim, it is morally necessary to stand by the sovereignty of nations and resist the imperial pretence of nation-building. This noble liberal sentiment makes the repressive mullahcracy palatable to people who otherwise sing about democratic values. The statements of defiance from the ruins in the wake of a Trump, bruised by the MAGA dissent and the oil shock, signalling ceasefire are inspired by the perceived isolation of the US-Israel alliance. Iran is not a theo-fascist state any longer. It is a representative underdog standing up to an imperialist desperate for a fig leaf. The sight of an Iran deceiving itself with the rhetoric of victory is so heartwarming to those who are assaulted by the combined immorality of Trump and Netanyahu that they now want the Great Islamic Revolution to prevail.

It is unlikely that an alliance of these three liberal attitudes will win the war for Iran, even though it seems to have overcome the fear of losing the next-in-command to an Israeli assassination plot. If it has achieved anything, it is about concealing repression with resistance. It is the ultimate narrative diversion engineered by its useful idiots: Iran is no longer the last imperium of the faith, and the fulcrum of regional chaos; it is no longer a police state that fears its own people the most, with god’s own firing squad manning the streets; and it is no longer the revolutionary state using the cult of martyrdom to kill and to be killed. Iran is suddenly secure in that autonomous space of victimhood—and its survival is the only moral imperative of the war.

Haven’t some of us thought all along that it is all about the survival of ordinary Iranians, not the spokesmen of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps?