It was a matchup between arguably America’s most dishonest politician and a former Fox TV host turned serial conspiracy theorist who now believes that demons come and scratch him in the night. So the fact that the encounter between Senator Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson became a bad-tempered battle was enjoyed by people right across the political spectrum. Well, almost.
The interview (God help us) was over two hours long so I have only seen the Match of the Day highlights, which most YouTube reports considered to consist of Carlson calling Cruz out for wanting to involve the US in Israel’s undeclared war against Iran. US observers seem to score this as Cruz 0 Carlson 5 and see in it the fracturing of the Trump coalition between its despicable liar faction (Cruz) and its mad conspiracist faction (Carlson). The issue being that the latter took seriously all that Trump stuff about not getting involved – unlike the dumb Bushes, the impotent Obamas and the senile Bidens – in foreign conflicts. To them – as with Charles Lindbergh of yore – America First means everywhere else nowhere. Now they think they’re being sold to the Jews.
Theoretically I have more time for Cruz in this battle than for Carlson; I retain a fondness both as a Brit and a demi-Hebrew for Roosevelt and Lend-lease. I admit, though, it’s like being asked who you’d support in a cage fight between an Iranian ayatollah and Itamar Ben Gvir: the theocrat in one corner, the fascist in another. The world would be better without both.
But Carlson managed to win this fight because Cruz demonstrated an ignorant glibness in his rhetorical support for the goal of regime change in Iran. He wanted it. He supported it. But he had absolutely no idea of how it was supposed to come
David Aaaronovitch
about. Carlson exposed that Cruz didn’t even have even a ballpark idea about how many people lived in the country, despite the fact that he was anticipating the end of the mullahregnum (CORRECT) via a ‘popular uprising’. Cruz revealed that he had opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq that changed Saddam’s regime (ChatGPT can find no contemporary evidence of his opposition) so when asked by Carlson for successful examples of the US procuring regime change he fell back on “the Soviet Union”. The much more plausible example of Chile in 1973 was not one Cruz chose to cite.
Now I know that Israel’s war with Iran has, in a strange way, relieved all kinds of anxieties. It is impossible in good conscience for anyone but the most slavish supporter of the Netanyahu government to support what it has been doing in and saying about Gaza in the last few months, let alone its policies in the West Bank. For many British Jews it’s become an agony. But taking out Hezbollah (and in such an ingenious way) was a no-brainer, and the defeats inflicted on Iran may be easily celebrated. Puts us all back in the same camp, so phew.
The Iranian regime is a corrupt, repressive theocracy, whose belligerence is both absurd and dangerous. When Iranian TV – home to the televised forced confession – was bombed, I felt no journalistic fellow-feeling. The only things the rulers of Iran seemed good at was enforcing headgear rules on women, making drones for the Russians and executing people.
Over the years I’ve watched and interviewed experts as various sets of street protests have been hailed as the onset of the regime’s collapse – and it’s always been a vain hope. Iran’s population has just topped 90 million and for 46 years this large complex country has been ruled by the mullahs, with the occasional bone thrown to “reformers”.
It would most likely take a massive fracture in the country’s ruling elite for a rising to have any chance of success and no one on this earth is planning to invade and achieve this goal by force. Anyone pontificating about regime change without recognising this truth is farting in the ocean.
One other point, since this publication allows dissent. Iran could disappear off the face of the earth and it wouldn’t solve the Palestinian issue. Iran did not create Hamas any more than it created the PLO. The ayatollahs are not what stands between Israel and a just settlement.
For that, in significant part, you have to look closer to home.
