Iran: America's Barfight Apocalypse
A conversation with Vijay Prashad.
I sat down with Vijay Prashad of the Tricontinental Institute to make sense of the “unreality” of the current conflict with Iran, which feels less like a strategic operation and more like a drunken bar fight. We dug into the staggering historical amnesia of U.S. and Israeli leadership, who seem to believe they can bomb 100 million people into submission despite a decades-long track record of failing to “win” wars through sheer destruction.
From the tactical intelligence of Iran’s infrastructure strikes to the haunting possibility of millions of people with nothing left to lose, we’ve moved into dangerous territory as America’s tactical blunders collide with the end-times theology of its extremist military commanders.
Quotes and transcript below.
SELECTED QUOTES
Vijay:
“You don’t win a war by destroying things. You win a war by subduing a people or by getting a people to believe that you are on their side.”
“A base is not a shield, it’s a target.”
Richard:
“It’s as if we’re all chess pieces being moved around the board by a deranged, syphilitic chess master—or puppet master.”
“It feels like war by PowerPoint... totally divorced from reality. It’s like some app developer’s presentation to venture capitalists.”
TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited)
Richard Eskow: There are things going on in the world you may have noticed. So without any further ado, Vijay Prashad, welcome back to the program.
Vijay Prashad: Thanks. It’s great to be with you.
Richard Eskow: Great to be with you, although the circumstances are very odd. We were talking a little bit before we went on air about Iran, and it is eerie in a way that this is the chronicle of some deaths foretold. We’ve expected it for decades, yet it has an air of unreality to me, almost as if the leaders of the US and Israel are automatons working off some script. We know what Netanyahu’s motivations are, but Trump and his team can’t offer a coherent reason why they’re doing this. They had no idea what they were getting into. The Ansar Allah — the so-called Houthi rebels — cost the US economy $20 billion with their blockade. And yet it never seems to have occurred to them that the much larger force of Iran might do the same in the Strait of Hormuz.
There appears to be no reason, no cause. It’s as if we’re all chess pieces with some deranged puppet master behind all of this. I have to admit that for all my study and effort to understand the dynamics of how the world works, this seems to be in a category by itself. You get what I’m driving at?
Vijay Prashad: Well, it’s a little bit like a bar fight. You’re drunk, you don’t like somebody, you haven’t liked them for a long time, and you just go out there swinging and throw your drink at them — and nobody really knows where this ends. Do you plan to kill them? Will they kill you? What’s the exit?
Serious modern warfare requires much more than just the ability to destroy a country, and this has been proved over and over again. We can look at the record and ask a basic question: when is the last time the United States actually won a major war? Maybe you can say Grenada in 1983 — overthrowing Maurice Bishop’s government after Bishop himself had been killed. But Grenada 1983 is not comparable to Iran 2026.
The United States could not prevail in Vietnam despite enormous use of force. Before that, it could not prevail in Korea. It could not prevail in Afghanistan. In Iraq, it was able to overthrow Saddam and kill Gaddafi, but it did not prevail. It does not control Libya, does not control Iraq, does not control Afghanistan, nor the northern part of Korea. What’s the point, really?
Where is the war expert who has looked at all this and said: the United States has the capacity to destroy anything, but we can’t win a war — and those are two different things. You don’t win a war by destroying things. You win a war by subduing a people, or by convincing them that you are on their side. Nobody believed it — not the Afghans, not the Vietnamese, not the Koreans. And you can’t subdue 100 million Iranians. It’s simply not going to happen.
So when you enter a war, you need clear political objectives. The United States does not appear to have them. Anyone could tell you the Iranians are not going to surrender — they’ve made that extremely clear. Bombing them is not sufficient. They don’t feel they need to be liberated by the United States. In 1953, the US and the UK ‘liberated’ them from a heroic national figure, Mohammad Mossadegh, and imposed a horrendous shah on them from 1953 to 1979. They don’t need that kind of liberation again.
So what is the war aim? There isn’t one, and that’s the problem. Trump is stuck. He wants out. He wants negotiations and a ceasefire. But the Iranians are smarter than that. They’ve already taken a big hit, but they have a chain of command that is deep, they can absorb more losses, and they planned for this. They don’t want the war to simply end on those terms. What they want is for the United States to say: we’re sorry, we started it, we won’t do this again, we’ll leave you in peace, and we’ll roll back all the sanctions — essentially everything in place since at least 2006. They want, in other words, a grand bargain. And Trump cannot offer that because it would look like defeat. So we’re stuck. This could go on and on. The Iranians refusing a ceasefire because they know it just delays the next reckoning, and the United States desiring one but unwilling to put a grand bargain on the table. We’re stuck in a bar fight.
Richard Eskow: I’ve heard so many people say Trump will just declare victory and get out. But you can’t do that unilaterally in a war — both sides have to agree. This is such an astonishingly ahistorical effort, and I’m not talking about ancient empires. I’m talking about last year.
Just over a year ago, in response to the bombing of their embassy, Iran sent — and this is not me vouching for their government, this is just what happened — they sent 50 missiles, no more, no less. That very precise number suggests there were back-channel understandings: we’ve got to push back, we’ve got to be seen to respond, but this is measured. And what did they get for it? They got this war. So the takeaway, if you’re in the Iranian leadership, is: you can’t deal with these people. You can’t be measured with them. The only way to stop this is to fight to the bitter end. And why, if that’s right, didn’t they know? It should have been obvious.
Vijay Prashad: Yeah, that’s the thing. And let’s go back to your point that you can’t unilaterally end a war. Well, you can — but it would mean the United States pulling back completely: removing its military bases, withdrawing its ships, and ordering the Israelis to stop firing. That’s what it would actually mean to pull back. The Iranians would need to see the United States picking up its forces from Qatar, the UAE, disbanding the military bases that essentially encircle Iran, and moving the naval armada out. Then the Iranians might say: now we’ll talk. That would be a sufficient gesture.
But why should they talk while the United States retains a stranglehold on Iran by surrounding it with military bases? It’s now come out that the US used airfields in Saudi Arabia — in violation of what the Saudis themselves said two decades ago when they told the US to leave and break down its bases. If that’s true, Iran is within its rights to strike Saudi Arabia. If you give your airfields to a hostile power to attack me, you’ve entered the conflict as a belligerent. A foreign military base on your land is not a shield — it’s a target.
Iran hasn’t aggressively struck the UAE or Qatar as nations; it has struck the US military bases there because those bases have made those countries belligerents. The Emir of Qatar should have understood that hosting a US base made him a target. He presumably believed the Americans would protect him. They can’t, because other nations have developed sophisticated military technology. The Iranians are not without their own capabilities — and they haven’t yet deployed their naval fast-boat fleets, which are stored underground. The Ansar Allah you mentioned are still largely silent. The militias in Iraq have only been firing sporadically at US bases.
Once those forces fully engage — if, for instance, Israel is reckless enough to use a tactical nuclear missile on Iran — Bahrain will see an uprising unlike anything it has experienced. The Emir of Bahrain is finished. This is a country more than 75% Shia with a Sunni monarch. He barely suppressed the Arab Spring. If they destroy a holy site in Iran, Damascus will rise up. There is the great shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab on the outskirts of the city — one of the most revered sites in Shia Islam. These countries are on a hair trigger.
What Israel is doing to Lebanon is generating anger at a level rarely seen in the modern Middle East. One fifth of the Lebanese population has been made into refugees. That’s one in five people who are not angry at Hezbollah or the Lebanese government — they’re angry at Israel. You’ve created problems for yourself. Every Palestinian now harbors deep resentment. Every Lebanese person is increasingly turning against Israel. You have a Shia population across the region that harbors profound anger at both Israel and the United States. What are you doing? It’s self-defeating, because if you’re fighting a war to achieve security, you’re going to end up with less security.
Israel and the United States apparently miscalculated, or didn’t care, believing that these strikes — killing Khamenei and others — would somehow collapse the Iranian government. But you don’t attack a people for twenty years, tighten sanctions from 2006 onward, and then expect them to just be sitting there unprepared. They have built themselves around the capacity for war. And they will win this war — not militarily, necessarily, but politically.
Richard Eskow: Not in the same way, but the same end result — I think, in many ways, Palestine has won the conflict in Gaza despite the horrific slaughter, because my long-term view is that it has doomed the state of Israel in its current structure.
But in terms of Israel and the United States, sometimes I think this must be war by PowerPoint — somebody in a war room had a slide deck with a plan: kill this one, this one, and that one, and then the Kurds will split this way, you’ll have eight fractured states, and we can dominate them all. Totally divorced from reality, like a venture capital pitch from some app developer. Pure fantasy.
At what point is the feedback loop supposed to kick in — the one that tells you: this isn’t working, trim your sails? Is the feedback loop broken for these people? Or are you saying that regardless of what they realize now, they’ve set a chain of events in motion that they can’t stop?
Vijay Prashad: That’s a very good question, and genuinely difficult to answer, because both administrations — in Washington and even more so in Tel Aviv — are something of a black box. We haven’t heard from Benjamin Netanyahu for several days. There’s enormous speculation about his whereabouts. Trump has just been his typical brash self.
The United States is slightly easier to read because its governments leak so much more — though this particular administration less so than usual. The only time Netanyahu’s administration leaks is when a coalition partner is unhappy and steps in front of a microphone. During this entire period, from the genocide in Gaza to this war, the Tel Aviv government has actually been quite disciplined. We’ve heard no dissenting voices, no voices of caution — just a gung-ho attitude of ‘get it done.’ So we’re not getting any sense of pushback or reconsideration from Israel.
I don’t really know what’s happening there. I try to find out from journalists and friends, but there’s almost nothing. I don’t think they’re going to blink. They wanted to do this, and they’re going to try to see it through.
There is real pain being inflicted on Israeli society. Iranian missiles are getting through, and I think this has genuinely rattled people. Israelis are not accustomed to this. They are used to asymmetric warfare against the Palestinians — a few rockets from Gaza fired by Hamas or Islamic Jihad is nothing compared to the sophistication of these Iranian missiles. These are not Scuds, like the ones Saddam fired in 1991. These are precision instruments built by highly skilled scientists and engineers. They are disrupting the protective dome, and Israeli civilians are directly feeling the impact.
The United States, by contrast, is too far away to feel it. What’s also striking is how reckless Trump is: he is refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA even while the country is at war. There’s no head of the department — Kristine Ohm was fired, her deputy fired. It’s reckless, though partly it reflects a real assessment: the Iranians don’t appear to have the capacity, or perhaps simply haven’t planned, to bring the fight to the US homeland. Their hardware can’t reach the American continent. They don’t have the kind of naval power to threaten the Caribbean. And the much-hyped terrorist networks — Hezbollah cells in Brazil, Hamas operatives here and there — were largely the paranoid fantasy of the far right. If those assets existed, they would have been used by now.
The only way Americans might feel any real pain is through oil prices — but that’s not the same as an Iranian missile landing in downtown Tel Aviv. The United States has large reserves and can cushion that blow. If something comparable were happening in New York or Chicago, public opinion would shift dramatically. We don’t know whether public opinion in Israel is shifting because they’ve really locked everything down.
What we do know is that the United States has continued, for the last several days, making entreaties to Tehran asking for negotiations. The United States wants to stop this war — that’s very clear. What’s also notable is that, for the first time in these kinds of conflicts — whether Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran — the Russians have made a public move by taking Khamenei to Moscow for medical treatment. Putin has sent a message to the Trump administration. Whether that message is simply ‘we have a stake in this’ or something more, I don’t know.
It’s not as though Russia or China are going to send air support into Iran the way Russia did into Syria — at least not yet. They seem reluctant to escalate with the United States. But during the third or fourth night of the bombing, Chinese military aircraft circled Taiwan and briefly entered the airspace above Taipei. They didn’t open fire, didn’t invade, but they demonstrated that they could. That was a statement to the United States.
And remember what the Iranian foreign minister said: we are waiting for you.
Richard Eskow: Russia and China are interesting factors here. My instinct — correct me if I’m wrong — is that if either of them believed Iran could actually fall in this war, they would escalate their involvement somehow. The precedent alone, apart from oil markets and everything else, would be intolerable for them. But they seem to be in a wait-and-see mode, possibly calculating that things are going Iran’s way enough that direct intervention isn’t necessary. Do you agree, or am I off base?
Vijay Prashad: I’m somewhat disappointed that neither Russia nor China has used public diplomacy more effectively. By that I mean the diplomacy that’s visible to the world — not the back-channel conversations, which most probably are happening. China has enormous investments in Iran and in Venezuela. The United States is jeopardizing Chinese strategic interests across the board. I would imagine significant private communication is taking place.
But there is also an avenue of public diplomacy that has gone largely unused. China and Russia are both permanent members of the UN Security Council, which gives them veto power. The United States, over the past thirty years and especially since the war in Syria, has used that veto mechanism to embarrass Russia and China — putting forward resolutions it knows they’ll veto, thus making them look like the obstructionists before global opinion. But Russia and China very rarely put forward resolutions they know the United States will veto.
If I were Russia right now, I would have three resolutions already in the chamber. First, a resolution against the US aggressive action in Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro — a clear Article 2 violation of the UN Charter. Put it on the table, force the United States to veto it. Second, a resolution against the unilateral US embargo of Cuba, particularly the heightened oil embargo creating blackouts. That embargo, insofar as it threatens third parties — telling Europe, Canada, and Mexico they can’t trade with Cuba — violates Chapters 6 and 7 of the Charter, which require a Security Council resolution to authorize such measures. Put it on the table. One hundred and eighty-seven countries in the General Assembly vote to end the embargo; make the theater visible in the Security Council. Third, a resolution declaring the war of aggression against Iran a violation of the entire spirit of the UN Charter — a war crime. Force the United States to veto it.
Three vetoes in a matter of weeks. Why hasn’t Lavrov drafted these resolutions? Why hasn’t China? It would electrify global opinion. People around the world would say: yes, we want a different kind of world. The failure to do this is demoralizing.
As for your specific question — whether they would act if Iran were on the verge of collapse — I think yes. I don’t think they will allow a US victory in Iran. But right now, they may be watching and concluding that Iran is actually prevailing, both militarily and especially politically. So why get involved? It could also be that Russia called and offered an air battalion, and the Iranians said: no, we’ll do this on our own. We are not Bashar al-Assad. They are an extremely proud people.
But at what you might call n-minus-one — one minute before collapse — I believe China would intervene in some form. A US victory meaning the destruction of the Iranian state would be catastrophic for the entire international order. Nobody wants to see Iran go the way of Libya.
Richard Eskow: Absolutely. Let’s talk for a moment about Iran’s relationships with the neighboring Middle Eastern countries — the ones hosting US military bases. I was intrigued by something in the recent back-and-forth: there was a strike on an Iranian desalination plant — Iran gets roughly 70% of its potable water from desalination, while some of those neighboring countries depend on it for close to 100%. Then an Iranian missile struck a desalination facility in one of those countries, did minor damage, and Iran immediately apologized, saying it was aiming for an American base.
I wondered whether that wasn’t also a message: if you allow the Americans to escalate from your territory to this level — a strike on civilian water infrastructure, which for Iran is an existential threat — be prepared to face a similar threat, because you’re even more vulnerable than we are. Am I reading too much into it?
Vijay Prashad: Why would you read anything into it? It’s perfectly clear: the United States quite badly damaged an Iranian desalination plant, and then an Iranian drone struck a facility in Bahrain that affected water delivery to perhaps twenty or thirty villages. Bahrain is a largely rural country — there’s Manama, the capital, and then it’s surrounded by small villages. This plant served a number of them.
Iran immediately apologized, but they are doing two things simultaneously, and that’s the intelligence of their diplomacy. On one side, they’ve sent a clear message: you hit our civilian infrastructure, we can hit yours. And Bahrain — you have a US base on your territory. That base is a target. There’s no shield for you.
The particular plant that was struck serves the Shia population of Bahrain, not the royal family — which adds a sectarian layer, though I don’t want to overstate it. This is not fundamentally a sectarian war, though sectarian elements are present.
They apologized because they don’t want a tit-for-tat on civilian infrastructure to continue. But the message was sent: this could become a water war. The Iranian escalation ladder is quite deliberate. They didn’t close the Strait of Hormuz after the Supreme Leader was killed. They closed it after the United States struck the oil refineries in northern Tehran. The logic is precise: you strike our oil facilities, we make oil a weapon. You strike our water plant, we can make water a weapon.
These are tactical maneuvers, not grand strategic commitments. They can be walked back. What they are saying, step by step, is: for every escalation you make, we have a corresponding option. What’s equally notable is that the Iranians have not responded in kind on civilian deaths, and this is consistent with their history.
In the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq was supplied with chemical weapons components by the United States and West Germany and used them liberally against Iranian soldiers — mustard gas along the front lines, the bombing of Halabja. The Iranian leadership responded by declaring through religious ruling that they would not reciprocate with weapons of mass destruction. That position, implicit at first and later explicit on nuclear weapons, has held.
Iran does not go after civilians even when its own civilians are killed. I’ve seen this in the Baloch border region: when separatist groups fire across into Pakistan and Pakistan responds, killing Iranian civilians, Iran does not retaliate against Pakistani civilians. They have a kind of ethics of warfare that I can’t fully explain but that is consistent and observable. They haven’t fired directly into downtown Dubai. That is simply not their way.
Richard Eskow: I wonder too whether they’re sensitive to how they’re perceived on the Middle Eastern street — whether they want to maintain popular sympathy not just among Shia populations but across the Sunni-Shia divide.
A friend of mine was recently transiting through Doha — one of the busiest airports in the world — and his 90-minute layover stretched to 15 hours. They were sent into what served as a bomb shelter, essentially the underground transit tunnel between terminals. An air-raid warning at a major international hub, filled primarily with business travelers and wealthier visitors. That’s different from striking civilian villages. It’s almost like a knock on the door — saying: we’re here, and elites are not necessarily immune. But the rural populations, the working poor — those are people they seem to regard as innocent bystanders.
Is there anything to that reading, or do you think for Iran all civilians are equally off-limits?
Vijay Prashad: The brand of Dubai and Qatar is built entirely on one promise: we are safe. No real crime, because the state deals with criminals harshly. No political freedom, but complete physical safety. Your children can walk on the street at midnight. You can bank here without interference. If you’re a wealthy person of, shall we say, flexible ethics, this is an ideal place to operate. It’s become a cliché that Indian financial criminals run operations in Mumbai from Dubai.
But that brand is now being stress-tested. Is it really that safe? It’s like asking after 9/11 which Western city is truly safe. Suddenly people in London, in New York, realized they were not as far from the wars they had tried to keep at a distance.
If there is no grand bargain with Iran, this threat is going to continue. People will start to leave. They’ll decamp to Hong Kong, Singapore — places that feel safer, at least for now. Nobody really wants to leave Dubai. Enormous salaries, comfortable lives, large staff. Why would you want to move to somewhere with heavy regulation and cold winters? The permanent expatriate class is large, and it comprises the nodes of international banking and finance — gold markets, offshore capital, all of it. These people are going to need another safe haven. It’s potentially an opportunity for smaller jurisdictions — Malta, Monaco — to absorb some of that activity.
After Nasser made Egypt inhospitable to international capital, Beirut briefly became the banker of the Middle East. Then civil war came, and it all moved to the Gulf. Now where do you go? The whole world is becoming a battlefield. Singapore may not be safe if the United States continues trying to egg China into a conflict.
I genuinely don’t understand why this international financial class is not furious. Do they think Iran needs to be punished, the government overthrown? These are childish fantasies — the idea that you can punish a nation into submission or that removing one leader makes everything fine. We’ve been down that road: remove Saddam, everything will be fine; remove Assad, everything will be fine. It doesn’t work like that.
Syria is only at halftime, by the way. I fear that continued Israeli bombardment of Lebanon is heating up a situation that will spill across the border into Syria. Lebanon cannot handle the current refugee crisis, and with UN agencies now drastically underfunded, there’s no safety net. Palestinians aren’t registered to access the Lebanese health system. Syrians aren’t registered either. When you get injured in a bombing, there’s no recourse. And there are very large Palestinian camps along the southern Lebanese coast and in Beirut itself.
This whole vision is, I think, a quixotic and deeply foolish dream. Netanyahu and Trump are drunk on their own ambition, and it isn’t going well.
Richard Eskow: Here in the United States it’s hard to get precise information on what’s happening. But from what I can see, we may be approaching Gaza-level slaughter — thousands of people in a matter of days, brutal and horrific — and in the process turning the entire region against you.
So I guess, as you said, this goes back to the beginning: drunk on power, stuck in a bar fight. I won’t ask you how you think it ends because I don’t think any of us know. But do you have any concluding thoughts? If you do know how it ends, please tell me.
Vijay Prashad: Well, the main thought is that this has been appalling. I’m editing a book written by a Palestinian journalist about being in Gaza during the genocide. He eventually gets taken to prison, and the book is in a sense his prison memoir. He calls it Those Who Survived Hell. The reason for the title is that when he was picked up, the Israeli soldier yelled at all the captured people: ‘Welcome to hell.’ And he said to himself: I survived hell.
I’ve been thinking about that phrase a great deal in relation to my friends in Iran. I have a number of close friends there, and in a real sense they are surviving hell. A couple of them wrote to say: this may be my last message to you. Of course, it’s an odd thing, because you write again the next day and say the same thing. Every message could be your last. You’re surviving hell. It’s brutal, it’s loud, it’s terrifying. Some of them have children. That’s an almost unimaginable kind of fear.
So yes, Richard, I hope they survive hell. I hope the people of Iran and the neighboring areas — Bahrain, Dubai, Qatar, the people of Israel, the people of Palestine — I hope all of them survive, because hell is where they have been taken. And it is the governments of Israel and the United States that took them there.
This was a completely unnecessary war. The Iranians were sitting with Omani intermediaries and US negotiators, and they were willing to go all the way to zero enrichment — to put that on the table. Trump lied to the people of the United States at the State of the Union when he said ‘I wish the Iranians would just say they don’t want a nuclear weapon.’ That was a lie, because two hours before he said it, Iran’s foreign minister had posted exactly that statement. Trump said, two hours later, that the Iranians won’t say it. This is precisely like the lead-up to the Iraq War: they lied, and then they launched a futile war.
This war is far more dangerous than Iraq, because Iran is four times as large, and unlike Iraq, the Iranians have built an enormous scientific and technical capacity over decades. They make their own weapons. The Iraqis had to import them. Iran has tens of thousands of drones ready to be deployed, naval assets they haven’t yet used, and hypersonic missiles they haven’t yet fired. Meanwhile, the government of North Korea has reportedly offered to provide a nuclear weapon if Iran wants one. Even now, even facing this assault, the Iranians have refused. That tells you something profound about Iran’s genuine posture on nuclear weapons.
I’ll be honest: if I were Iran, purely from a cold pragmatic standpoint — and I abhor nuclear weapons — I would test one and tell the United States to back off. That is what North Korea did in 2006, and since then the United States has been unable to threaten them militarily; it can only ask them to come to the table. If Iran tested a nuclear weapon now, they could say: you forced our hand. Now let’s talk about the grand bargain. The Saudis are reportedly seeking nuclear capability, the Jordanians are considering it — that door was opened by Israel, with American assistance. Israel got its nuclear weapon from apartheid South Africa with help from the United States. You opened the door. Iran never wanted to walk through it, but if they get there now, it changes everything.
Richard Eskow: On the subject of hell — there’s a Willie Nelson song called ‘What Can You Do to Me Now?’ The whole point of it is: I’ve suffered so much that nothing can touch me anymore. When you have millions of people who have been through hell and come out the other side saying, ‘What can you do to me now? Kill me? I’ve faced that every day for years’ — that kind of defiance may, in its own way, be as powerful as a nuclear weapon. That would be my closing thought. What’s yours?
Vijay Prashad: I don’t want to be too culturalist about this, but I think it’s important for people to understand that the Shia population comes out of a foundational tragedy — the Battle of Karbala, several hundred years ago, in which Hussein, one of the great leaders of Islam, was martyred. The Shia are, in a sense, those who were unable to defend him. And the grief of that failure runs very deep.
A friend was telling me recently that this idea keeps recurring at funerals: ‘We were not with you.’ They say it to the Supreme Leader, to Soleimani, to the others who have fallen. It is a lament of historical inability to protect those you love, repeated across centuries. This is a population that has been formed not around the experience of victory, but around the experience of loss. And that is a very particular, very heartbreaking way to encounter the world — and a very powerful one.
That eschatology meets another eschatology: the one now being articulated in certain Israeli circles, which holds that God has granted the Jewish people dominion from the Euphrates to the Nile. I don’t know if you watched the conversation between Mike Huckabee and Tucker Carlson, but Huckabee said precisely that — God’s mandate extends from Iraq to Egypt. That is an eschatology, a vision of destiny.
And then there is the Christian Zionist theology underneath much of this — the belief that the Third Temple must be built, which requires demolishing the Al-Aqsa Mosque, after which all the Jews will be killed so that the Messiah can return. These eschatologies are colliding with each other.
You and I have been talking about this entirely in pragmatic terms — bar fights, military strategy, diplomatic maneuvers. But we are also living in a world where many of the people making decisions have a completely different framework for understanding what is happening and what it means. When you enter that framework, it becomes very hard to see a path out. There are people who genuinely believe this war is going to culminate in the return of the Messiah.
Richard Eskow: And some of them are commanding US troops in the field.
Vijay Prashad: Exactly. And we are not really equipped — because of who we are and how we were raised — to enter that conversation in those terms. I made an elementary error just now in this discussion, because I don’t live inside that world. I wanted to end, not by opening up that entire subject, but simply by letting people who are listening know that we’ve only been talking about half the story. The other half — the eschatological half — you and I can’t fully enter. And when we ask, ‘How is this going to end?’ we should remember that there are people who believe it ends with the Messiah descending from heaven.
Richard Eskow: You’re absolutely right. On that rather striking note — Vijay Prashad, director of the Tricontinental Institute and so much more, thank you for your thoughts and thank you for joining me on the program.
Vijay Prashad: Thanks a lot. It’s a real pleasure.