Scientists and most philosophers want things to make sense, to manifest an orderliness governed by the operation of natural laws or structural social regularities. Applied to historical developments this demand that events make sense generates suspicions about the adequacy of psychologistic explanations focused on dispositions and personality traits that appear to exert only accidental influences on decisions. However, if certain dispositions and traits are constantly conjoined with the same sort of decisions they cease to be accidental quirks of individuals but become part of the pattern that students of history are trying to explain.

Watching Israel’s war of choice against Iran and listening to leaders on both sides defend and justify their actions I am beginning to think that stupidity is part of the constellation of causes that must be included in explanations of contemporary warfare. The English word derives from the Latin stupidus, to be “stunned or benumbed.” (OED) Stupid leaders are more likely to be hyperactive than stunned or benumbed, but the ones who make the worst mistakes do answer to the third connotation: “wanting in or slow of mental perception.” (OED). Politically stupid leaders simply fail to recognize the real implications and costs of their decisions and policies. Stupidity is thus the root cause of Einstein’s purported definition of insanity as repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Those ‘wanting in mental perception’ make the same mistakes because they cannot draw appropriate analogies between past and present contexts. They thus cannot see the similarities between policies that failed in the past and the policies that they choose in the present. Early detection of analogies could lead to the rejection of those policies, but the dim-witedness of stupid leaders prevents them from understanding the relevant historical lessons.

The Israeli government’s decision to launch an air war against Iran was certainly in part caused by the stupidity of its leaders who have failed to learn the lessons of the past thirty years of wars of choice. First, like Putin and the two Bushes, Netanyahu and his death cult argue that they had no choice but to launch attacks on Iran because Iran was mere weeks from building a nuclear weapon. Set aside the fact that there is no independent evidence supporting that claim and focus on the function of “necessity.” Stupid leaders always appeal to necessity when they start wars because it will shield them from blame when they produce predictable blowback effects. But if they were keener of mental perception they would know that wars always have blowback effects and unintentional outcomes (including political defeats for the vastly superior military power, as in Afghanistan) and choose not to start them. Israeli leaders have abundant lessons to draw upon to teach them that air power alone will not win wars, destruction of a society’s infrastructure will not cause the citizens of that society to break with their government and support the foreign killers, and that intensely partisan ideological war deepens rather than resolves social contradictions within and between societies. Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya all teach the same lesson: wars not only kill people who would otherwise be alive, they tend to produce the opposite political effects than the one intended. Ukrainians are more nationalistic, Iraq is closer to Iran, the Taliban returned to power, former terrorists are in charge of Syria, and Libya remains volatile and unstable. You don’t need to be Einstein to learn the lesson the evidence teaches: people rally around the nation and its leaders when they are attacked and revolt not at the behest of, but against, foreign invaders. What provoked the Iranian revolution? The brutal regime of the US installed and backed Shah. .

Because stupid leaders do not learn from history they tend to choose policies that are most likely to lead to the opposite outcome of the one intended. The evidence speaking against the efficacy of warfare as a solution to contemporary geo-political problems is overwhelming, and yet it is ignored by the Israeli leadership. These lessons are not all distant in time and space either. Israel is still fighting Hamas after two years in a tiny confined space from which there is no escape. Two years! And now they have attacked a nation with thousands of years of history and national pride, orders of magnitude larger, geographically and demographically than itself, hardened by decades of sanctions and Western opprobrium, and ideologically antithetical to Israel. And yet they publicly argue they are actually liberators of the Iranian people? Remember when American soldiers were going to be hailed as heroes by grateful Iraqis? Iranians certainly need liberation from religious leaders who think the culture should be shaped by the values of the 6th CE, but only they can liberate themselves.

So Israel, like America in Viet Nam and Iraq must destroy the village in order to save it. Death is tough medicine, but it is good for the patient if the patient happens to live under a regime unwise enough to believe that that national sovereignty entitles them to make their own decisions about how their societies will be run. The sins of one’s own society are projected on to the enemy, adding a moral counterpart to the practical dimension of political stupidity.

Consider the profound moral stupidity of Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz’s pronouncement that Khameini is a “modern day Hitler” that “can no longer be allowed to exist” and that the missile strike on the hospital in southern Israel was a war crimes. One simply cannot believe the moral blindness of a man who belongs to a government whose armed forces have destroyed every hospital in Gaza, almost every house, shoots people begging for food that Israel has made artifically scarce and killed tens of thousands of people. All necessary, of course! If Khameini is Hitler for partially damaging one hospital what is Netanyahu for ordering the destruction of the whole life-infrastructure of Gaza?

A war criminal?

Political stupidity manifests itself as an inability to learn the lessons of history and moral blindness to the reality of the policies that one’s state pursues but it is not caused by innate lack of intelligence but rather, I think, a superabundance of confidence. Trump perfectly illustrates the relationship between confidence and political stupidity. After saying that he would not bomb for two weeks, he gave the order to attack the fortified Fordow site after two days. He might be criticised for inconsistency but Trump is not so much inconsistent but incapable of distinguishing between his moment to moment thoughts and reality. What critics attack (rightly) as disdain for the truth is a function of his supreme confidence in himself: whatever he thinks to be the case he takes to be the case, and if what he thinks changes, then he believes that reality changes accordingly. Of course, reality does not obey the thoughts and whims of anyone, as Trump and Israel and the world will now find out. Despite his usual childish hyperbole, the use of the “bunker buster” bomb will deepen the conflict, not resolve it.

Iranian leaders are, predictably, talking tough about the need and right to respond to the attack, but this too, while understandable given the rules of the political game, is also stupid. Why can’t politicians see that that sometimes the weaker state needs to take one or two steps backward in order to later take a few steps forward. Strategic nonresponse is also a response. Insisting on acting on the right to respond to aggression with military force when you are the militarily weaker party will only be used as pretext for more attacks. International law could solve the problem if anyone obeyed it, but since Israeli and American aggression is already illegal, Iran’s appeal to the Security Council will not halt the attacks. Only some sort of concession on its part will stop the bombing, and that is just what its leaders will refuse to give. Their supposed Russian allies will not be coming to their defence; they will be left to fight militarily and economically stronger powers on their own. The world is far from a time when the BRICS countries can act as an effective counter-power to the US.

Iranians will sing of the dignity of their resistance as more and more of their cities and installations are bombed. Netanyahu and Trump will wax philosophical about necessity and the nobility of their cause. Each will fuel the other side and the killing and destruction will spiral for weeks or months, or perhaps even years. Eventually this conflict will die down and become part of the history that the next generation of stupid politicians will ignore.