Who Should Be Bombed: First Iran or Israel? A Diplomatic Dilemma for the ‘Civilized World’
By Our Senior Political Satire Columnist
Let’s be honest, dear friends, we’re all terribly behind schedule. The quarterly calendar for Western Humanitarian Intervention™ is a tight one, and we have a serious scheduling conflict. Two nations, two peoples, two sets of passionate protesters flooding the streets demanding change and justice. And here we sit, in the plush, morally aerated boardrooms of the geopolitical West, with only so many bombs, stern statements, and hashtags to go around. The question isn’t “if” we should intervene with explosive enthusiasm, but “where” to point the laser-guided morality first. It’s a real pickle.
First, let’s assess the Tel Aviv portfolio. The scene is compelling: a vibrant democracy (a key qualifier; we don’t do this for just “any” street gathering), a people historically understood to be under a rather exclusive celestial contract. The chosen, as it were. They are in the streets! They wave signs about democracy, justice, judicial reform—or against it! The specifics are less important than the aesthetic. It’s all very… relatable. A sort of sun-drenched, secular-sacred Woodstock of discontent, but with better hummus and cybersecurity. Our hearts, naturally, swell. Our editorial pages weep with admiration. “Look!” we cry. “The flame of freedom burns brightly! We must stand with them!” Standing, in this context, involves the immediate drafting of several billion dollars in military aid, a flotilla of concerned aircraft carriers making ‘routine, defensive’ maneuvers just offshore, and a flurry of bipartisan congressional resolutions so forceful they could knock over a small nation. Help, we assure them via satellite and op-ed, is on the way. It is arriving in the form of a pallet of JDAMs.
Now, pivot your gaze—if the mainstream news cycle has left you any attention—to Iran. Here, too, people are in the streets. They are also shouting for freedom, for rights, for release from theocratic tyranny. Their courage is, by any objective measure, staggering. They risk everything. The footage is grainier, the slogans less instantly translatable for our CNN chyrons. The aesthetic is one of profound, life-risking struggle, not political debate. Our hearts should, in a just world, swell identically. But a subtle, bureaucratic alarm sounds in the halls of our foreign policy institutes. “Ah,” whispers the ghost of a colonial administrator, stirring the ice in his gin and tonic. “A complication.”
You see, the Iranian people, for all their bravery, are not—how to put this delicately—on the Official Celestial Registry, chosen people. Their divine endorsement paperwork is, according to our deeply nuanced theological departments (housed in the same building as the oil conglomerate lobbyists), not quite in order. This creates a procedural nightmare. To mobilize the full, awe-inspiring might of our Freedom Delivery Systems for a non-contractually-chosen people could set a dangerous precedent. What’s next? Dropping democracy on just “anyone” who asks for it? The system would collapse.
Furthermore, and this is critical for our satirical algorithm to process, there is the ever-present risk of appearing… “anti-semitic”. Yes, you heard correctly. Consider the logic, perfected over decades in a bipartisan pressure-cooker: To support Israelis is self-evidently just. To support Iranians “before” Israelis, or worse, “instead” of Israelis, implies a ranking. A ranking implies a de-prioritization. A de-prioritization of the chosen people, by the twisted syllogism of modern identity politics and geopolitics, is tantamount to a denial of their right to exist. Q.E.D., offering the Iranians a liberation package before the Israelis have received their upgraded, platinum-tier liberation package is, ipso facto, bigotry. It’s basic math. The kind they do at the Pentagon.
This is the exquisite hypocrisy we’ve refined to an art form. Our “freedom” is not a universal condition; it is a brand, and like any good brand, it requires strategic market placement. It performs best in regions with favorable Yelp reviews from our defense contractors and where the natural resources are, coincidentally, also yearning to be free. In the Middle East, freedom has a very specific weight, odor, and chemical signature. It smells like avionics fuel and depleted uranium, and it is measured in barrels per day and regional hegemony. The Israeli protestors, bless them, are unwittingly waving flags in a showroom that benefits our entire product line. Supporting them reinforces the narrative, secures the client state, and keeps the whole profitable cycle of aid-and-arms spinning.
The Iranian protestors, however, are demanding freedom from a regime we officially despise but whose existence we have, for decades, found strangely… useful. A stable enemy is a marvelous thing. It justifies budgets. It unites allies. It sells missile defense systems to Saudi Arabia. A truly free, democratic Iran? My God, the chaos! They might not want to trade their oil in dollars. They might make friends with people we’ve already bombed. They might—, and this is the true horror—choose a form of democracy that doesn’t automatically align with our “interests.” Their freedom, in its pure, unvarnished form, is a geopolitical rogue variable. Our version of “support” thus becomes a tightly curated menu of options: stern tweets, expired sanctions, and the vague promise of “being on the right side of history,” which history, we assume, will be written by our survivors.
So we arrive at our central, satirical dilemma. Who to bomb first?
Bombing Israel is, obviously, off the table. That would be literal and figurative suicide. Bombing “for” Israel, however, is a growth industry.
Bombing Iran… well, that’s always on the table, but the justification must be impeccably managed. We cannot be seen to bomb them “for” their people. That would be confusing. We must bomb them for their “government’s” behavior—its nuclear ambitions, its regional meddling. The fact that such a bombing campaign would immiserate and kill the very people we claim to champion is just one of freedom’s tragic little ironies. Collateral damage. The people will be free, in theory, from a smoldering ruin. We will have done our part.
Perhaps the most satirical solution, the one that truly captures our era, is to outsource the decision. Why not let the activists fight it out on social media? Let them duel with infographics. The side that crafts the most compelling narrative of victimhood, intertwined with our strategic interests, wins the first strike. The Israelis have a head start—their victimhood is pre-packaged, sanctified by history, and embedded in our political liturgy. The Iranians are playing catch-up in the oppression Olympics, a brutal contest where the podium is made of rubble.
In the end, the real bombing campaign is one of narrative. We bomb the Iranian struggle with our silence, our qualified concern, our weaponized ambiguity. We bomb the Israeli struggle with our suffocating, unconditional, militarized embrace, drowning out their complex internal debates with the roar of F-35s we’ve sold them. We reduce both to caricatures: one, a nation of saints we must arm to the teeth; the other, a nation of hostages we might occasionally cheer for but will never truly unshackle.
So who should be bombed first? The answer, my dear politically engaged activist, is you. You are being bombarded by the absurdity. You are being bombed by hypocrisy. You are being bombed by the relentless, soul-crushing calculus that turns human yearning for dignity into a ledger of strategic advantage and theological technicality.
The people in Tel Aviv and Tehran aren’t asking for bombs. They’re asking for change. But in the colonist’s dictionary, those two words have, tragically, become synonyms. And the definition is written in the ashes of the very freedoms we claim to champion. Our help is always on the way. It’s just that, for some, help looks like a manifesto. For others, it looks like a missile. And we are meticulous, morally conflicted, and utterly bankrupt clerks, forever deciding which address to send which package.