03.26.26

Pattern Zero

There is an ultra-realistic new video war game called “Pattern Zero.” The text emblazoned over the images in its trailer are “Destruction is a tool.” “Strategy is a weapon.”

To what end is the destruction of the Middle East a tool, its seat-of-the-pants “strategy” a weapon?

Well, there’s Trump’s amusement, for one. He mused on bombing Kharg Island — site of a major oil terminal essential to Iran’s economic survival — “just for fun.” He’s alleged that rather than end the conflict through negotiations, Pete Hegseth would find bombing the country into oblivion “more fun.” To illustrate how much fun it all is, the administration uses video games in its propaganda, interspersed with blurry airstrike footage. There are no humans in the airstrike footage; in the video games there are only avatars.

These games came to mind when I read Fintan O’Toole’s (as usual) brilliant piece in the March 13 New York Review of Books, called “Signifying Absolutely Nothing.” O’Toole writes:

For the first time in US history, American physical dominance is being fused with American political anarchy. Freed from all the entanglements that come with having to launch a ground invasion, air war can overfly not just morality and law but arguments, rationales, the calibration of risks to rewards and of suffering to satisfaction. Military might under Trump is all power and no purpose, all tactics and no strategy, all violence and no vision, all means and no ends. Having ditched any larger claims (building democracy, fighting tyranny, advancing freedom), it is its own justification.

One irony of this catastrophe is that the security and intelligence communities perform endless “war games” to assess the risks and predict the consequences of a military action. The administration apparently did neither of these. It didn’t occur to them that Iran might block the Straight of Hormuz.

But if there was no risk assessment and no plan, it is not exactly Pattern Zero. There is an intended consequence: World empire under Caesar Trump.

Continues O’Toole:

. . . What is weightless for Trump lies very heavy on the American republic. The anarchic nature of his war does not make it merely aberrant. The lurch from declaring fears about Iran to be mere media exaggerations to invoking imminent threat, from demanding the Nobel Peace Prize to luxuriating in lethality, is the essence of the autocrat’s monopoly on unpredictability.

. . . Extreme violence is now a large part of this repertoire of arbitrariness. Trump has pushed domestic terror to the point where his agents can murder American citizens on the street without accountability. He is now pushing the use of overwhelming force abroad into a terrain where accountability becomes impossible because there are no clear objectives by which to distinguish purpose from pointlessness, right from wrong, success from failure.

In his quest for domination, Trump told the New York Times, that they only thing that can stop him is “my own morality. My own mind.”

He has no morality and his mind is a stew of dementia and delusion. Like any good gamer he keeps his opponent guessing. Along with Putin and Netanyahu he has tossed out the rules, shredded international law. The rule-makers, the global institutions, have been powerless to intervene in genocide. So it is up to the rest of us to stop him—and force the world’s political leaders to stop all these monsters. We are not avatars.

I don’t pretend to know what the strategy, or more likely, strategies, will be. But if there is any lesson to be learned from this war of all against all, it is that destruction is not a tool. Fire will not quench fire. It will only immolate everyone.