TRUMP ATTACKED IRAN. Did the MOR model fail? (Part 1)
The Geopolitical Theorem -- An MOR series
Trump attacked Iran.
Some believe this means the MOR model—which claims the US bosses are anti-Israel and pro-jihad—is broken.
In this series, I argue the opposite.
It is the mainstream model, according to which the US bosses—and Trump especially—are anti-jihad and pro-Israel, that is broken.
Long before this war, the mainstream model had already been decisively refuted.
The mainstream model of geopolitics makes the following basic claim: the US bosses are the best allies of Israel.
This model—mind you—is never presented as such, as a hypothetical model that one may, in principle, scientifically disagree with. It is, rather, matter-of-factly embedded in news stories, academic articles, and expert presentations as an allegedly obvious description of the world admitting of zero controversy. The grass is green, the sky is blue, and the US bosses are the best allies of Israel.
For the odd US president, this claim is occasionally weakened with a nod to nuance (Carter/Obama/Biden…). But in its general form it is taken for granted and broadly accepted—by supporters and enemies of Israel both—that the US bosses are the best allies of Israel.
And where Donald Trump is concerned, all voices, in the mainstream and even beyond, agree that—love him or hate him—Trump is very pro-Israel.
From its lonely corner, the MOR model of geopolitics makes the opposite claim: all of the top US bosses—including Donald Trump—are covert totalitarian antisemites working to produce, by proxy, a jihadi genocide of the Jewish people in the State of Israel.
That’s a stark contrast. Who’s wrong?
Donald Trump has now attacked the very jihadi Iranian ayatollahs who promise the genocidal destruction of Israel. Many seem to think this has proved the MOR model wrong. But I disagree. In consequence, I have been publicly upbraided for my alleged stubbornness. C’mon, Francisco—say my numerous detractors—admit that you got it wrong.
Admit it!
I perceive in this sometimes impolitely expressed insistence a certain cannibalistic animus: salivating mongrel beasts eager to see Francisco humiliated, face down in the mud, and ready to make a meal of me. So let me say this: in the pursuit of science this kind of belligerence is absolutely what you want. I applaud you. Avenging skepticism—because there can be no sacred Authority!—is the very practice of freedom. And freedom is preserved only while practiced.
So bring it on.
The great philosopher Karl Popper taught us to value this killer instinct because great scientific progress is a matter of refutation, not confirmation. The bigger the thing refuted, the greater the progress. Refute a perceived ‘ground truth’ and they’ll give you a Nobel.
So yes: bring it on. This is a sport.
Every sport has rules
I’m glad that the MOR model is now sufficiently well known to be attacked. And attack you must, my dear adversaries. I delight in your brimming confidence.
If I might, however, just a few words on the rules of engagement.
In science, you don’t refute by exposing the theorist—it’s the theory you’re after. Because a scientist wants the best model of the Universe. So the killer instinct, though it burneth furiously, must be domesticated within a certain grammar.
Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton, who taught us how to do modern science, competed viciously—even nastily. As I recommend. But this is a sport, and they played by rules.
This collection of rules—we anthropologists call them norms—are what establish the epistemological paradigm of modern Western science. But they do so only if they are embodied and practiced within an academic society—it’s a culture. In other words, because it is a culture, the scientific paradigm endures only while its practitioners continue to enforce the norms of science.
I am reminded of Tolkien and his One Ring, for in this cultural grammar—in this rule-based discursive system—there is One Norm to rule them all, and in the light of science bind them:
The One Norm: Always tolerate controversy peacefully and fairly, but never agreeably.
Proper consideration of the One Norm, I have argued, identifies the boundary dividing science from non-science and pseudoscience, and hence solves the famous Demarcation Problem in the history and philosophy of science.1
We may restate it like this:
The One Norm: Rival scientific theorists may not kill or institutionally oppress each other, but neither may they amicably ignore each other.
The latter point is crucial. To have science, you need more than freedom of thought. Others must be allowed to have a different opinion, yes. But you don’t let them alone. In science, each mind tries to compel dissenting minds into agreement, using nothing more—but also nothing less—than logic and evidence. That’s the whole sport.
You have a right to your own opinion, but you’ll have to defend it.
If the right to your opinion and the obligation to defend it against dissenting views with logic and evidence are both universally extended, even to the dominant players, then every alleged epistemic authority that might seek to evade challenge crumbles. Religious inspiration, prophetic sight, military power, institutional status, presumed knowledge, academic credentials, media acceptance, cultural tradition, majority opinion, aristocratic lineage—none of this will be any avail. There is no Authority—only logic and evidence.
Asking others to believe you is therefore a major faux pas in science. Skepticism—even a somewhat brash and impudent skepticism—is normative. Everyone expects you to show your work so they can pick it apart. It feels like undressing in front of a crowd (that’s almost not a metaphor). And it makes you vulnerable. But that’s the game.
It is considered good form, in this sport, to gallantly defeat the strongest rather than the weakest version of your opponent’s theory. You ‘steel-man’ your opponent: you see where you can make his theory even better. And then you refute him. Because you hate the guy—fine. That’ll work. But do it like this.
To do it the other way—to erect an easily demolished ‘straw man’—wastes our scientific time. Because true scientists want to know what works and what is real (even when they honestly loathe each other). No matter your feelings, if you are an honest scientist, if you want to know what is real, then you want the strongest rather than the weakest theories duking it out.
Careful with the evidence
Precisely because scientists care about what is real, the First Commandment of adversarial scientific disputation—as in adversarial democratic courtrooms—is this: be careful with the evidence. In our present controversy, I see room for improvement on this fundamental score.
I can see from the comments on YouTube (mostly on the Spanish channels, where my audience is larger), and even from live interactions with colleagues who disagree with me, that some of my adversarial collaborators believe that, before Trump’s war on Iran, my prediction was: “Trump will not attack Iran.” But here are the exact words that I used—and simultaneously displayed on a slide—in two live videos (Spanish and English) right before the onset of war:
“Whatever Trump does in Iran will be bad for Israel. That’s my prediction.”
“Whatever Trump does in Iran” is a catch-all category that, by definition, implicitly includes “Trump may attack Iran.”
But I also ruled in this specific possibility explicitly. In the same video, I said:
“People want me to make a more precise prediction. I can’t. I can only make qualitative predictions. Why? Because that’s all the model affords. Okay? I can only make qualitative predictions because the US bosses have many different possibilities at their disposal. There’s many things they can do to hurt Israel. … [I]f Trump attacks [Iran] and produces regime change or whatever, I guarantee you the next regime is not going to be good for Israel.”
Now, I’ll allow that the words “Trump will not attack Iran” did escape my lips in interviews here and there. But this was part of a larger, carefully constructed (and previously prepared) sentence:
“Trump will not attack Iran unless attacking Iran is bad for Israel.”
The second part of this sentence—not always included in the edited shorts one sees here and there—was melodramatically declaimed with my index finger up in the interviewer’s face as I pointedly pronounced the word “unless!”
And why all that drama? Because the conditional “unless” clause encapsulates, in a nutshell, the entire structure of my model of the Western bosses.
I’ll get to my model in a second. But first, a brief epistemological clarification.
What matters is what my model logically requires, not what I said
If you can successfully argue that my model logically requires the prediction “Trump will not attack Iran,” then you can still nail me to that tree. Because what matters is not what I did or didn’t say in an interview—that’s just gossip. And gossip has zero place in science. We don’t do playground ‘gotcha’ (or shouldn’t). Science is the serious business of adults. What matters to the scientific argument is what my model logically forces me to say, not whether I myself am a quality person who commits honestly, in public, to the logical implications of his premises.
But this path is not available to you here. My model logically forces no such prediction. As I explained,
“I can only make qualitative predictions because the US bosses have many different possibilities at their disposal.”
There are too many possible pathways, and the players are all adapting to events in real time.
My heavily grammatical approach allows me to make educated guesses—and, so far, to comfortably explain after the fact—the intermediate moves of the bosses as they adapt discursively and materially to other players. But I cannot model the entire system forward as a complete and precise sequence of outcomes. Nobody can.
So what prediction does flow logically from my model?
Here again is a succinct statement of the MOR model:
MOR MODEL. The US bosses are covert totalitarian antisemites, working to produce, by proxy, a jihadi genocide of the Jewish people in the State of Israel.
Assuming competent US bosses, then:
MOR PREDICTION: the net effect of any major US policy intervention in the Middle East will be to strengthen antisemitic and genocidal jihadism and to weaken the security of the Jewish State.
COROLLARY: The US bosses will attack jihadi forces only if and when such attacks are instrumental to grow the jihadi threat overall and produce a net security cost for Israel.
The mainstream model, by contrast, makes the following claim:
MAINSTREAM MODEL. The US bosses are enemies of jihadism and best allies of Israel, committed to the protection and defense of Israel as a top foreign-policy priority.
Assuming competent US bosses, then:
MAINSTREAM PREDICTION. The US bosses will deploy their great power—including attacks against jihadi forces—to reduce the threat to Israel.
Which model does the historical evidence undermine?
Before the current war on the Iranian ayatollahs, there have been two important prior cases in which the US bosses engaged jihadi forces in warfare: 1) against the Afghan jihadis; and 2) against the ISIS jihadis. We may examine these two important cases to see which model—mainstream or MOR—is undermined by the historical facts.
Exhibit 1: War against the Afghan jihadis. The US bosses fought the Afghan jihadis for years. What was the effect? The war worked as a kind of machine fueling the growth of jihadism: traveling ‘holy warriors’ from all over the Muslim world went to Afghanistan and cut their teeth there, then hired themselves out as jihadi mercenaries elsewhere.
And the outcome in Afghanistan? The Taliban jihadis won—they are now the government. Even worse: these jihadis have large quantities of US weaponry that the US bosses left behind in their hasty retreat and evacuation from the Afghan capital, Kabul.
The US war on the Afghan jihadis strengthened jihadism in Afghanistan (and elsewhere).
Exhibit 2: War against the ISIS jihadis. Here, by contrast to Afghanistan, the US bosses didn’t lose—they defeated ISIS. It was Trump himself, during his first administration, who did it.
During that war, the public narrative became that Iran was needed to defeat ISIS. And Trump and the ayatollahs—Hezbollah and Iran—fought together against ISIS. The emerging media and official discourse at that time (‘the ayatollahs are not so bad…’)—what we call the management of reality—normalized the takeover of Iraq by jihadi Iran. And that takeover—mind you—was itself possible thanks to the earlier US invasion of Iraq.
And what was the outcome of defeating ISIS? That the Iranian ayatollahs—way more dangerous to Israel than ISIS—now obtained a land corridor all the way to the northern border of Israel, because they already controlled Syria and Lebanon. Only Iraq had been blocking their way, and now they had it.
The US war on ISIS increased the jihadi threat to Israel.
We have a sample n = 2 of US wars against jihadis. A sample this small cannot usually be eloquent, yet this one speaks, because the empirical result is at the extreme opposite of what the mainstream model predicts. It is a rather strong result: whether in victory (ISIS) or defeat (Afghanistan), the alleged ‘best allies of Israel,’ the US bosses, managed both times to strengthen genocidal antisemitic jihadism against the Jewish State. (With ‘friends’ like that, who needs enemies—right?).
Saying it charitably, this evidence is inconsistent with the mainstream model.
The MOR model looks at the same evidence and smugly recognizes everything that happened as precisely what it expects: the US bosses attack jihadis only when this makes the jihadi threat to Israel worse.
But MOR explains more, for, as it turns out, the Afghan and ISIS jihadis are—both—creations of the US bosses!
The creation of the Afghan jihadis was for years associated exclusively, in the official story, with US President Ronald Reagan. It has recently been established, however, that this all began with Jimmy Carter.2
With the help of the Pakistani ISI, Carter’s CIA financed and led a program to build madrasas (Islamic schools) and training camps inside Pakistan, on the border with Afghanistan, to indoctrinate Afghan Muslims—and lots of mercenaries from different countries—into jihadism, and to arm and train them for holy war. The resulting mujahideen were then sent over the border to fight the communist government of Afghanistan. It is from these mujahideen that the Taliban later emerged.
The video below shows Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, giving the holy-warrior mujahideen a pep talk: “Your cause is right and God is on your side!” (Years later Brzezinski would brag publicly about his role in all this.3)
As for ISIS, it is a matter of record—reported in mainstream sources such as the New York Times and the Washington Post—that ISIS emerged from the US military prison system in Iraq. Almost to a man, ISIS commanders were inmates of those prisons, where a deliberate US policy allowed the jihadis to control social life and force everyone into their terror structure. They were teaching the principles of jihad, the making of weapons, and how to become a suicide bomber on blackboards. The US general in charge himself called this prison system his “jihadi university.”
After five years of operation (a bachelor’s degree), the prison system was dismantled and—against the desperate pleas of the Iraqi government—the “jihadi university” graduates were simply set free, released into the wild. And they became ISIS. Then they got lots of US weapons and training via the ‘Syrian rebels’ whom the US bosses armed and trained on the grounds that they were supposedly democratic, but who then turned around and joined ISIS en masse.
As routinely happens, this has all been erased from our political memory, and yet, as the piece above shows, it was all widely discussed in the mainstream media when it happened (though of course interpreted there as a series of ‘mistakes’).
Summing up.
We have two important comparison cases of the US bosses going to war against jihadis. In both cases, the whole thing—from creation of the jihadis to attacking the same jihadis—was US policy. And the outcome, both times, was to strengthen jihadism and weaken the security of Israel. The greatest beneficiaries were the Iranian ayatollahs, whose World Jihad hinges explicitly on the genocidal ruin of the State of Israel.
Everything here is radically inconsistent with the mainstream model.
The MOR model, by contrast, finds nothing unexpected. The US bosses created and armed jihadi forces dedicated to the genocidal destruction of the State of Israel because they want a jihadi genocide in Israel. When the US bosses attack such forces, therefore, they are careful to ensure that the outcome increases the overall threat to Israel.
So far:
MOR model → 2
Mainstream → 0
(Yes, I’m keeping score.)
Can the mainstream model, backed into a corner by this evidence, fend off its own extinction? Only if we charitably allow its defenders to claim that the US bosses didn’t mean it. In other words, the US bosses twice created antisemitic jihadi forces, armed them, and then attacked them, managing each time to strengthen the jihadi threat and weaken the security of Israel, but they did all this (somehow) unintentionally. The US bosses love Israel; they are just… terribly incompetent.
But you can’t really save the mainstream model this way.
First, because, although ‘incompetence’ may reasonably be invoked for the occasional mishap, it is most implausible as an explanation for a major policy pattern—especially when the pattern in question is the precise opposite of what the mainstream model must predict.
Secondly, because alleging that the US bosses are incompetent on this astronomical scale introduces a new and equally astronomical theoretical problem: How did such imbeciles become the most powerful humans ever to walk the Earth?
When ad hoc moves to save your model get you into fresh theoretical trouble, what you have is a bad model.
The MOR model, by contrast, stays reasonable: it assumes that the US bosses are masters of politics, geopolitics, the management of reality, and the mature Machiavellian conspiracy, and hence they are precisely the sort of persons who might become the most powerful in human history (which they are).
But Trump has now attacked Iran—can’t this save the mainstream model?
Why should it? We’ve just seen that the US bosses twice before attacked jihadis, and each time they strengthened jihadism and weakened the security of Israel. What should you rationally expect the third time that the same US bosses attack jihadis? Same outcome.
It’s called reasoning from experience.
And notice that even if ‘the era of President Donald J. Trump’ is all the experience you will deign to consider, you must still make the same prediction. For two reasons:
it was Trump who, in defeating ISIS, gifted the Iranian jihadis—far more dangerous to Israel—with a normalization of their control over Iraq and a land corridor to the northern border of Israel; and
Trump’s consistent policy in the Middle East—up until his recent attack against the ayatollahs—has been rather unambiguously pro-jihad and anti-Israel: he armed ayatollah-controlled Iraq to the teeth; he saved the Hezbollah jihadis in Lebanon, saved the Hamas jihadis in Gaza, saved the ayatollahs in the Twelve-Day War; installed the ISIS remnant of Muhammad Al Jolani as the new government of Syria; green-lighted Al Jolani’s destruction of the democratic and pro-Israeli Rojava Kurds; extended NATO-level protection to jihadi Qatar, intellectual author of the October 7th massacre; and rushed to sell more weapons to Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and other enemies of Israel.4
In any case, the proper category of analysis, according to the evidence and reasoning presented here at MOR, is not any one US president but ‘the Western bosses’ as an ideologically coherent, internationally cohesive, strategically solidary, and transhistorically self-reproducing Western elite power system.5
Honoring that approach, let us now zoom out from Donald Trump to recover ‘the US bosses’ as our category of analysis and we shall see that the MOR case strengthens powerfully. For the Iranian jihadis whom Trump is now attacking turn out to be—once again—a creation of the same US bosses!
This completes the pattern: three out of three.
I’ll keep it brief. It was discovered in the mid-1980s that Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. had rushed to secretly arm Ayatollah Khomeini—to the tune of billions of dollars a year—immediately after Khomeini established Shiite jihadism in Iran in 1979. The media called this the Iran-Contra Affair. It was a huge scandal—once very famous, but now, like so many other things, almost completely forgotten.
Iran-Contra is bad enough, but that’s not where it all began. We now have declassified CIA documents to establish that the CIA had clandestine contact with Ayatollah Khomeini from 1963. The same documents, and other evidence besides, jointly establish that before Reagan-Bush, US President Jimmy Carter prepared Khomeini to replace the Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and deliberately engineered the Shah’s political collapse and exit from Iran. Then Carter used his own emissaries and agents to get the Iranian army to stand down and allow Khomeini to seize power.
(Perhaps you wondered: Did Carter create and launch, at the same time, two major jihadi movements in neighboring countries—the Afghan mujahideen and the Iranian ayatollahs—for different reasons? Or was this all one broad, coordinated, regional pro-jihad policy? Fact: the Afghan mujahideen group that got the most support from the CIA, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami, was also directly supported by Ayatollah Khomeini.6)
The US bosses are responsible for establishing and supporting three major jihadi movements: the Afghan mujahideen, the Iranian ayatollahs, and ISIS. This is entirely consistent with the MOR model. Twice before the US bosses have attacked their jihadi creations, and each time jihadism grew and Israeli security was further compromised. This pattern is again entirely consistent with the MOR model. What outcome must the MOR model predict for Trump’s attack on the ayatollahs? The same: a strengthening of jihadism, and a blow to the security of Israel.
I have full confidence in this prediction; before too long we’ll have a decisive confirmation.
If you are impatient, though, keep reading, because historical events have already produced what I claim is a definitive falsification—refutation—of the rival mainstream model. And I present that demonstration in the following piece, in the manner of a historically grounded geopolitical theorem.
(Don’t worry; there’s no math…)
Gil-White, Francisco. (2023). Demarcation, and the Structure of Pseudoscientific Evolutions: How Paradigm Rent Seeking Invisibly Turns Kuhnian-Normal Science into Kuhnian-Normal Pseudoscience. Available at SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=4504597 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4504597
In a different piece, have a short—documented—section on Jimmy Carter’s creation of the Afghan mujahideen. You need to click on this link, and then scroll down a bit to the subtitle ‘The mujahideen.’
The Trump policy moves mentioned in the text have been documented and analyzed in the following pieces:
![DOES THE US SUPPORT ISRAEL? OR JIHAD? A simple-minded look at the numbers [PART 2]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QDts!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eb51195-2f6d-456f-8fda-55def68eebcc_1962x1272.png)
We have two pieces that are especially useful to grasp why we believe ‘the US bosses’ is the coherent analytical category that we need:
As even Wikipedia is aware, “Hizb-i Islami … headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” is the group of mujahideen “who enjoyed the largest amount of ISI Pakistan funding, Saudi intelligence funding, and American CIA funding.” What did Hizb-i Islami, the jihadi group that the US bosses supported especially, want? Well, it “aimed for a state similar to that founded and led by Khomeini in Iran.” It is perhaps not a total surprise, then, that Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami received support also from Khomeini’s Iran. In a document from RAND, a Pentagon-affiliated think tank, I find the following: “The Hezb-i-Islami has historically received assistance from the Iran and Pakistan governments, as well as the United States.”
SOURCE: Jones, S. G. (2008). Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. In Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan (MG-595-OSD). RAND Corporation.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/mg595osd.12
no real quibbles with any of it. I will make the points that imo, given what Brzezinski said and the US's repeated empowerment of jihadists, the notion that the US was ever fighting *against* jihadists in Afghanistan or Iraq is absurd. The only thing that makes sense, per US policy as well as per US propaganda, is that the US was fighting 'islamophobes'--anti-fascist/secular people (likely mostly unobservant Muslims), while US media told us fairy tales about 'isis' and similar kayfabe characters that we have absolutely no way of knowing if they existed in any way.
Think about it: the notion of the Pentagon fighting against jihadists while also giving hundreds of millions of dollars to fatah/hamas is just ridiculous. And the US also fought islamophobes in the Balkans (as you and Jared) have documented amply.
So I'd merely posit that the US has spent 47 years fighting resistance to jihad, while lying in western media and inventing kayfabe nonsense like 'we're fighting isis!!!'.
Wrt Iran, something different is definitely going on. I wonder if Israel is using all her powers to force the US to fight against jihad--and the US has to placate some 'societal grammar' (or whatever your term is) by actually helping Israel, but is obviously deploying ALL propaganda efforts imaginable to get regular people to despise Israel and push for the US to stop killing jihadists. This seems to be what is going on. Trump, the political-wrestling entertainer of course just plays his role and decides nothing. Trump has magically been absolved of running a Jewhate propaganda campaign (even though this has been going on throughout his presidency).
Okay, so the MOR model makes sense, far as it has gone to date.
"The US bosses are covert totalitarian antisemites, working to produce, by proxy, a jihadi genocide of the Jewish people in the State of Israel."
Yet in this round there is a powerful driver not yet factored in - 80 million Iranian people who want their secular freedoms back. The only reason they haven't risen up against the tattered regime is because they were told to wait for a ceasefire. But as of 2 days ago armed civilians have already begun to take revenge on the IRGC and Basij. According to Iranian insiders, the nation is overwhelmingly pro-Israel, except for the 5% still loyal to the ayatollahs. So is the most likely leader of the transition government, Reza Pahlavi.
For the model to work this time, the US bosses would need to forcibly change the direction of that momentum 180 degrees, using... what?