MICHAEL MORRIS: The why and WTF of Trump’s F-bomb on Israel and Iran’s missile war - Business Day

Michael Morris
One of the most interesting things about US President Donald Trump’s artless − charmingly artless, and only briefly breathtaking — repudiation of Israel and Iran last week was that nobody really seemed to wonder what he actually meant.

Of course these days, when all reasonably smart people count on having go-to online sources to validate and — they fervently wish — give authority to their own opinions, everybody’s convinced they know enough to be right. Questions evaporate before the sun. 

But the world turns.

While I’m fond of short, rude words, my first reaction last week in a chat with colleagues was that that kind of language in any serious context “only infantilises”. Doesn’t it? Now, days later, I am not sure that’s right.

It could be that crudely putting the belligerents in their place was only fleetingly infantilising — casting them as kindergarten ninnies just long enough for each to grasp at some more adult sense of agency.

But, to what end? What did Trump have in mind? What did he actually mean? What could he have meant?

Many — some perhaps not yet dreamt of — variables will in time determine whether, for instance, those one-of-a-kind bunker bombs that pierced the crust of Iranian geology, and doubtless jarred Iranian ideology, will produce anything like the effect that was imagined in advance.

Saul Bellow describes early on in his remarkable 1976 account, To Jerusalem and Back, a fine dinner in the opulent Old City apartment of an Armenian archbishop. Other guests include Jerusalem’s near legendary mayor Teddy Kollek, violinists Isaac Stern and Alexander Schneider and Le Monde journalist Michel Tatu. 

The conversation is insightful, informed, clever.

Bellow observes: “I have been hearing conversations like this one for half a century. I well remember what intelligent, informed people were saying in the last years of the Weimar Republic; what they told one another in the first days after Hindenburg had brought in Hitler.

“I recall table talk from the times of Léon Blum and Edouard Daladier. I remember what people said about the Italian adventure in Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Britain. Such intelligent discussion hasn’t always been wrong. What is wrong with it is that the discussants invariably impart their own intelligence to what they are discussing.

“Later, historical studies show that what actually happened was devoid of anything like such intelligence. It was absent from Flanders Field and from Versailles, absent when the Ruhr was taken, absent from Tehran, Yalta, Potsdam, absent from British policy during the Palestine Mandate, absent before, during and after the Holocaust.

“History and politics are not at all like the notions developed by intelligent, informed people … And the talk goes on. What is still being perpetuated in all civilised discussion is the ritual of civilised discussion itself.” 

What at a glance may seem a rejection of reason, is rather perhaps a call for something more than merely intelligent analysis, or abdication to fate.

If there’s little we can truly be certain of, the one exception that can dispel illusions is having to acknowledge repeatedly that in the world of ideas and policies, decisions and instructions — whether what to bomb, what to build — the golden rule is that the end never justifies the means, and this not on the grounds of one or another arcane moral superstition but simply because ends and means are eternally inseparable. 

The way we do a thing cannot but be the thing itself — the doing is the outcome; the means is always the end. 

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2025-06-30-michael-morris-the-why-and-wtf-of-trumps-f-bomb-on-israel-and-irans-missile-war/