Donald Trump has betrayed his base by joining hands with the neo-cons in their belligerent support of war with Iran!

Donald Trump has betrayed Israel by trying to engage Iran in negotiations instead of bombing them now!

Which is it?

Neither.

For one thing, with every day that passes, Israel takes more chess pieces off the board of Iran’s military power, both in matériel and personnel. As of a couple of days ago, it was estimated that Israel had destroyed about 1000 of Iran’s 3500 to 4000 missiles. Add the 400-plus that Iran has lobbed at Israel’s cities, and you can see where this game of attrition is heading.

If one major goal is to extirpate Iran’s nuclear capability, then every day Israeli F-15s take flight is another milestone on the path to that goal. A weaker Iran is also a more pliant Iran.

It has been amusing to watch the chattering class suddenly become experts on the GBU-57 “bunker buster” bomb. Only the United States has them, and only the United States has bombers capable of delivering the 30,000-pound “Massive Ordnance Penetrators.” If you flip through the news, you will see scores, if not hundreds, of stories that repeat the same talking points.

At first, it was said that only the GBU-57 could destroy hardened sites such as the Fordow atomic bomb-making—officially, the “fuel enrichment”—site, buried hundreds of feet into a mountain.

Then some “experts” told us that it was by no means clear that even this behemoth could do the job. Trump, it was confidently speculated, would order that a tactical nuke be used instead.

In fact, all this is hooey. Steven Bannon goes to the White House. Oh no! That means that Trump is not going to attack Iran. But it means nothing of the sort. As Trump himself said with respect to some Wall Street Journal story about his plans concerning the war, the Journal “Has No Idea What My Thoughts Are Concerning Iran.”

The point can be generalized. One major source of the fog of war is the rhetorical incontinence of journalists. Someone makes a claim; it gets picked up, repeated, and amplified. Suddenly, what began as merely speculation is touted confidently as fact.

We know what Donald Trump wants: peace. He has said it over and over. But no one outside Trump’s inner circle—a circle that must occasionally contract to the dimensions of a single individual—really knows what he will do to achieve that goal.

For the last 46 years, Iran has been murdering its own people and exporting terrorism either directly or through proxies in Lebanon, Syria, among Palestinians, and elsewhere. Ridding that backward, theocratic regime of its nuclear apparatus is one goal. Pace some naïve commentators, there can be no doubt that if Iran possessed the bomb, it would use it. How many times have its spokesmen observed that Israel is a “one-bomb country?”

But in my view, that is merely one piece of the puzzle that Israel and Trump are trying to solve. Obliterating Iran’s nuclear program would be to shatter one sword of its militancy. By itself, though, it would do nothing to tame or neuter that militancy.

Many in Trump’s base shudder at the phrase “regime change” because they believe it is redolent of the Bush-Romney, Clinton-Obama agenda of “exporting democracy.” Sure, those presidents employed different bureaucrats to pursue their globalist agenda, but that agenda, despite different cadences and ideological colorations, was essentially the same.

Iran, however, presents us with a different sort of problem. The name of that problem is “radical Islam” or—to be perfectly frank—“Islam” unadorned by any face-saving adjective.

I know, I know: we are not supposed to say that. Remember when President Obama told us that terrorist groups like ISIS were not really Islamic because “no religion condones the killing of innocents.”

Really? Was the Ayatollah Khomeini “Islamic?” He, like his successor, ordered the torture and execution of countless innocents. How about Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan: is he “Islamic?” A few years ago, Erdogan told the world that the phrase “moderate Islam” is “ugly” because “Islam is Islam.” Democracy, he said, is just an express stop on the train whose destination is Islam.

Who, in fact, speaks for Islam? Who gets to say what it is and isn’t?

We are assured that it’s not the group that calls itself an Islamic State because our political leaders and our media have told us so. It’s the same with Boko Haram. They regularly slaughter Christians, women and children included. Spokesmen for Boko Haram say that they represent Islamic teaching, but no: our leaders have assured us that that is not the case. “No religion,” said Obama, “condones the killing of innocents.”

Has the former president contemplated the glorious history of Islam and the glittering deeds of Mohammed? We have it on the highest—and for Muslims, the only—authority that the Prophet regularly slaughtered innocents. Consider, to take just one example, the siege of Medina in the year 627, then home to a Jewish tribe. After a couple of weeks, the inhabitants surrendered unconditionally. Mohammad then had the 600-800 men butchered and sold the women and children into slavery.

“We are not at war with Islam,” our leaders tell us. “We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

The impolitic question is, where are all those unperverted Muslims? In the common rooms of American universities? Maybe. In our cities and suburbs? Perhaps. But I think we can agree that it is not (to make an arbitrary and woefully incomplete list) the people behind such actions as

• The 9/11 terrorist attacks
• The Bali nightclub bombing
• The Ft. Hood “workplace violence” event
• The London tube and bus bombings
• The Madrid train bombing
• The Boston Marathon carnage
• The Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket slaughters in France (“folks shot in a deli” was how Obama described the latter)
• The Danish shootings by another “Allahu Akbar”-shouting chap.

Islam, or a perversion of Islam? At some point, as Hillary Clinton might put it, what difference does it make? As we contemplate the future of Iran, I would suggest pondering the possibility that, even if “we are not at war with Islam,” Islam may well be at war with us.