If you’re in the U.S. military, Ben Shapiro would like you to know that he considers your life acceptable collateral damage. “No one in America wants American casualties, it’s a tragedy and a horror,” the Daily Wire pundit said in a recent video on the war with Iran. But, he continued, “We do understand that war does come along with casualties. And we are willing to undergo those casualties in pursuit of an end, and a victory for America.” In other words, Shapiro believes defeating Iran is so important that, if you or your loved ones in the armed forces happen to get blown up in the process, that’s all very sad, but ultimately worth it. Which raises an interesting question: since he feels that way, when will Ben grab a rifle, strap a Kevlar helmet on his head, and put the rest of his body where his mouth is?
Of all the commentators in the right-wing media, Shapiro may be the most vehement in his desire for the United States and Israel to remain at war with Iran, and to attack and kill Iranians as frequently as possible. This has been a project of his since at least 2008, when he was writing columns for Town Hall urging American Jewish groups to “create a groundswell of support for a military strike against Iran by Israel—the only true solution to Iranian nuclear ambition.” In the intervening 18 years, his belligerent outlook hasn’t changed. When Donald Trump finally did launch a joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities last June, Shapiro called it “the signal act of political bravery, perhaps, of my lifetime.” He insists that “the U.S. must dismantle the Iranian terror regime” at all costs, and is disturbingly explicit about the violence he wants to see in pursuit of that goal. Going beyond the Book of Exodus’ dictum about “an eye for an eye,” he says that:
What we actually ought to do is say, an eye for everything. If you touch a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, then we kill the head of the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps]. We kill Ghalibaf. We kill your entire leadership class, again. We destroy South Pars and we strike Kharg. One drone, and that’s what happens.
Curiously, Shapiro bemoans “political violence” in other contexts, but actively calls for political violence against Iranians. Here, he is endorsing the premeditated assassination of political leaders, including Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who is both the Speaker of the Iranian parliament and a lead negotiator in the on-and-off ceasefire process. Beyond Ghalibaf, wiping out a country’s “entire leadership class” regardless of their direct involvement in hostilities would be a serious war crime under international standards. And with his demands to attack the enormous methane fields at South Pars and the heavily guarded oil infrastructure at Kharg Island, Shapiro is also urging a U.S. military assault that would get many American soldiers killed. He is clear that he means a ground assault, saying that “Kharg Island, the chokepoint for the entire Iranian oil industry, can be taken with special operations” and “Iran’s nuclear materials can be captured as well.” According to Task and Purpose, the latest strategic estimates suggest it would take at least 1,200 American troops to “take” Kharg Island, let alone the nuclear material deep underground at sites like Isfahan. Inevitably, some percentage would come home in black PVC bags.
In fact, the body bags have already begun to pile up. The exact number of U.S. deaths in the Iran war is somewhat unclear, because the Trump administration has been playing political games with categories: first listing four service members as casualties of the war, then re-listing them under the more ambiguous title of “overseas operations,” then changing it back after veterans’ groups called the move a “huge disrespect.” But we know for a fact that at least 18 U.S. soldiers have been killed, and a further 624 have been wounded. (And keep in mind, in modern wars “wounded” can mean anything from a concussion to fourth-degree burns or amputation.) One, Private First Class Isabella Gonzales of Texas, was just 19 years old when her life was cut short at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan on July 17. This, according to Ben Shapiro, we are “willing to undergo.”
But who exactly are the “we” who Shapiro says are prepared to accept these deaths? It can’t be the American public at large, who have opposed the war with Iran since the March strikes that killed the Ayatollah Khamenei and all those schoolgirls in Minab. Today, only 33 percent of Americans support the war to any degree, let alone say they’re willing to see Americans die for it. “We” might mean supporters of the Israeli regime, which Shapiro backs to the hilt: in a remarkable statement this month, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said that “When it comes to the state of Israel, there is no interest in joining the campaign[…] The current situation, where there is a confined campaign between Iran and the United States, is the correct [situation] and best for us.” Or it could be the royal “we,” referring simply to Shapiro’s personal position as the editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire. Any of the options would be equally contemptible.
It’s another dark irony that Ben Shapiro was recently a guest speaker at the University of Pennsylvania’s Adam Smith Society, where he gave a talk on “Why Capitalism Makes America Great.” (It doesn’t.) Apparently he hasn’t actually done his reading of Smith’s work, or he might be familiar with this passage, from The Wealth of Nations:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war.
Well, who does this describe if not Shapiro? To him, war with Iran does not mean blood and sweat and fear and pain, or your squadmate’s intestines hanging out of their gut after a piece of shrapnel hits. He has no intention of encountering any of that. For him, war just means another subject to debate, another piece of content for his YouTube channel, the same as it would have been for the newspapers in Smith’s day. His job as a culture warrior is a lucrative one, so just like Smith’s aristocrats, he can afford the higher gas and food prices. The dying is other, poorer people’s job.
In the whole bestiary of political animals, there are few nastier than the chicken-hawk: the person who relentlessly pushes for war, secure in the knowledge that they’ll never face any personal danger themselves. But this kind of person has always been with us. In his play The Knights, written in the year 424 BCE, Aristophanes levels the accusation against Cleon—a real politician of ancient Greece who he portrays as a war-hungry demagogue. Centuries later, there was Vice President Dan Quayle, who supported the invasion of Vietnam but reportedly used family connections to enlist in the Indiana National Guard, avoiding the front lines. In every era, the pattern repeats.
The late, unlamented Senator Lindsey Graham was another of this type. Soon after his July 11 death, some really chilling footage came out from a behind-the-scenes documentary about his political career: Graham is seated in his plush leather office chair, watching Fox News announce that Trump had attacked Iran. “I almost cried! I mean, like, how long have we been pushing this?” he asks a staffer, before emitting a cough that now seems like foreshadowing. The answer is his entire career; as even Trump admitted at Graham’s funeral, the senator “never saw a war he didn’t like.” But as the Tampa Bay Times revealed, even though Graham used to describe himself as a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, he really served as a military lawyer, and “was never deployed overseas during the Persian Gulf War. He stayed in South Carolina, where he prepared wills for those going into combat.” No bullets whizzing overhead for him, thank you very much.
There are counter-examples, too: those who, when they say publicly that a war is worth fighting, are willing to take the risks involved. George Orwell, famously, volunteered to fight with the communists in the Spanish Civil War, writing that “I had promised myself to kill one Fascist—after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.” In this century, TrueAnon podcast host Brace Belden went to Syria and exchanged bullets with ISIS. Even MSNBC analyst Malcolm Nance, despite some lingering questions about how much combat his unit saw, had enough courage in him to join the Ukrainian military in 2022. But not Lindsey Graham, and not Ben Shapiro. Instead, Ben is content to record smug videos about why you should go kill and be killed, before transitioning smoothly into an ad read for ZipRecruiter or Express VPN.
But as it happens, there’s still time for Ben to demonstrate the courage of his convictions. Under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Army has just raised its maximum recruiting age to 42, allowing middle-aged men to join up—and with a birthday on January 15, 1984, Shapiro is exactly 42 now. So if he really feels that it’s so damned important to make war on Iran, to the extent that dead soldiers are just the cost of doing business, there’s nothing stopping him from joining up and taking the fight to the “terror regime” himself.
For that matter, he can take some friends with him. There’s the New York Times’ Bret Stephens, who has been writing headlines like “We Absolutely Need to Escalate in Iran” for years now, or the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, who wrote in January that “There is no U.S. downside to striking the Iranian regime.” (Oops.) There’s author James Lindsay, who said in April that he expects “this operation in Iran ends up making the world an unambiguously better place for generations to come.” All of these guys feel strongly that war with Iran is good and right, so they should eagerly accept the honor of participating. Unlike Shapiro, all of them are above 42, but some exceptions can be made; the Trump administration, after all, are not sticklers for the rules. Strap them with M16s, pump them full of Pete Hegseth’s testosterone shots, and load them into a troop carrier. Call it the Pundit’s Brigade. It’s a strategically smart move: after all, if he hears Shapiro’s nasal whine coming over the Alborz mountains, there’s a chance Mojtaba Khamenei might kill himself out of sheer annoyance.
Personally, I happen to share the majority of Americans’ opinion: that attacking Iran was a catastrophically stupid and morally heinous move. I want nothing to do with a regional war in the Middle East, let alone one that Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for. But if Ben Shapiro feels otherwise, that’s his business, and he can take it up with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard directly. His home turf in South Florida boasts any number of Army recruitment centers, and he’s welcome to use them. Otherwise, let him get back to something more his speed, like complaining about wokeness in The Little Mermaid, and leave our military out of it.
