Morbid Symptoms: War on Iran and the Epstein Class

On Saturday, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated military assault on Iran under the banner of Operation Epic Fury. The operation, involving large-scale air and missile strikes across multiple Iranian targets, marked another significant escalation since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023. Critics have since renamed the campaign “Operation Epstein Fury” or “Operation Epstein Files,” arguing that the sudden recourse to war appears designed to divert attention from a political scandal engulfing the presidential administration—one that, in their telling, dwarfs both Watergate and the sordid indiscretions that haunted the presidency of Bill Clinton.

During recent congressional testimony concerning Clinton’s relationship with the deceased financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna told reporters that she believed Epstein “was an intelligence asset running some form of honeypot operation.” For years, rumors have circulated regarding Epstein’s possible connections to intelligence services such as Mossad and the CIA, allegations he treated with a certain flippant irony in private emails with associates and fellow Jewish supremacists. Though many investigators insist that no definitive “smoking gun” has surfaced to prove such intelligence ties, the network of Epstein’s relationships with powerful figures remains undeniable, reaching into Trump’s political orbit as well as into the circles of foreign governments, including Israel.

It is therefore unsurprising that many observers now wonder whether Trump’s attack on Iran functions as a political diversion from the widening Epstein scandal. What is certain is that the president’s political fortunes have declined: his poll numbers have slipped, and Americans have grown increasingly despondent amid a worsening domestic economic climate. In his most recent State of the Union address, Trump—a man who has likely never pushed a grocery cart down a supermarket aisle—derided talk of an “affordability crisis,” having previously dismissed the rising cost of basic goods as a “hoax.” Meanwhile, revanchist attacks on political opponents, the federal invasion of Minnesota, an episode that left two Americans dead and immigrant communities terrorized, and the diminishing returns of white-supremacist rhetoric and policy have done little to arrest his growing unpopularity. The gradual release of additional Epstein files, reportedly implicating an expanding circle of elites and containing tens of thousands references to Trump himself and allegations implicating him in the abuse of women and girls, combined with the conspicuous absence of accountability, has only deepened public distrust toward what many now call the Epstein class—the insulated stratum of wealth and power that governs modern political life.

There is, indeed, a conspiracy. But its central purpose is not merely the concealment of crimes of sexual exploitation, abhorrent though they are. Such atrocities are themselves symptoms—grotesque manifestations of a deeper and more malignant disease. Epstein was but one among many actors, whether intelligence asset or merely a creature of wealth and impunity, who preyed upon the vulnerable while treating ordinary people as pawns in their conquest of power, whether acting on behalf of foreign states or private capital or both.

In this sense, the scandal reveals something larger: the moral pathology of capitalism in its decadent phase and the morbid symptoms of imperial decline. The American war with Iran serves no constituency except those who stand to profit from the destruction of yet another sovereign state that has resisted incorporation into the imperial order. Iran, like Venezuela or Cuba, poses no existential threat to the United States or its people. To strike such nations is not an exhibition of strength but a confession of weakness—a tacit admission that the American project, having exhausted the possibilities of reform at home, can imagine no alternative to crisis except war.

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

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