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Notes -
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran? And what is with him generally? Or the whole upper echelons of the US govt?
I reference a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Cruz, where it turns out he didn't know said population (and has since responded with an AI meme image of Tucker asking Luke the population of the Death Star).
Turns out that the population of Iran is 92 million, I thought it was around 80. 80 would be a fairly reasonable answer. Even Yemen is surprisingly populous, around 41 million. Fun game to try - estimate the population of various countries in these areas.
I thought Ted Cruz was supposed to be super-smart, wouldn't it be natural to read up on Iran? He is on the Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism. It's also relevant to US strategic choices and his particular love of Israel. Knowing about the subpopulations and relative size of the Azeris, Kurds and similar would be relevant to regime change, which is his professed goal:
To his credit he does know that Iran is Persian and predominantly Shia. And maybe being on a bunch of other subcommittees means he has to divide up his time and energy in all these different areas. But it's not like Tucker is asking really sophisticated questions about the position and integration of Azeri elites in the Tehran power structure. That really should be dealt with by an expert diplomat. But senators are supposed to be making strategic decisions, one has to have some base of knowledge to decide upon different courses of action.
Cruz also thinks that the Bible requires Christians to support the nation of Israel, which is somewhat non-mainstream in theology: "Where does my support for Israel come from, number 1 we're biblically commanded to support Israel". Tucker tries to ask 'do you mean the government of Israel' and Cruz says the nation of Israel, as if to say it's common-sense that the nation of Israel as referred to in the Bible is the same as the state of Israel today. It seems like he's purposely conflating the dual meanings of nation as ethnic group and nation as state, which is a stupid part of English.
Also Cruz said to Tucker "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States”. How would this help in the context of a hostile interview, does he think that's a helpful thing to say? I can only imagine that Cruz thinks this is a winning issue, he wants to play hard rather than go down the wishy-washy 'Judeo-Christian' values route. Is declaring your devotion to a foreign country really that popular in America?
Trump also posted this somewhat ominous diatribe from Mike Huckabee (pastor and ambassador to Israel) praising Trump's divine prominence, his position similar to 'Truman in 1945' and how he has to listen to god and the angels only... https://x.com/Mondoweiss/status/1934999328583713096/photo/1
This episode reminds me of how George W Bush apparently didn't know of the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam until after deciding to invade, he brought up Gog and Magog when trying to persuade Chirac to join the war. Maybe that's false, some have disputed it. Or how Trump apparently won't read any long extracts of text and demands pictures. Maybe that's also false, lots of stories have been made about Trump policy. It's known that Biden didn't know whether people were alive or dead or what was happening much of the time. Large swathes of the Democrats can't tell the difference between men and women.
Here's another one I just found from another US congressman: https://x.com/VoteRandyFine/status/1839686465820766542
That's just weird!
There are serious structural problems with how America selects its politicians if this is the calibre of talent that's drawn into positions of great power. At the risk of sounding like an edgy atheist fighting a war everyone's tired of and moved on from years ago, surely theology should have no place in grand strategy. It's normal to have colourful characters in politics, some corruption, some old people who don't know what's going on, a certain level of lobbying. But this seems to be on a qualitatively different level, with serious results.
Some somewhat unstructured thoughts:
While "Cruz doesn't know anything about Iran" seems to have been the big takeaway that people focus on from this interview, I think the much more important and more alarming part is, as you pointed out, the religious element - but I don't think it's a case of stupidity, at least on that specific issue, or of ignorance. "What is with him" is that he genuinely believes that his God, through scripture, has commanded him to support Israel, and there are many in the upper echelons of the US government who genuinely and wholeheartedly believe the same thing.
"Republicans want to go to war in the Middle East because they're Millennialist Christians" is one of those horseshoe / bell-curve-meme situations where if you know nothing about the state of the American right, you probably believe it, if you are sort of read up on the American right, you probably think it's nonsense, and if you really listen to everything they say and the actions they take and try and discern their motivations, then yeah, it turns out they really just do believe it. Yes, sometimes they'll give other justifications based on liberal principles or American statecraft or plain might makes right rhetoric, and sometimes those justifications make sense, but they are all made in the shadow of the initial basis of theology. They are add-ons, NOT the central thing itself. In that way, it's telling that Cruz gives two reasons for his unconditional support of Israel, and the first one he describes is theological.
I really wish Tucker had asked the natural follow up, which is, "If your God has commanded you to support Israel, then surely you would do it even if it was actively against American interests?", but he instead chooses to focus on the difference between what Israel meant in the Bible and whether it can be understood to refer to the modern-day polity of Israel (the answer is very obviously no, because the polity did not exist in any meaningful form, but Cruz refuses to engage properly on that point).
HOWEVER, with all that said, I would be curious as to whether Tucker himself disagrees with the idea that Christians have some obligation to support some form of Israel, whether that is just "the chosen people" (i.e. Jews). I've heard some Christians explain this away by saying that "nah, doesn't matter because Jesus, new covenant, we're all God's chosen, etc. etc." but I don't think that holds out when you read through the Bible. I, personally, follow in the strong and storied European tradition of pick-whatever-works faith, so would be interested in what the more theologically-minded Christians of the motte believe.
I don't want to go off the deep end speculating on his stated faith, but at first glance, this part felt somewhat post-hoc to me. I don't doubt that his support for Israel is tied to his faith to some degree, but I also doubt that that particular verse is the driver rather than the justification.
It is suspicious to me that he had the verse memorized (and corrected Tucker on the exact wording at one point, to narrow his interpretation even though his quote was not quite right anyway.), and had the 'I learned in Sunday school' framining, but didn't know where in the Bible it was, or provide any additional context outside of the single quoted verse.
It just came off to me like a digestible soundbite to rattle off, rather than the starting point for a developed point of view. I think Tucker sufficiently surfaced this in his pushback, but it didn't come out explicitly.
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