Pete Hegseth’s testosterone militarism and calls to escalate against Iran reveal the dangerous fantasies shaping US war thinking.
Hegseth popped up in a video presaging his intention to test testosterone levels in American troops to make sure he has a “High T Department of War”. He wants to get testosterone frothing away in his charges so they can “operate at their absolute best” and provide “the biological foundation required to sustain the fight”.
In the video Hegseth looks as if he’s sufficiently overflowing with the stuff to top up any deficiencies in several battalions of troops. He may even have a pint or two left over for his 80-year old President who may well have run his supplies down to perilously low levels.
For those not in the know, testosterone is a naturally occurring hormone that helps with the development of sex characteristics, muscle mass, bone density and, I’m afraid, sperm production. Men have more of it than women.
Testosterone levels are affected by many things, including age, and if they get lowish the benefits listed in the paragraph immediately above can be compromised.
Happily, in Chicago in the 1920s Professor Fred Koch was able to get his hands on large quantities of bovine testicles from the local abattoirs. He extracted the isolates from these organs and injected them into broods of low-libido roosters and rats. The procedure re-masculinised them.
The technology from the Koch experiments has been converted into therapies for topping up testosterone in humans on the basis of what is good for a rat and a rooster must be good for common personages. The top-ups are achieved by injections into bottoms or the application of gels to convenient locations, especially the loins and the groins.
So far so good, but hang on a minute: these treatments, according to medicos in the know, can have unsettling side effects including acute acne, dense body hair, breast tenderness, wild mood swings, irritability and high blood pressure.
The US Health Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jnr, says he regularly augments his testosterone, a credible enough claim if his appearance and attitudes are anything to go by.
Thus, if Hegseth is going to be rubbing testosterone supplements into his troops, some may get more muscles and stronger bones but others could end up as hairy as badgers with tender breasts, irritable as buggery and looking like Secretary Kennedy. Are these the kinds of troops anyone would want to send “over the top”? And could this be the kind of military to provide “the biological foundation required to sustain the fight”?
Of course, as with just about everything Hegseth says, this is all absolute crap. He should be getting people onto the front who are assessed as being capable of doing their jobs without insultingly mucking around with their biology by stuffing them with drugs banned by the World Doping Authority. No matter how tasteless, let him gloat about the possible disfigurement of the current Iranian leader as collateral damage when the Americans and Israelis killed his father, but he should be told to stick his testosterone up his jumper.
If testosterone has had anything to do with current US-Israeli adventurism in the Middle East, it’s got not much to commend it. Apart from the raw damage, Iran now seems to be holding most of the cards. And Trump has said, “We’re finding it hard to find where they have anything.”
Trump, Hegseth and their ilk appear oblivious to the experience of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan where more bombing often had a lesser effect. Of course, Trump’s bone spurs kept him out of Vietnam while Hegseth’s many manifest inadequacies give him a host of excuses.
Countries don’t like the United States and its Australian and other proxies attacking them and trying to change their governments no matter how appalling they may be. And they will particularly not like it when the attacks are from the parasitic, corrupt and grotesquely incompetent Trump government.
More broadly, the policies of isolation and economic and military assault on Iran since its 1979 revolution have failed. They contributed to the present lamentable state of affairs. Hemmed in as it has been by the US and its allies, and with the fresh memory of the Iran-Iraq war in which unknown hundreds of thousands of its people were killed, is it any wonder Iran has cultivated an aggressive forward defence with allies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen?
Iran is an important country. Rather than isolating and attacking it, it would be better to find ways for it to play a useful role in international affairs and reduce the incentives it has for aggression in its region. The 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, signed up to by the US, China, Russia, France, the UK, Germany and the European Union was a step in this direction. That, of course, was trashed by Trump.
With Trump, Hegseth and Netanyahu doing their worst it’s hard to be hopeful when, as the poet Yeats said in 1920, “the worst are full of passionate intensity”. More bad is almost certainly around the corner.
Paddy Gourley is a superannuated Commonwealth public servant.