Nobody Wants This War

People know intrinsically that an attack on Iran is an act of insanity.

On Saturday morning, the United States and Israel launched an illegal, unprovoked, unjustifiable attack on Iran—the kind of full-blown assault the world has been dreading for years. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but we should be clear about a few things that we already know for sure.

The first thing, obviously, is that this is a despicable decision by the U.S. and Israel. It is a flagrant act of imperialist aggression against a sovereign state, with no legal basis either domestically or internationally. You couldn’t find many clearer examples of a war crime if you tried. Already, civilians in Iran are being massacred; Israel got started right away by indulging in one of its favorite pastimes—murdering dozens of little children. Trump has barely tried to make a case for any of these crimes, with the exception of a gruesome and insulting video he posted in the middle of the night on Saturday in which he spewed random lies and called for regime change in Iran while wearing a ludicrous “USA” baseball cap.

This is evil stuff.

The second thing we know is that we have been lied to over and over again about this war. The U.S. and Iran have been engaged in negotiations all week about Iran’s nuclear weapons program—you know, the one that has never been proven to be anywhere near operative, and that Trump claimed to have obliterated less than a year ago. Less than 24 hours before the strikes, Vice President JD Vance was telling the Washington Post, “I think we all prefer the diplomatic option. But it really depends on what the Iranians do and what they say.” Now we learn, via Reuters, that all of that was a sham: “An Israeli defence official said the operation had been planned for months in coordination with Washington, and that the launch date was decided weeks ago.” That’s not surprising, but it’s still unconscionable.

In the same Post interview, Vance said something he probably shouldn’t have.

“I do think we have to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. I also think that we have to avoid overlearning the lessons of the past. Just because one president screwed up a military conflict doesn’t mean we can never engage in military conflict again. We’ve got to be careful about it, but I think the president is being careful.”

That brings me to the third thing we know: Donald Trump is not being careful. He is being reckless and deranged, just like every warmongering U.S. president before him. And, despite Vance’s waving away the entire catastrophic history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East as an irrelevance, we know that that history is actually a guide to what’s going to happen. We know what happens when U.S. presidents plunge us into open-ended, bloody conflict under false pretenses: tons of people die, and the consequences last for generations. We have had decades and decades of experience with these kinds of disasters. Does anyone really think that senile tyrant Donald Trump is the one to break that pattern? Of course not.

Finally, one last thing we know as surely as we know anything: nobody wants this war—nobody apart from the bloodthirsty psychopaths who populate DC and Jerusalem, the weapons manufacturers, and the AI slimeballs looking to test their latest killing technology, that is. People know intrinsically that this is insanity. There is no mass constituency for this war of choice, no desire for the chaos, instability, and death that it will spawn.

We should be furious to live in a country that does this—to be at the mercy of a flailing empire that always chooses death and conquest over peace and justice. We should be furious at a political system that makes it so much easier to kill people than to help them. We should be furious at an establishment that lusts so ardently for war, and that has so much contempt for humanity. We should be furious at the untrammeled power of a global ruling class that causes so much suffering. And we should recommit to the most important task ahead: destroying as much of that power as we can.

Solidarity with the people of Iran. End this war now.