The Iran Disaster

 

Today I sent the following letter to our local weekly paper, the Carbondale Times:

Editor,

Kudos to Scott Thorne for his letter of March 13 questioning the purpose of bombing  Iran.

Our various media outlets offer endless analyses of both the causes and possible consequences of this newest violence. Yet I see almost nothing about the plain old wrongness of it. 

To cite one noticeable example, U.S. explosives with nearly unimaginable destructive capacity recently incinerated some 170 Iranian civilians, mostly children, at an elementary school. The best scientific evidence suggests that those children and their families are no less human beings than we are over here in the great U.S. of A. Their parents and aunts and uncles will grieve just as hard as will those of the US forces killed in retaliation, even if their skin is a little darker than some of ours.

The above incident was, it is true, widely reported. Yet there has been no thoughtful discussion of the moral depravity underlying this incident.

 

*   *   *

There is, remarkably, one item of good news in the Iran disaster. It seems that a high-ranking, extremely conservative (!) and otherwise hawkish Trump official, has resigned in protest to it. This is one Joe Kent, who was, until yesterday, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Kent’s resignation letter offers a glimmer of hope that some tiny crumbs of sanity might still exist somewhere in the upper reaches of the Empire. He says, for instance:

I cannot, in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no immediate threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful lobby.

Kent was the kind of warrior that phonies like SecDef Pete Hegseth try so hard – yet clownishly fail -- to imitate. He (Kent) demonstrates -- I hope for many other young people -- that warriors don’t have to be conscienceless robot:

As a veteran who deployed to  combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in [another] war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.

 

I’m not getting my hopes too high, but maybe Kent’s statement indicates we have finally reached some kind of turning point in our attitudes toward violent domination of the world.

End

 

Justified Rage Against the Machine

 

The new attack on Iran by the U.S. and Israel is about as depressing as anything I have seen in a while.

 European academic Jason Hickel sums it up well.

 

“Bombing Iran in the middle of negotiations, while starving Cuba, while genociding Palestinians, while threatening to invade Greenland… the U.S. and Israel are the single greatest threat to humanity — and it’s not even close. We are all forced to live in the nightmare they create.” https://x.com/jasonhickel

 

So much for international law, by the way. It was a great idea, following the destructiveness of World War II. But a few countries – mainly the US – have emerged too powerful to be held to account by any international court or rule-making body, and their leadership too psychopathic to care.

Caitlin Johnstone’s Statement

The article pasted below, by the Australian blogger Caitlin Johnstone, reflects, I think, how a lot of us feel right now. I freely admit that it has some big flaws. The tone is shrill, for example. If it were written in the same tone but arguing in favor of U.S./Israel aggression, I would hate it. 

It also uses language that many would say defeats its purpose. That would be true if the purpose was to persuade the reader to adopt a point of view. But I think Johnstone’s purpose here is not mainly to persuade. It is to honestly express the deeply felt and very justified anger and sorrow she feels in light of the continuing war crimes by the empire she lives in.

And so I freely admit that, as flawed as the piece might be as a persuasive argument, I for one find it very relatable.

Anyway, here it is, in full, copied from https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/03/01/fuck-everyone-who-made-this-war-possible/ :

 

 

Fuck The Western Empire, by Caitlin Johnstone

The US and Israel have launched their long-planned attack on Iran. President Trump said in a speech that the US military is engaged in “major combat operations” intended to cripple Iran’s military and topple the Iranian government. Iran has reportedly been retaliating with missile strikes on Israel and US military bases in the region.

This is going to get ugly, folks.

I don’t even know what to write about this one, honestly.

What am I supposed to say? “Hey everybody, they’re lying to us about this war”? Everyone already knows that. Even the people who support this war know all the justifications for it are lies.

They know Iran isn’t building nukes.

They know Iran poses no threat to the United States.

They know all that bullshit about Iran cutting out women’s wombs and murdering tens of thousands of protesters was evidence-free atrocity propaganda.

Nobody needs me to tell them these things. Nobody needs me to tell them that this war is going to kill a whole lot of innocent people and inflict unfathomable amounts of suffering upon our species, both directly during these attacks and indirectly in the chaos and instability ensuing thereafter. Everyone already knows this.

Everyone already knows this, and it’s happening anyway. They’re just doing whatever evil things they want to do, without the slightest regard for public opinion or consent.

They’re just going right ahead with a military operation to topple Tehran, after decades of inertia for fear of the horrific consequences it would unleash.

They’re just choking off Cuba using siege warfare, which previous presidents refused to do because it would be a monstrous act of war.

They just kidnapped the president of a sovereign nation, which previous administrations had refused to do because it’s plainly against international law.

They just helped Israel turn Gaza into a gravel parking lot and are now building a giant dystopian tech surveillance encampment to imprison the survivors.

They just designated an American company a “supply chain risk to national security” for the first time ever because the AI firm Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use its technology to operate autonomous killing machines and surveil American citizens — an open admission that the Pentagon plans on using AI to run autonomous killing machines and surveil American citizens.

There’s an old Frank Zappa quote that’s been popping into my head more and more lately:

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

We’re seeing a lot more bricks these days.

That’s all I can think to say about all this.

Fuck the USA.

Fuck Israel.

Fuck Trump.

Fuck Netanyahu.

Fuck Zionism.

Fuck Trump supporters.

Fuck the Republican Party.

Fuck the Democratic Party.

Fuck war.

Fuck everyone who helped make this war possible.

Fuck the western press.

Fuck warmongering think tanks.

Fuck the Israel lobby.

Fuck the military-industrial complex.

Fuck the western intelligence cartel.

Fuck the western empire.

I hate everyone who inflicted this nightmare upon my species. If you stand by this senseless US-Israeli act of depravity, then I consider you an enemy. And I will never stop reminding everyone of the psychotic agenda you supported.

You own this. This is on you. It’s on you forever.

_______________

 

 

The Pentagon’s Parking Problem

 

The Pentagon has a parking issue.

 It has so much money they don’t know where to put it all. A recent headline in “Common Dreams” sums it up nicely. Here it is:

 

‘Ridiculous’: Pentagon Doesn’t Even Know What to Do With Extra $500 Billion Trump Wants to Spend

 

The article explains that the Trump syndicate wants to increase its war department’s budget by 50 percent. It took 250 years to get that budget up to a trillion dollars. Trump and his people want to add another half trillion in one year.

 

But this is such a huge addition that, according to the Washington Post,

““White House aides and defense officials have run into logistical challenges surrounding where to put the money, because the amount is so large.”

 

The Kill Line

  As everyone knows, this comes at a time when virtually any program that might directly help ordinary U.S. citizens eat, be educated, stay healthy, or breath clean air is being ruthlessly slashed. Comedian turned social critic Lee Camp puts it like this:

Most Americans right now can’t afford a $1,000 emergency without finding themselves neck-deep in debt and/or poverty. About half of all American children live at or near the poverty line, often going without basic necessities. The younger generation – trying to make sense of this morally vacant system by using video game terminology – have begun referring to this as “the kill line.”

 

Every Day is Laundry Day at the Pentagon

 Camp’s use of the phrase “money laundering machine” is a reference to the corruption and waste already rampant in the war department.  As he says, “Tax dollars are taken, rinsed in a big washing machine called “national defense,” and then spit out into the pockets of bloodthirsty war profiteering contractors.”

 

This is all textbook, predictable behavior of a declining empire. The ruling elites loot the treasury to make themselves obscenely rich. Then they let the peasantry starve while they bankrupt the country while looting faraway resources at gunpoint.

It actually works well, if you’re a billionaire with no conscience.

 

End

 

 

 

 

 

 

The All-New, Improved Age of Irony

 

On September  24 , 2001, TIME essayist Roger Rosenblatt declared that the 9/11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. had marked “the end of the age of irony.”

For too long, Rosenblatt said, “the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.” He continued:

With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes–our columnists and pop culture makers–declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life.

Such glibness will have to stop, he said, because:

The planes that plowed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were real. The flames, smoke, sirens–-real. The chalky landscape, the silence of the streets–all real. 

Unfortunately, Rosenblatt never quite nails down what he means by irony. Is it a trivial, wise-aleck attitude toward life, or is it a fatal denying of reality? Those are two different things.

In either case, Rosenblatt was wrong. The best ironists may seem glib, but they don’t deny reality. They expose reality by pointing out the disconnect between what is real and what we like to pretend is real. Or what we are told is real by our “leaders” and their stenographers at outlets like TIME.

Moreover, the events of 9/11 failed to end irony. They jump-started a whole new Golden Age of it, government-approved and highly destructive.

 Government Approved Irony Pre 9/11

There was, of course, plenty of government -sponsored irony before 9/11. My own favorite example involves the following events, all happening within a fourteen-month period:

1.     In November 1989, the Berlin Wall falls.  This is said to mark the end of the Cold War. It promises a “Peace Dividend” – defined by Oxford as “a sum of public money which becomes available for other purposes when spending on defense is reduced.”

 

 

2.     One month later, the U.S. sends 26,000 troops into Panama, a neighboring sovereign nation. The Peace Dividend is forgotten. The Panama operation includes such intense firebombing of one barrio, El Chorrio, that locals nickname the event “Little Hiroshima.” In that neighborhood alone, many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of civilian die in fires. Two thousand homes are destroyed and between 10 and 20 thousand people are made homeless.

The invasion itself is a major breech of international law –indeed, the Nuremberg trials have identified “aggression against a sovereign nation” as “the supreme international crime.” Also illegal is the failure to warn civilians of the attack and the “disproportionality” of it.

 But, as one U.S. general explains, “We have all these new gadgets, laser-guided missiles and stealth fighters, and we are just dying to use that stuff.”

And this is all – officially, at least – to capture one single guy, Panama’s president Noriega, who, ironically enough, had long been a U.S. intelligence asset.

 

3.     Just over one year after that – January 1991 – the U.S. decides Iraq needs invading. The reason: Iraq had invaded Kuwait, a sovereign nation. In other words, it was okay for the U.S, to invade a much weaker sovereign nation but it was a crime for Iraq to do so.

 

The Golden Age Emerges

Thus the roots of the New Age of Irony were already well sunk when the planes hit New York and the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania that Friday in September of 2001 and the end of irony promptly declared by Roger Rosenblatt.

Since then, the Ironies of US actions have multiplied and must rival that of any empire in human history (such things being difficult to measure).

Here, then, is a small sample (ten) of U.S. government-sponsored ironies that illustrate the age in which we now live -- the “post 9/11 world,” as they say:

1.     It was ironic that, in response to 9/11, Afghanistan and then Iraq were invaded and violently occupied when, according to the official 9/11 story, 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian citizens and none were Afghan or Iraqi. And that Saudi Arabians were “the primary source of al-Qaeda funding.”

 

2.     It was ironic when, in the name of fighting terrorism, President Obama approved the drone-strike murder of U.S.-born citizen Anwar Al Mawlaki in December of 2011 – -making Malaki  the first-ever American citizen killed by the State without trial or judicial procedure.

 

3.     It was ironic that in 2011 –- in the name of curbing the violence of a civil war in Libya -- the U.S.,  led a bombing campaign there that featured the firing of 110 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles on Day One; lasted over eight months; included 26,500 bombing sorties;   and resulted in a dystopian state whose civil war worsened for several more years, is a center of human trafficking, and allows some 47,000 people to live in conditions that meet the definition of slavery .

 

It was further ironic that the corporate U.S. media, while employing taglines like “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” trumpeted the bogus cause of the Libyan “intervention” but highly underreported its destructiveness. Writing for a much less powerful outlet, journalist Joe Lauria said it well:

 

How then could The New York Times and The Washington Post, the most influential American newspapers, either refuse to adequately cover or not cover at all a story of such magnitude, a story that should have been front page news for days? It was a story that undermined the U.S. government’s entire rationale for an unjustified attack that devastated a sovereign nation.

 

4.     It is ironic that the U.S. – under both Biden and Trump – has gifted Israel some 21.7 billion dollars’ worth of weapons to conduct their genocide in Gaza and their ethnic cleansing in the West Bank when the Leahy Laws prohibit “the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights (GVHR).”

 

5.     It’s ironic that while Israel receives the huge amount of aid in military weaponry from the U.S. mentioned above, its own arms exports to other countries recent broke record sales four years in a row.

 

 

6.     It’s ironic that in a supposed constitutional republic, the Supreme Court would decare the president “presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for any official act they undertake.”

 

7.     It’s ironic that a Gestapo-like agency called I.C.E. – that did not exist when Rosenblatt declared the End of Irony – now feels entitled to batter down doors and violently enter homes  without probable cause or a warrant when the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly prohibits this.

 

 

8.     It’s ironic that in a recent six month period, there would be “at least 2,300 cases in which … immigration officials illegally detained people without bond or due process. This despite the Fourteenth Amendment stating that “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

 

9.     It’s ironic that in a country where “free and fair elections” are considered fundamental to sustaining democracy, the Supreme Court, in 1910, “reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.”

 

10.   Add your own irony here.  Having trouble finding one? Try Googling of the following:  Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, economic sanctions, ICE murders in Minnesota, Pentagon budget, ICE budget, social security, or income inequality, to name a few.

 

In summary, Irony has not ended, as Roger Roseblatt wishfully wrote in 2001. Like the common cold and Grateful Dead cover bands, it will always be with us. As the sports announcers like to say, you can’t stop it; you can only hope to contain it.

End

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MLK, Poverty, and War

 

Another Martin Luther King Day has gone by with no mention in any of our corporate outlets -- including NPR and PBS – of the speech in which King pointed out that his own country was the world’s greatest purveyor of violence. Specifically, he observed this:  

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.

That speech was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” It was delivered in April of 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City. Many believe it to be the speech that got King killed almost exactly a year later.

The response in the New York Times was typical and telling. The Times is, after all, an enormous business corporation and thus a key part of the U.S. based empire. The Times advised King, in so many words, to stay in his own lane, or to use an old racist expression, to know his place. The two problems King tried to link – poverty and war – were “distinct and separate,” the Times pronounced. And further:

the political strategy of uniting the peace movement and the civil rights movement could very well be disastrous for both causes.

Fast-forward nearly sixty years, and little has changed.

In the past year alone, U.S.-made bombs have exploded over Venezuela, Syrai, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, Palestine, and Somalia. We are the major arms supplier to three of the most brutal suppressors of human rights in the world: Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel.

Meanwhile, in the words of researchers at the Urban Institute, “Wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country and has risen for much of the past 60 years.”

And corporate media continue to shamelessly ignore the obvious connection between war and poverty.

It’s a common mistake among empires past to ignore the welfare of their own citizens in order to maintain power in faraway places. Or, as Christopher Hedges recently observed: “All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war.”  

end

 

 

"Our Rulers are not Good People"

 

I recently stumbled across this observation by one of my favorite writers, Caitlin Johnstone. She said:

 

Our rulers are not good people. They are not wise. They are not compassionate. They aren’t even particularly intelligent. They just happen to be good at winning the capitalism game by moving the circumstances of our society around in such a way that the numbers in their bank accounts grow very large.

 

 

 Johnstone’s observation was in a post mostly about the multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame  who, she notes, “exploits his employees and destroys his competitors, and who some experts say is trying to take over the underlying infrastructure of our entire economy.”

This is apt, as Bezos is one of the all-star entrepreneurs and corporations generously ponying up for Donald Trump’s grotesque “ballroom.”

Bezos’s and others’ contributions to this cause, as everyone knows, are not motivated by any love of elegant ballroom dancing.  They are business investments, or, stated more honestly, a form of legalized bribery, a down payment on influence in the affairs of the state.

As Johnstone says, they are not good people.

Another writer I like, Chris Hedges, very recently posted an essay relevant to this topic. It is titled “America is a Banana Republic.”

The opening paragraph reads as follows:

El Presidente Trump is cast in the mold of all tinpot Latin American despots who terrorize their populations, surround themselves with sycophants, goons and crooks, and enrich themselves — Trump and his family have amassed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts from leveraging the presidency — while erecting tawdry monuments to themselves.

 

 

Hedges goes on to point out similarities between Trump and some of the most notorious Latin American dictators of the not-too-distant past.

There was, for instance, Haiti’s “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who eventually spent a full half of the country’s budget on his ICE-like private militia, which violently disposed of 30 to 60 thousand of Baby Doc’s political opponents.

Another Trump prototype was Juan Vicente Gomez, who ruled Venezuela from 1908 to 1935. Gomez, Hedges writes, “looted the nation to make himself the wealthiest man in the country” and fought any efforts to educate the citizens, knowing their ignorance would ensure his continued place in power.

I thought of all this when Trump recently hosted, and fawned over, the Saudi Arabian ruler, Mohammed bin Salman. Bin Salman has been nicknamed “Bone Saw” in honor of his order to murder journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2019, then saw him into pieces for proper disposal.

When a U.S. reporter asked Bone Saw about this, Trump excoriated the reporter for her bad manners. “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” he told the reporter. And besides, Trump added, “things happen” and “a lot of people didn’t like [Khashoggi] anyway.

Bone Saw was later honored with a state dinner attended by an all-star cast of U.S. rulers who, it seems, couldn’t afford NOT to attend a tribute to one of the world’s most psychopathic despots.

The list of conscience-less bigwigs at the dinner was headlined by – you guessed it – Jeff Bezos. Also attending were various ruling elite worth a total of $719 billion, according to Forbes. They included Elon Musk, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, and the CEOs of Citigroup, Pfizer, Chevron, and General Motors.

Numerous A.I. and cybercurrency bigwigs made the scene. Also David Ellison, head of Paramount Skydance “ amid reports the Saudi sovereign fund could partly fund his company’s bid to acquire rival Warner Bros. Discovery.” (The company has denied this, so maybe Ellison was there out of pure admiration for Bone Saw’s work.)

Noticeably absent from the Bone Saw Bash were any representative of Human Rights Watch, the Climate Action Network, or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.