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