Tag Archives: Iraq

Political Rants

The war dog that didn’t bark in the night

Leave a comment

I’ve heard a few stories this week about mission creep in the U.S. led response to Russia’s Ukraine invasion. Frankly, it would surprise me if there wasn’t any. This is something empires do, and the United States has done it multiple times in not at all subtle ways. Libya is probably the most glaring recent example of this. First we’re going to save the people of Benghazi; then, well, we’re going to act as the Libyan rebels’ air force. That’s when you get people back home saying, did we sign up for this?

Well, now we have members of congress going around saying that this is a proxy war against Russia, which speaks to the intention behind the policy. Granted, Seth Moulton was the source, but still – he probably hears a lot from the national security establishment on this. Trouble is, there’s a proxy only on one side – ours. This is not like Syria. Russia has a direct interest in this war, not a supporting role. Given what we’re hearing about intelligence sharing, it’s kind of a miracle that we’re all still here.

Unannounced, unmolested visitors

But intelligence sharing is not the only thing going on behind the scenes. There must be a substantial amount of de-confliction taking place, or even relatively high level conversations. The reason I think this is that Russia has the capability to strike anywhere in Ukraine by air, via either planes or medium range ground-to-ground missiles. And yet, when American dignitaries – congress members, cabinet officials, the first lady – show up in Kviv, there are no Russian strikes. Coincidence? I think not.

This cannot be chalked up to not knowing about the trips. Russia hits these cities at random, at will. But when important people from the U.S. are in town, the missiles stop. This is not a coincidence. It’s evidence of some rudimentary rationality on the part of Russian leadership – they don’t want World War III. Frankly, there are a lot of things they could be doing militarily that they haven’t opted for. That’s not cause for praise, of course – if someone with a gun stabs you to death, it doesn’t mean you should praise them for not shooting you. But in this case, it means that things can, indeed, get a lot worse.

Going over the top

All that said, there remains a better than strong chance that this Ukraine conflict will result in a broader war, and perhaps nuclear escalation. The pieces are all in place to make that happen. It seems clear, based on recent reporting, that the Biden administration has been sharing targeting information with the Ukrainians that has contributed to bringing about the deaths of numerous Russian generals. If it’s being reported, it was certainly known already to the Russian leadership. Now the whole world knows, and they have egg on their face.

In recent days, the Russians have been zeroing in on Ukraine’s supply lines from the West. They hit Odessa as part of this campaign, reportedly. We know there are American and European operatives working in Ukraine. How long before some of these people are hit, captured, killed? If the Ukrainians continue to succeed on the battlefield with our weapons, how long before Russia strikes at the source of these weapons, if only obliquely? It might turn out to be a light tap on the arm, but that might be all that’s needed.

What doesn’t help is American politicians spouting off about turning this into another Afghanistan, as Seth Moulton was kind of saying on Fox the other day. I expect this idiocy from Republicans … but Democrats should know better, somewhat.

Damn the ICBMS – full speed ahead!

I got into a Twitter skirmish with a Congressional candidate a couple of weeks ago over the topic of Ukraine. He is an independent, and he was advocating removing Putin from power. I asked him how he proposed to do this, and after some hedging he said through military action. When I pointed out that this would likely lead to World War III, he basically accused me of not caring about the suffering of Ukrainians, and called me a “coward” because I was not willing risk nuclear war to advance his regime change policy.

The thing that’s truly frightening about this is that other people – progressives, even – seem to think this makes sense. This is the problem with having a massive military that can project power all around the globe at will. We use it too much – like Russia, only worse – and get used to the idea of it being a solution to all problems, when it, in fact, solves none.

If we try to pull an Iraq or a Libya on Russia, it’s game over. That’s the reality, like it or not.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

While you were looking over there

Leave a comment

As Russia continues to do what Russia always does, this time in Ukraine, other atrocities try to keep pace. The Saudis put 81 people to death this past week in one of their execution sprees. Ali AlAhmed shared some photos of the victims on Twitter, and it’s worth scrolling through the list just to afford these people a small portion of the humanity being accorded, quite rightly, to Ukrainians.

Then, of course, there’s Yemen – still Yemen. Over the weekend, UNICEF reported that almost 50 children were killed or maimed in January alone, adding to the more than 10,000 child casualties recorded since the war began, with our nod and crucial material support, in 2015. Yemen remains among the worst humanitarian crises in the world, and yet it has fallen from the front page, particularly in America.

Proximity, proximity is everything

It’s not surprising or outrageous that the mainstream corporate media, and much of the independent media, spends most of their time on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s a huge story, and it should be reported on. But some crises fail to command the attention that Ukraine has garnered over the past three weeks. Yemen is chief among them, but certainly not the only instance.

The reason? Impossible to be precise, but it’s not hard to discern a pattern. If an atrocity is being committed by an official enemy, it is all over the media. If, on the other hand, the atrocity is being committed by us or by a close ally, it gets much, much less coverage, by and large. Count the number of stories about the war in Yemen that have run in U.S. major media. You will have fingers left over. Now compare that with this wall-to-wall Ukraine coverage.

Conclusion: Ukraine is being attacked by someone we don’t like; Yemen is being attacked by an ally who’s dependent on our help to conduct the war. The less likely it is that we can stop a war, the more likely it is that our media will focus on it.

Sticking to what you know

Russia’s military, at Putin’s behest, is doing what they know how to do: blowing things up. That’s how they get people to bend to their will. It’s the sharpest imperial tool in their toolbox by far. They destroy whole cities and drive people into the wilderness. That’s all they know.

Bombs, missiles, shells, and bullets are what’s available to Putin. But he doesn’t have a corner on imperialism. The United States, on the other hand, has more than one way to skin a country. When we put a nation under sanction, it hurts very badly. We can shut off access to international financial institutions. We can starve whole populations and ruin their public health infrastructure. This is what we did to Iraq in the 1990s and early 2000s, between two spates of bombing. That’s how we bent them to our will.

Russia doesn’t have that. If they sanction someone, it doesn’t mean much. They don’t have anywhere near the leverage of the U.S. in international finance. All they have is the bombs.

Finding the exit

Maddeningly, this attack on Ukraine, all in the space of a few weeks, is doing what was done in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq at the height of those conflicts – destroying societal infrastructure on a massive scale. Much as you have to admire the Ukrainians’ courage and stubbornness, I hope the sides aren’t getting so entrenched that some settlement can’t be reached.

This war will end. The question is, how much of Ukraine will survive that long? If Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and others are any indication, it’s better to find a way to settlement sooner rather than later. I think that’s one channel by which the international community can help.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Wearing out our welcome in iraq

Leave a comment

Biden dropped bombs on Iraq and Syria again this week, this time using F-15s and F-16s. This is the president’s second large action against what the administration describes as Iranian-backed groups. They claim this action is in self-defense, invoking the U.N. Charter (presumably article 51). Nancy Pelosi piped up with her own cry of support for the attack, stating that “protecting the military heroes who defend our freedoms is a sacred priority.”

Now, what the fuck freedoms are these heroes defending? And how is it self-defense to hit back against local forces that are resisting our presence in their own country? A country, mind you, that didn’t ask us to invade in the first place and that has explicitly asked us to leave. Like all empires, we have an expansive sense of our own sovereignty. We feel put upon when the locals rise against us.

What’s different is lesser than what’s the same

I know, we were all happy when Donald Trump had the nuclear launch codes taken away from him. And his assassination of Soleimani was an obvious and reckless provocation coming from an administration that put Iran on notice in its first week and tore up the JCPOA. That said, they still stride around the Middle East like they own the place, and that should be just as unacceptable to us as when Trump did it.

Even worse, the Biden foreign policy team is leaving bad policies in place from the previous regime. They are essentially in agreement with much of it, and because they are generally more competent than the last crew, they in some ways may pose an even greater threat to the cause of peace.

And again, what the hell are we doing in Iraq, anyway? Our troops should leave now. In fact, they should never have been there in the first place.

Death of a Salesman

Of course, there was a reason why they went there in the first place. The Bush administration sold the war in Iraq to the American people – or at least to enough of them for the tanks to start rolling. An important part of that sales effort was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who died this week.

I’ve never made a habit of dancing on people’s graves, and I’m not about to start now. Suffice to say that this man did a lot of damage in his life. He helped to push two disastrous wars that resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people. Simply put, he was a horrible man in many respects.

Of course, he had a lot of help in this sales job. The mainstream press was a tremendous help. At the height of Rumsfeld and Bush’s popularity, before the Iraq war went predictably down the drain, the press was even painting Rumsfeld as some kind of warped sex symbol. I remember having a hard time with that as I waited in supermarket checkout lines, looking at People magazine or Us or whoever was blowing Rumsfeld that week. Jesus, how nauseating can you get?

Anyway, one of the main architects is now gone. Time to stop this stupid ass war, once and for all.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Making the bombs more drop-able.

Leave a comment

I don’t know if you noticed this in an otherwise busy week of news, but at some point renowned Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released an a previously redacted classified U.S. government report from the late 1950s.

The document included discussion of the possibility of using nuclear weapons on mainland China at a moment of heightened conflict between China and Taiwan, which China regards (not incoherently) as a breakaway province. This was over the island chain called Quemoy and Matsu in the Straits of Taiwan – disputed real estate that came up in one of John Kennedy’s televised debates with Richard Nixon. (The report, prepared by the Rand Corporation, was among a cache of secret documents Ellsberg had taken along with the Pentagon Papers.)

I would like to be able to say that this was the only instance of the United States threatening to use nuclear weapons in conflicts following the Second World War. Sadly, I cannot. We considered using them in Korea and in Vietnam, then fortunately thought better of it. (I seem to remember Nixon exhorting Kissinger to “think big” when he suggested it.) We also came close to triggering a nuclear exchange by accident, through recklessness, more than once. (See my posts on nuclear weapons for some discussion of this.)

A New Generation of Threat

Another thing I would like to think is that we have gained some wisdom with regard to these weapons over the years. I have yet to see evidence of this. The fact is, we are in the process of investing many, many billions of dollars into “upgrading” our nuclear arsenal. This was a process brought along considerably by President Obama, and of course signed on to by Trump and now Biden.

Part of the rationale for this upgrade is safety. But what the hell is safe about an H-bomb? The thing is just inherently dangerous, is it not?

Good Things Do Not Come in Small Packages

What’s particularly frightening about the next generation of nuclear bombs is the advent of low-yield “bunker buster” weapons. These bombs are extremely destabilizing, as they blur the line between nuclear and conventional weapons. They make it simpler for commanders and political leaders to transition to a nuclear conflict in the midst of some overseas dust-up that they get themselves (and the rest of us) into.

Of course, nuclear components have been used in our conventional munitions for decades. The depleted uranium shell casings employed by our military nominally as a means of penetrating armor have been the source of radioactive hot spots in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. These weapons are effectively dirty bombs we deploy pretty liberally.

We’ve Got Shit To Do

One thing we can do to stop this craziness is to tell our congressional representatives to support legislation restricting spending on the ongoing nuclear “upgrade” and expansion. One piece of legislation in the works is Senator Markey’s SANE Act, which was reintroduced just this past week. This bill would cut $73 billion from the planned $1.7 trillion spending on nukes over the next thirty years. Of course, we need to do more than that, but bills like this one represent a good start on starving the beast. Worth a call to your Rep and your Senators. And your President.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Stop The damn War.

Leave a comment

We’ve entered a presidential transition, sort of. Sure, one candidate is crying foul and trying to foment a coup d’etat in the most ham-fisted way imaginable, but inasmuch as our short-attention-span culture has already all but normalized this insane behavior, we can consider ourselves well into the process of transition. And no, I don’t mean the the current president is transitioning to some new identity. I mean that he is in the process of being replaced by his general election opponent, who won the November election kind of hands down, despite all the noise.

Given that Biden is busily appointing members of his executive team – some okay, others pretty bad – this seems like a good time to make our policy preferences known to the President-Elect. Everyone’s getting their two cents in, whether it comes in the form of suggesting new policy directions or pushing potential nominees forward. I personally think people on the left should pick an issue or two and start shouting about it, figuratively speaking (or literally, if you prefer), so that Biden can hear us loud and clear. We will all have our preferences as to what demand should come first, what second, etc. I can tell you where I would like to start: STOP THE DAMN WAR.

As of October of 2021, we will have been engaged in this insane war on terror for twenty years. Obama indicated that he would stop it, and he didn’t. Trump said he would stop it, and he hasn’t. Biden is making some similar noises, but I think we can guess that the same political pressures that were brought to bear on his two predecessors will be applied to him as well. The longer we wait, the harder it gets – the conflict has metastasized to encompass other nations, from Iraq to Somalia to Yemen to Libya to Syria, and with each new “front” comes new bogus justifications for why we can’t leave now, new sets of facts on the ground, new twists and turns in the logic of imperialism. Enough. We need to get out now – that’s what Biden should hear from us.

There’s no question but that Trump has made the process of forging an agreement with other nations more fraught with difficulty. Who will sign on to a treaty with us when they know it may be ripped up by the current president’s successor? Nevertheless, I think we need to act on the knowledge that most Americans are sick of the war in Afghanistan, load our troops onto trucks and planes and head for the border. If we don’t, it will just never end.

That’s my ask. What’s yours?

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Intelligence and skepticism.

Leave a comment

I had a weird feeling of displacement this week, hearing commentators and political officeholders talking about intelligence reports regarding the Russians’ alleged payment of bounties to the Taliban for the killing of Americans. Such an allegation is not particularly far-fetched – the United States has been in Afghanistan for almost twenty years, and there are plenty of people there who would try to kill our soldiers without compensation, but they probably would accept payment if offered. Still, listening to the outrage, it felt like some of the conversation in the months leading up to the Iraq war. Powell’s presentation to the UN in February 2003; the insistent claims about evidence of WMDs in Iraq, etc. All bogus, incidentally, and no one responsible for the misinformation was ever held accountable, as far as I know.

Of course, that was an example of an administration using its intelligence services to a specific end – in effect, weaponizing it. In the current case, Trump seems at odds with the intelligence community, but I’m not convinced his administration is. Let me be clear; while I don’t think Trump is some kind of Manchurian candidate programmed by Putin to destroy America, I do think that he’s a tremendously crappy president who wants nothing more than to license a Trump Tower Moscow when he leaves government service. If the stories about the bounty on U.S. soldiers are even partly true, it would be just one more example of Trump putting his own interests ahead of those of the people he is supposed to serve as president. Is anyone surprised by that?

Look, Trump is not some kind of unicorn. Anyone who has worked at a small business knows who Trump is. If you’ve ever worked for someone who had their name on the door, you know what I’m talking about. Trump’s ignorance, arrogance, impatience, arbitrariness, bullying tactics, self-aggrandizement, and parsimony are familiar to all former employees of America’s beloved small businesses. They’re not all that way, of course – some are benevolent dictators – but the American myth of the self-made man is a compelling one, and I’ve heard versions of it spouted to me over the years. They all pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, no help from anyone.

Though I’ve never met the president, I did briefly work for him in 1987-88, when I worked with a band that played Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. His company was terrible to employees, bands, etc. Now we’re seeing the same thing on a national scale – relentless self-dealing and an almost cult-like belief in himself. What. A. Freak. But at the same time, I recommend skepticism with respect to the information products of the intelligence agencies, even if the asshole-in-chief says it’s bullshit. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Dodging bullets.

Leave a comment

Fuck all, what a week this has been. The Suleimani assassination has turned Trump’s disastrous approach to foreign policy up past eleven, and that is a positive danger to organized society. Domestic president Bam-Bam is dangerous enough, but give him a war that he has started himself and god only knows where the hell we’ll end up. It’s like someone let a chimp loose in the oval office, and after months on the job he’s going stir crazy, pulling levers, pressing buttons, and randomly throwing feces at his political enemies. Does this kind of governance really work for anyone? It’s like living on a very active volcano. We may have temporarily dodged a bullet this time, but nothing has fundamentally changed.

Times like these I am grateful for podcasters, bloggers, and independent journalists. The mainstream press have been of very little use through this recent crisis. There is this insistence, for instance, on calling Suleimani a terrorist or a bad guy, over and over like a mantra. Usually tagged on to that is the claim that he was directly responsible for the killing of hundreds of Americans – I’ve heard talking heads put the number around 700 – during a certain phase of the Iraq war. This is total shit. I remember those days pretty well, as does the Progressive’s Stephen Zunes, who wrote a good treatment of this claim this past week. It is well to remember that the Bush administration, even in the face of their disastrous invasion of Iraq, still had Iran in the cross hairs and were working to build a public case for yet another regime change enterprise. They didn’t succeed, but what they did manage was to plant this notion in the heads of journalists and commentators that Iran was responsible for every EFP roadside bomb planted in southern Iraq, a vacuous claim that assumes every Shi’ite resistance fighter is subject to mind control by the Ayatollah.

Once again, let’s be clear – the people responsible for the deaths of the more than 4,500 U.S. service members killed in Iraq are named Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. We can try to blame the people we invade for resisting our armed forces, but doing so doesn’t hold a lot of water. We should never have been in Iraq in the first place; anything that proceeded from that criminal decision is the responsibility of our own decision-makers. It took virtually no time for the same crop of insane leaders to exploit the deaths of the people they sent over there and attempt to utilize them as a means of starting yet another needless war. And now the current incarnation of the Republican regime change machine is working overtime to make war with Iran inevitable. That includes most prominently that overstuffed geiser of pig shit – a veritable Old Faithful of rancid manure – Mike Pompeo, who is in many ways worse than Trump.

Arrgh. I could go on, but my main point is, agitate for peace. Make your voice heard. Don’t think someone else will do it. This is like the election – you need to participate and encourage others to do the same. That’s the only way out of this shithole.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Happy new war.

Leave a comment

President Bam-Bam has started off the new year with incoherent threats against Iran, and it appears as if the entire corporate media establishment is pretty much on the same page as him. I was greeted on New Year’s morning by the usual cavalcade of retired generals (e.g., Barry McCaffrey, etc.) and inside-the-Pentagon correspondents (e.g. Hans Nichols, etc.) that MSNBC (a.k.a. “the liberal news channel”) trots out whenever someone challenges the U.S. empire somewhere in the world. This time it’s Iraqis, and of course Iran is to blame … because we seem to want war with Iran. That’s why whenever they talk about our opposition in Iraq, these Iraqis are termed “Iranian-backed militias” or “Iranian-backed extremists,” though they would never call the forces we fund and train “American-backed militias”. Yes, Iran has substantial influence in Iraq – they share a long border and a troubled history with Iraq, so it’s no surprise. We, on the other hand, come from the other side of the Earth, and yet somehow we consider our enormous influence on Iraqi affairs more legitimate.

The Trump administration decided last week that it was a really, really good idea to conduct air strikes on an Iraqi Shi’ite militia group Kata’ib Hizbullah, killing 45 of them in supposed retaliation for mortar attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq that recently killed one U.S. contractor. (See Juan Cole’s blogpost on this for details.) The protests and intrusions at the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad were a predictable response to what General McCaffrey and others consider a proportionate use of force. (That was quickly followed by their assassination by drone of the Iranian Quds force leader Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad, a major escalation by Trump.) Not being a member in good standing of the American Empire Positive Propaganda Force, my first question is … just what the hell are we doing in Iraq in the first place? In all fairness, I think that question is on the minds of many Iraqis right now.

Okay, this isn't going so well.

In my humble opinion, there are a couple of things going on here. Of course, Trump likes to look tough, hence the drunken threat tweets and the rushing of 3000 more U.S. troops to Baghdad. But despite the fact that these threats are directed at Iran, I think deep in his tiny lizard brain he understands, albeit tenuously, that war with Iran would be a disaster for his presidency far worse than his impending impeachment trial or his failing trade war. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why. No modern president has had as high an approval rating as George W. Bush did in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and yet just a few years after invading Afghanistan and Iraq, his presidency was in tatters. His wars are still going on, metastasizing again and again into new, more toxic cycles of violence. And Bush’s wars were against one nation that was totally destroyed (Afghanistan) and one that was partially destroyed and starved to death (Iraq); we have essentially lost both of those wars. Iran would be harder to beat, and the events of this week demonstrate part of the reason why – the exercise of power by proxy, to put it in terms an imperialist might understand.

I have no doubt Trump’s foreign policy establishment is working towards war with Iran, whether or not that is their full intention. Smarter presidents than Trump (a category that includes every other president) have blundered into disastrous wars that have essentially destroyed their presidencies. Whatever Trump’s intentions may be regarding Iran, this escalation in Iraq may be the start of his ultimate undoing if he’s not careful. And the entire establishment – Trumpist and faux resistance – will wave him on into the catastrophe.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Song of Roland.

Leave a comment

ISIS has lost its leader. So … that’s that? When are the leaders of my country going to work this decentralized model of resistance out? It’s not that these are leaderless movements per se. Al-Baghdadi was a founder and a leader of his grisly movement. But the relationship between his organization and the broader base of jihadists across the region and around the globe is loose at best. As Ted Rall once put it, it’s a bit like the relationship between a Rolling Stones tribute band and the Rolling Stones themselves. And like Warren Zevon’s Roland, cutting off the head won’t kill it:

The eternal Thompson gunner still wanders through the night
Now it’s ten years later, but he still puts up a fight
In Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine and Berkeley …

Had enough in Iraq ... and Chile, and Lebanon, and ...

I feel somewhat the same way about the Trump presidency. Getting Trump out of office is not going to be some kind of magic bullet. I keep hearing pundits talk about people wanting to return to normal, go back to brunch with the gang, and have a few mimosas. All that means is a return to what they consider normal, which is the slow decline into destitution, destruction, and environmental degradation. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to suppose that we will be right back here, with a different proto-fascist president, in another four years if we don’t take the bold steps that are needed to support workers, promote peace, and save the planet from total ruin.

Let’s face it – we’re coming up against the first-world version of what we see people around the world resisting in the millions, in Chile, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Haiti, and elsewhere. As happened in the wake of the 2007-8 financial crisis, the neoliberal capitalist house of cards is falling in on itself again, failing an increasing number of people in profound and deeply unjust ways, particularly in these developing nations that have been subjected to structural adjustment policies for decades on end. The Lebanese have simply had it, as have the Iraqis, the Chileans, etc. When people can no longer afford to live day to day, there is nothing left but to link arms and demand change.

We need more than a little bit of that here. We can’t wait until people here feel the level of pain that’s being felt in Beirut. We need to get out and march like the Chicago teachers, carry Bernie to victory, and push a progressive agenda hard as hell. A million mutinies now!

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Iraq 3.0.

Leave a comment

Despite the occasional bleat that no one wants war and that we are not seeking conflict in the Gulf, the United States continues to move closer and closer to some kind of clash with Iran. Administration officials are blaming the Iranian government for attacks against tankers owned by nations who still do business with Iran, citing non-existent evidence of sabotage by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard – evidence contradicted by the owners of the Japanese ship that was attacked. Right wing blowhards like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas are advocating for strikes against Iran, and this is treated as a serious policy proposal. Various spokespeople for the administration’s ever-emerging policy even raised the possibility of the U.S. providing naval escorts for commercial ships in the Gulf, modeling it on the tanker war phase of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

Who says I'm blowing smoke out of my ass? It's the ship, damn it, the ship!

This last bit fascinated me. It’s so unusual for our leaders to even mention the Iran-Iraq war, I suspect largely because we had a dog in that fight … and the dog was named Saddam Hussein. (Also, one of the ships we sent to the Gulf on that particular mission was the U.S.S. Vincennes, which on July 3, 1988 shot down Iran Air flight 655, killing all 290 passengers on board, 60 of whom were children.) If this is the mark of a successful policy to be imitated, god help us. Few Americans will recall that Saddam Hussein started that war, in 1980, using chemical weapons liberally against the Iranians – weapons whose primary components were purchased from (West) Germany, I believe. One of the principal outcomes of the Iran-Iraq war was the invasion of Kuwait, subsequent Gulf War, then the 12-year strangulation and ultimate invasion of Iraq by the U.S.

This is to say that war can sometimes sound a lot simpler than it actually turns out to be. People like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, of course, are driven by ideology and really don’t care if their war with Iran turns out to be a disaster. But aside from the very crucial questions of whether the policy is right or legal, I think it’s fair to say that this administration’s deliberate push from functional diplomacy to the brink of armed conflict is reckless and potentially catastrophic, given the current state of international affairs. We are desperately in need of action on the ensuing climate crisis, and these nutjobs are driving us into another pointless war, damn the consequences.

I strongly suggest you contact your congressional representatives and urge them to oppose this policy. The switchboard is 202-224-3121. You may also want to use the Stance app, which is very easy to use when phoning your house member and senators. Right now, it’s our best chance at heading off this madness.

luv u,

jp