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Opinion
How the US Became an International Serial Killer
What was once covert, controversial, and constrained is now overt, normalized, and defended.
Mar 25, 2026
For decades, the United States moved from covert assassination plots to openly embracing assassination or “targeted killing” as policy. Now, in its war with Iran, that evolution is reaching its most dangerous phase.
On March 17th and 18th, the United States and Israel assassinated three senior Iranian government officials in targeted air strikes: Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council; Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Basij domestic security forces; and Esmaeil Khatib, Iran’s Intelligence Minister.
The missile that killed Ali Larijani also demolished an apartment building and killed more than a hundred people. Israeli defense minister Israel Katz announced that Israeli forces were now authorized to assassinate any senior Iranian official whenever they can, and they have continued to do so, bringing the number of Iranian officials assassinated in the past year to at least seventy.
The assassination of Ali Larijani is a blow to the already fraught chances for a negotiated peace between Iran and the United States and Israel. Ali Larijani was an experienced, pragmatic senior official who had played leading roles in negotiations with the US and other world powers since 2005.
What was once covert, controversial, and constrained is now overt, normalized, and defended.
Larijani had degrees in math and computer science, attended the revered seminary in Qom, and fought in the Iran-Iraq War, rising to the rank of brigadier-general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. After the war, he managed Iran’s state broadcasting service, earned a doctorate in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran, and wrote three books on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, before entering politics and government in 2005. In 2024, Larijani wrote a book on political philosophy, titled Reason and Tranquility in Governance.
If the US hoped to make peace and restore relations with Iran, Ali Larijani would have been a potential negotiating partner. The decision to assassinate Larijani two weeks into this war suggests that US leaders had no interest in negotiations.
Another possibility is even more chilling. Israeli leaders may have viewed Larijani as a potential off-ramp and deliberately eliminated him to ensure the war continues.
That killing was followed by an unprecedented Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field—the largest in the world and a shared resource with Qatar. Iran retaliated with missile strikes on energy infrastructure across Israel and the Gulf. In Qatar, damage to the Ras Laffan LNG terminal—one of the world’s most critical gas hubs—could take years and billions of dollars to repair.
As global energy markets reeled, US officials confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the South Pars attack had been coordinated with Washington, contradicting denials from President Trump.
The pattern is unmistakable. As one analyst put it, Israel appears to be escalating deliberately—eliminating moderates within Iran while striking critical infrastructure—to provoke a wider regional war that leaves no room for de-escalation.
Analysts debate how much Israel is driving this escalation and how much US officials are fully aligned. But an imperial power cannot outsource responsibility. As Harry Truman’s famous desk sign declared: The buck stops here.
In its alliance with Israel, the United States has normalized the systematic assassination of foreign leaders—from Palestine, and Lebanon, to Syria, Yemen and now Iran. This is not new. In 2020, President Trump ordered the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that had joined with US forces to fight the Islamic State.
Yet assassination is explicitly prohibited under US law. Executive Order 12333 states clearly: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
That prohibition emerged from the Church Committee’s investigation into US assassination plots against Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and General René Schneider in Chile.
It also reflects long-standing international law, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions.
After 9/11, however, the United States systematically ignored or circumvented many of the constraints of US and international law. As US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq led to widespread armed resistance, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began arguing for what he called “manhunts,” to deploy US special operations forces to hunt down suspected resistance leaders and kill them, as Israeli undercover units already did in occupied Palestine.
General Charles Holland, the head of US Special Operations Command, refused to authorize such operations, but his retirement in October 2003 allowed Rumsfeld to appoint more like-minded officials to senior positions and bring in the Israelis to train American death squads in Israel and North Carolina.
“Dead men tell no tales,” as the saying goes, and there has been almost no accountability for the resulting killings, which systematically killed thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two senior US commanders told the Washington Post that only about 50% of “kill or capture” raids by Joint Special Operations Command targeted the “right” or intended people or homes, while troops involved in these raids said that that assessment greatly overstated their rate of success.
Drone warfare accelerated the trend. Under President Obama, strikes expanded tenfold, turning targeted killing into a central pillar of US policy. By 2011, night raids in Afghanistan numbered in the hundreds each month, alienating the Afghan people and ultimately ensuring the defeat of the US occupation and the return of the Taliban.
Now US and Israeli forces are using air and drone strikes to assassinate Iranian leaders and kill civilians in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. The language of restraint has disappeared, replaced by open celebration of “lethality” and threats of further war crimes.What was once covert, controversial, and constrained is now overt, normalized, and defended.
The United States now faces a stark choice: to continue down this path of lawless violence, or to turn the page on our nation’s life of international crime and finally, genuinely embrace diplomacy and peaceful coexistence with our neighbors.
The cumulative effect is stark: the United States has made assassination and extrajudicial killing routine instruments of policy, as it tramples the UN Charter, the Hague and Geneva Conventions and its own laws—undermining the very international legal order it claims to uphold.
Meanwhile, a multipolar world is emerging, driven largely by nations of the Global South. But the transition to a peaceful, sustainable world is far from certain. The greatest obstacle in its way is the continued reliance of the United States on the illegal threat and use of military force and economic coercion to try to maintain its own dominance.
Iran exercised restraint for decades in the face of false accusations regarding nuclear weapons, “maximum pressure” economic sanctions and escalating threats and attacks by the US and Israel. It quietly built up its defenses and military strategies for the day that it would need them, and that day has come.
The failure of the international community to stop successive US wars of aggression poses an existential threat to the UN Charter and the post–World War II order. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned at the CELAC Summit on March 21: “The more serious humanity’s problems become, the fewer tools we have for collective action. And that path leads only to barbarism.”
The United States now faces a stark choice: to continue down this path of lawless violence, or to turn the page on our nation’s life of international crime and finally, genuinely embrace diplomacy and peaceful coexistence with our neighbors, as the UN Charter requires.
For Americans—and for the world—that choice is becoming a matter of survival.
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Better Uses for the Money Pete Hegseth Wants to Throw at Trump's Illegal Iran War
The $200 billion that Hegseth now wants for his and Trump’s Iran war could instead feed and care for everyone at risk of losing healthcare or food aid due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Mar 25, 2026
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth would rather use your tax dollars to bomb Iranian families than feed American families.
That’s the upshot of news that Hegseth is prepared to request $200 billion in funding for the Pentagon’s new war on Iran. That’s far higher than earlier reports that put the request at $50 billion or $100 billion. And all of these astounding sums would come on top of the $1 trillion already budgeted for the Pentagon, itself a record.
It should be clear: Funding this unjust, unpopular, and illegal war comes directly at the expense of ordinary Americans.
Less than a year after the passage of Trump’s signature “Big Beautiful Bill,” which made deep cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—and right in the middle of an affordability crisis—this is the last thing the country needs. That same bill added $150 billion for the Pentagon, pushing the Pentagon budget over $1 trillion for the first time since World War II—and directly enabling the war on Iran.
This is a war of choice that is only making the world more dangerous and more expensive for Americans.
Half of Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities like food, housing, transportation, and healthcare. Trump’s Big Bad Bill threatens to take health insurance from 17 million people and some or all food assistance from 4 million people.
The $200 billion that Hegseth now wants for his and Trump’s Iran war could instead feed and care for all of those people—plus medical care for the 1.8 million veterans of the last forever war who still live with disabilities, for an entire year. For good measure, we could also expand Head Start to serve six times as many kids next year—from just over 700,000 to 4.2 million kids—with what’s left over.
What’s more, it comes on the heels of more shocking news about waste at the Pentagon—a problem for generations, but especially under this administration.
News recently broke, for example, that Hegseth’s Pentagon blew nearly $100 billion last September alone. As they raced to use up funds in their budget, the Pentagon shelled out millions on luxuries like lobster, steak, and crab—all while working Americans were battling rising food prices and getting their SNAP benefits cut.
“In the last five days of September alone, the department blew through $50.1 billion on just grants and contracts,” The New Republic reported. “For context, only nine other countries spend that much on the entirety of their defense budget per year. It’s also more than the total military budgets of Canada and Mexico combined.”
Too many Americans are hungry, sick, and struggling to afford housing and other necessities. We should spend our tax dollars meeting those needs—not throwing more at our $1 trillion Pentagon for a pointless war most of us oppose. Secretary Hegseth can cut back on steak and lobster if he needs the extra cash.
This is a war of choice that is only making the world more dangerous and more expensive for Americans. We should remember the lies that led us into war in Iraq a generation ago. That war ultimately cost nearly $3 trillion, which cost a generation of investments that could have made life better for struggling Americans today.
We must not go down that path again. Our tax dollars should be helping our neighbors and our communities, not feeding new forever wars.
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No Life Is a Line Item: Gas Prices, Bombs, and Children in Iran
Human life cannot be reduced to barrels of oil, dollars of growth, or inflation points. To do so is to make mass murder manageable, calculable, acceptable.
Mar 25, 2026
When a bomb falls on a school, a hospital, or a home, no euphemism can soften the truth. Babies die in incubators. Teenage girls die in classrooms. Civilians experience violence not as a “military operation” or a “precision strike,” but as death delivered with terrifying immediacy. Yet governments persist in cloaking catastrophe with language that sanitizes it, as if calling mass murder an “operation” could contain its human cost.
In the opening days of the war involving Iran, an airstrike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, a coastal city in southern Iran. Iranian authorities report 165 dead, many of them schoolchildren, and dozens more wounded. Satellite imagery shows the school nestled among civilian and military structures. Neither the United States nor Israel has claimed responsibility; both insist civilians were not intentionally targeted. That absence of attribution is not a minor detail. It is a tool of evasion, allowing states to obscure responsibility while the innocent pay the price.
I’ve watched two images closely since the conflict began.
The first unfolds in the Oval Office, that carefully staged room where power is both exercised and performed. President Donald Trump asks an aide to hand him a model bomber. He turns it over in his hands, smiling, admiring it, and then almost tenderly hugs it.
Have we no shame? We watch children die and count barrels of oil. We hear names read off casualty lists and ask instead whether the gas pump is under $2.00.
“Give me that bomber… let me just hug that little sucker.”
Something in me recoiled, not just at the moment itself, but at how easily it could pass as normal. How quickly the machinery of war can be made small, harmless, even affectionate.
Because I know what that machine is.
The real aircraft—the Northrop B-2 Spirit—was designed to move through the sky without being seen. Built by Northrop Grumman with partners like Boeing, it exists to penetrate defenses, to arrive without warning, to deliver payloads that can level entire structures in seconds. It can carry dozens of precision-guided bombs. It can carry nuclear weapons. It is engineering in the service of disappearance: disappearance of sound, of visibility, of warning.
And maybe most dangerously, disappearance of consequence.
The second scene is one I can’t stop imagining.
A young girl in Tehran is crying for her mother.
I don’t know her name. That is part of what haunts me. I don’t know what her voice sounds like, what her favorite game is, what her mother used to say to calm her down at night. I only know that somewhere beneath broken concrete and dust, her mother is gone, killed in an airstrike, and that whatever the last hug between them was, it has already happened.
When I think about that Oval Office clip, I don’t stay in that room for long. My mind goes somewhere else entirely.
It goes to her.
It goes just as quickly to the families of American service members. Grief doesn’t recognize borders, and loss doesn’t check passports. According to reporting by USA Today, the number of US troops injured in this war has climbed to 200. Ten are seriously wounded. More than 180 have already returned to duty. Thirteen are dead.
I read their names slowly, not as information but as interruption:
Maj. John A. Klinner. Capt. Ariana G. Savino. Tech. Sgt. Ashley B. Pruitt.
Capt. Seth R. Koval. Capt. Curtis J. Angst. Tech. Sgt. Tyler H. Simmons.
Capt. Cody A. Khork. Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens. Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor. Sgt. Declan J. Coady. Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien. Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan. Sgt. Benjamin Pennington.
I think about who spoke their names last. I think about the last time they hugged someone goodbye without knowing it would be the last time.
And I think about the children, who will grow up with that absence shaping everything.
The human toll extends even further. Thousands of American and Israeli air strikes have targeted Iranian leadership, Tehran’s nuclear program, and missile installations. President Donald Trump has said the assault will continue until an “unconditional surrender” by Tehran, though US officials offer conflicting definitions of victory even as they assure the public ground troops won’t be involved. Tehran’s leadership has struck a defiant tone, giving no indication of surrender.
This is not new. The US Constitution vests Congress with the power to declare war. Yet modern conflicts are launched through executive fiat, bypassing debate and public scrutiny. Military actions framed as “operations” rather than wars slip past safeguards designed to enforce accountability. From Vietnam’s “body counts” to Iraq’s “surgical strikes” and Afghanistan’s decades-long campaigns, euphemisms have long softened the moral weight of military action. History shows they do not lessen harm. They only obscure it.
Consider Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Moscow called it a “special military operation.” Russian media were forbidden from using the words “war” or “invasion.” Official messaging emphasized demilitarization and denazification. Language shaped perception. Language concentrated power. Language justified violence. And violence followed.
Words matter because they frame reality. “Operation” implies precision. “Precision strike” implies control. These words belong to surgery and engineering, not human lives ripped apart by bombs. War is never neat. War is never clean. War is messy, chaotic, and irrevocably human. Babies die. Children die. Parents dig through rubble. Words cannot erase that.
The strike in Minab exists within a broader struggle over the Middle East. Analysts see the conflict as part of a long-running effort to reshape regional power. Washington’s strategic conversations often center on limiting Iran’s military capacity, weakening alliances, and consolidating influence. These objectives go beyond battlefields; they aim to construct a political order in which local actors depend on foreign power, a system where autonomy is constrained.
Wars described as “limited operations” rarely end neatly. Targeted strikes can evolve into protracted campaigns. Euphemisms smooth the path for persistence, allowing conflicts to expand without the scrutiny or reckoning that accompanied formal war declarations in earlier eras.
International humanitarian law draws clear lines. Combatants and civilians must be distinguished. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime. Disproportionate attacks that fail to discriminate may also violate the laws of war. Yet phrases like “collateral damage” and “precision strike” mute moral alarm, constructing distance between planners of violence and those who endure it. For the victims, no such distance exists.
And yet, the conversation often circles back to the economy. Gas prices. Stock markets. “Is the pump near $2.00 a gallon?” “Is inflation holding?” As if killing children can be measured and balanced against a commodity. As if a girl crushed beneath concrete is only tragic insofar as her death might jolt the price of crude oil.
Shall we start calculating how much gas a child in Iran would consume in their life? Or how much they might contribute to economic production decades from now? That is exactly the kind of grotesque calculus some people apply, and it is morally bankrupt. Human life cannot be reduced to barrels of oil, dollars of growth, or inflation points. To do so is to make mass murder manageable, calculable, acceptable.
When I put all these images together, I can’t keep the usual distance that commentary seems to require. I don’t experience this war as strategy or policy first. I experience it as a series of human ruptures that keep multiplying.
A man in power holding a model of a bomber like something precious.
A child reaching for a mother who will never hold her again.
Families in Ohio, Kentucky, or Florida trying to make sense of a knock on the door that changes everything.
We are told that around 2,000 people have been killed across the region, more than 1,300 in Iran alone. The numbers rise, they are updated, they are absorbed into the rhythm of the news cycle.
But I can’t relate to the numbers.
I relate to the hug.
To the presence of it. To the absence of it.
War depends on a kind of distance I can no longer maintain. Not emotional distance. Not moral distance. Once you really let yourself imagine the moment after impact—the dust, the silence, the voice calling out—it becomes impossible to return to abstraction.
It becomes impossible to look at a bomber, even a small one, and not see what it does.
So I keep coming back to those two scenes, even when I’d rather not.
A president hugging a machine built to erase.
A child calling out into the space where her mother used to be.And somewhere between them, all of us, deciding quietly what we are willing to see and what we are willing to hold.
Have we no shame? We watch children die and count barrels of oil. We hear names read off casualty lists and ask instead whether the gas pump is under $2.00. We hug machines built to erase, and we pretend the consequences are abstract. But the dust, the silence, the absent voices are not abstractions. They are proof that human life cannot be reduced to a commodity, a strategy, or a “precision strike.” And if we cannot summon shame for what we allow to happen in our name, then we are complicit in the erasure, every single day.
As Mahatma Gandhi observed, “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.” Leaders may rationalize actions in the language of necessity. Alliances may shift. Strategic objectives may evolve. But the destruction left behind by war does not vanish with rhetoric. It endures. It demands recognition. It demands justice.
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Forests, Not Data Centers: A Better Plan for Rural Prosperity
Local and state governments should invest in protecting natural landscapes as the foundation of rural prosperity—not funnel more public dollars into yet another dirty and destructive industry.
Mar 25, 2026
Nature is our lifeline. Technology cannot replace it.
That truth is the heart of a growing conflict in rural America. As data centers and AI infrastructure are sold to communities as “innovation,” “jobs,” and “the future,” we’re being asked to trade away the natural systems that have always sustained us: forests, clean water, a stable climate, and the human need for connection with each other and the natural world.
It’s not a fair trade. It’s not a winning economic strategy. And no matter what Big Tech claims, it’s not good for us.
Like many Americans, my most treasured memories come from time spent outdoors. I grew up exploring the forests of coastal South Carolina—climbing trees, watching birds fly across the sunset, picking wildflowers. Those experiences led me to co‑found Dogwood Alliance, an organization dedicated to protecting Southeastern forests, in 1996.
We still have a choice: Allow hollow promises to lead us into a dead planet, or look to nature for survival and joy.
Our Southern forests are among the most biodiverse in the nation—and are the least protected. Industrial logging has presented the greatest threat to forests I’ve seen in my lifetime. The South is logged at a rate estimated to be four times higher than South American rainforests. I’ve seen how decades of expansion in wood production—from paper to biomass wood pellets—have fouled air and water while degrading millions of acres. I’ve seen how clear-cutting and the conversion of wild forests into single‑species plantations have devastated biodiversity, water quality, natural flood control, and carbon storage. I’ve seen entire communities become sacrifice zones, with low‑income, Black, and Indigenous residents bearing the brunt of pollution and forest destruction.
What I have never seen is a corporation’s promises of clean operations and economic prosperity actually materialize. That’s why I am more convinced than ever that our future depends on protecting standing forests
Today, we stand at a crossroads. After years of community organizing, public pressure, and scientific pushback, paper and wood‑pellet mills are shuttering. For those of us in rural and forest communities, this presents a rare opportunity to rethink what we want our economy to be. Do we continue down a path of destruction, or do we accelerate the protection of nature?
Into this moment steps a new pitch: data centers and AI as the next economic “miracle.” But their enormous appetite for electricity and water accelerates resource extraction, pollution, and climate impacts. The declining forestry industry is now trying to hitch itself to this swindle, promoting the burning of trees to power data centers as a way to prop up its obsolete business model—and calling it “progress.”
Progress toward what? Much of what these AI data centers produce is inflammatory content that fuels political outrage and deepens social division. No wonder people across the country are pushing back—and winning.
In so many ways, forests are the most advanced technology the world has ever known. They regulate temperature, store carbon, support food systems, and offer psychological grounding no device can replicate. When left intact, forests are self‑maintaining, self‑renewing, and infinitely more productive than any data center.
Study after study shows that time in nature improves cognitive function and a wide range of mental and physical health markers. Research also links depression, anxiety, and attention disorders to tech overload and reduced time outdoors. Science shows what we instinctively know to be true—nature brings people together. Protecting it is one of the few remaining ways to restore health and rebuild unity in a divided time.
Equally important, forest protection is a proven economic strategy for rural communities. The outdoor recreation economy generates far more revenue and jobs than the timber industry. Conservation and recreation jobs, ecological restoration, and community‑led development create long‑term prosperity without sacrificing land, water, or health. These sectors keep wealth local, strengthen small businesses, and attract people who want to live in places defined by beauty and belonging—not destruction and noise.
At Dogwood Alliance, we’ve seen what happens when communities reject extractive industry and shift to people power. Last year, we partnered with New Alpha Community Development Corporation to purchase Freedom Land, a 305‑acre property that will become a community‑led hub for forest conservation, ecotourism, and outdoor recreation. We also helped the Pee Dee Indian Tribe purchase 77 acres of wetlands to create an environmental education center celebrating Native American culture and heritage.
These projects offer a blueprint for a community‑led movement to save our forests and our towns. And they come at a critical moment, as rural communities face new threats from Big Tech’s land‑hungry, resource‑intensive infrastructure
We still have a choice: Allow hollow promises to lead us into a dead planet, or look to nature for survival and joy. Local and state governments should invest in protecting natural landscapes as the foundation of rural prosperity—not funnel more public dollars into yet another dirty and destructive industry.
We can and must build a future rooted in nature, not in the false god of AI technology. Nature is not just the original technology—it’s still the best.
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