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blowback
Cheap Drones and the Iran War Blowback Threat
You do not have to be a cynic to predict that Trump would relish such mayhem.
Apr 06, 2026
While our intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have long studied possible “domestic blowback scenarios” to our aggressive wars overseas, what happened last month was a troubling, unexplained reality. ABC News reported that the large Barksdale Air Force Base (BAFB) in Louisiana, where B-52 bombers are stationed, “detected multiple unauthorized drones operating in our airspace during the week of March 9th, quoting Capt. Hunter Rininger of the 2nd Bomb Wing. These drone flights continued for nearly a week.
More specifically, according to what ABC News described as a confidential Air Force briefing document dated March 15, 2026, “the drones came in waves and entered and exited the base in a way that may suggest attempts to ‘avoid the operator(s) being located.’ Lights on the drones suggested the operators ‘may be testing security response’ at the base.”
“Between March 9-15, 2026, BAFB Security Forces observed multiple waves of 12-15 drones operating over sensitive areas of the installation, including the flight line, with aircraft displaying non-commercial signal characteristics, long-range control links and resistance to jamming,” the document added.
These flights lasted around four hours each day. The confidential document obtained by ABC News considered these “incursions” to be criminal offenses under federal law, calling them “a significant threat to public safety and national security since they require the flight line to be shut down while also putting manned aircrafts already inflight in the area of risk.”
Well, Mr. Trump, even your MAGA loyalists may be wondering why your “Department of War” did not intercept these drones, bring them down, and learn whose sending them. One would also think, this would be a huge newsworthiness episode for the mainstream mass media. The American people were left with a vague assurance that the Air Force’s investigation was being assisted by the Louisiana State Police.
Since then, there has largely been silence, from the media, from Congress, and from the war-mongering Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who would be expected to overcome this unauthorized “unmanned aerial system.”
This is the kind of provocative event that generates conspiracy theories.
There is a larger puzzle here, given how much the Pentagon is given by Congress to spend on defense – over 50 percent of the entire federal government’s operating expenditures. Ellen Mitchell, writing in The Hill newspaper on March 7, 2026, gives us an expert’s assessment: “Brett Velicovich, a former Army intelligence special operations soldier who has worked with Ukraine’s drone forces in its defense against Russia, said he and other drone experts have been warning the US to prepare for drone warfare for years.” He added, “Our counter drone systems need work.”
Small Ukraine is ahead of the US in developing low-cost drones and drone interceptors, while the US builds $13 billion aircraft carriers, which in modern missile warfare would become sitting ducks.
The US military is presently experiencing Iran’s response to Trump’s February 28th treacherous attack, in the middle of negotiations no less, of their advanced, inexpensive Shahed drones, which can be assembled in a garage.
Those garages assembling drones could soon be in the US, which now are included in the blowback assessments noted earlier by US intelligence agencies. The more the US Empire blows up people abroad in countries that pose no threat to the US, the more the grieving survivors may be motivated to retaliate. Certainly, if the shoe were on the other foot and some giant military powers were obliterating US civilians and civilian infrastructure, does anyone doubt there would be vengeful retaliation?
Iran has the added grievances of having their elected prime minister overthrown by the CIA in 1953, followed by the US-installed dictator Shah for 25 years. Then, following the Iranian overthrow of the Shah in 1979, the US backed Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, to invade Iran, causing about 500,000 Iranian fatalities in this multi-year aggression. Since then, the US and Israel have been sabotaging Iran, annihilating its leaders, and imposing crushing economic sanctions on that country (twice the size of Texas) of 93 million people.
Is it a surprise that the militarily surrounded and massively infiltrated by Israeli spies Iranian theocratic regime imposes very harsh measures internally? By comparison, without any external threat, Tyrant Trump has imposed police state measures in our country, illegally seizing and imprisoning innocent people by the thousands, and causing casualties among United States citizens.
It is evident from warnings by specialists that the US is unprepared for ‘lone wolf’ drone attacks, much less more organized drone retaliations.
You do not have to be a cynic to predict that Trump would relish such mayhem, which he would immediately exploit to bolster his failing dictatorial regime and dropping poll numbers. Dictators know exactly how to brutally suppress dissent and consolidate their domination with exaggerated rhetoric to pursue massive violent revenge. Trump, in his lie-filled and violent televised diatribe to the nation on Wednesday, told the Iranian people that “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong.” That is the grisly playbook that dictators have launched for generations to cover their own crimes of death and destruction.
The American people had better be alert to this predictable reaction by the dangerous Trump. His more extremist supporters, including some convicted violent criminals who he has pardoned, may not wait and are capable of trying to pull off a “false flag” operation to provoke worse impacts from Trumpian fascism.
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Americans Must Oppose Trump's Iran War for Humanity and for Our Own Sake
History tells us one thing: When we wage unjust wars that terrorize distant populations in far-off lands, the violence rarely remains confined there. Sooner or later, in one form or another, it returns.
Apr 03, 2026
What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated US military adventurism in the Middle East amount to? Some of the toll is already clear. Washington has squandered billions of dollars on a reckless war of aggression against Iran. A merciless campaign of aerial bombardment has driven millions from their homes. American and Israeli airstrikes have rained destruction on 10,000 civilian sites and already killed more than 3,000 people in Iran and Lebanon. Among the dead are more than 200 children, many killed in a US strike on a girls’ school, a war crime that evokes the grim precedent of such past American atrocities as the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam or the 1991 Amiriyah shelter bombing in Iraq.
The latest war has also dealt a potentially fatal blow to our already battered democratic institutions. It’s a war neither authorized by Congress nor supported by the public. Instead, it was launched by a president who refuses to submit to the law or heed the will of the people, claiming in true authoritarian fashion that he is the law, and that he alone embodies the popular will.
Such democratic backsliding has, however, been decades in the making, a predictable result of longstanding imperial impunity. Yet we may rapidly be approaching a point of no return. Even George W. Bush, in launching his catastrophic wars of choice in the region, sought to manufacture consent and present the case before the United Nations. Today, there is neither the pretense of legality nor of legitimacy.
The costs associated with this latest criminal war, measured in human lives; the misappropriation of national resources; and the erosion of the rule of law will only continue to mount. Yet there is also a less visible, less immediate price tag for such wars. If the history of American interventions in the region offers any guide, the full bill will likely not become apparent for months, years, or even decades. When it finally arrives, however, it will carry a familiar name: blowback.
In case after case, conflicts initiated or intensified by the United States appeared to subside, only to reemerge in new, more volatile forms.
For that reason, it’s important at this moment to recall the lessons Washington appears determined to forget. From Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq to Libya, the record is unmistakable. Yet as long as the historical amnesia that grips this country’s political establishment remains unchallenged, the same cycles of escalation and reprisal will undoubtedly persist in the years to come, threatening to once again draw the United States (and much of the world) ever deeper into the abyss of forever war.
Oil and the Engine of Empire
While the post-9/11 “war on terror” is often invoked as the starting point of US militarism in the Middle East, the roots of conflict there stretch back nearly a century. The violence and instability unleashed after the attacks of September 11, 2001 represented less a rupture with the past than a continuation of long-established patterns of US policy. The seeds of the forever wars had, in fact, been planted decades earlier in the oil-rich soil of the region.
Direct American involvement began in the previous century in the years between the First and Second World Wars. By that point, petroleum had become not merely a valuable commodity but a strategic necessity for sustaining a modern industrial economy. The vast oil reserves discovered in the United States had propelled the American economy to global prominence and played a decisive role in fueling the Allied war effort during World War I. Yet policymakers in Washington understood that domestic reserves were finite. As petroleum became synonymous with power, economically, militarily, and politically, the United States increasingly turned abroad to secure new sources.
The Middle East emerged as a critical frontier in that search, drawing the region ever more tightly into the orbit of an expanding American empire. In 1933, Standard Oil of California secured an exploratory concession with the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The agreement created the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), laying the groundwork for the 1945 US-Saudi oil-for-security partnership that would become central to Washington’s future influence over the region’s geopolitical order.
Over the years, the insatiable thirst for oil only drew the United States ever deeper into the region. By 1953, American intervention assumed more overtly coercive forms. That year, in coordination with British intelligence, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s popular prime minister, who had committed a cardinal sin in the emerging Cold War years. In 1951, he presided over the nationalization of his country’s oil industry in an effort to return sovereign control of its resources to the Iranian people by wresting them from the exploitative grip of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the precursor to British Petroleum.
Despite his staunchly nationalist rather than communist credentials, a fact understood in Tehran, London, and Washington, Mossadegh would then be cast as, at worst, a dangerous proxy of the Soviet Union and, at best, a threat to regional stability (as in, American hegemony). The coup that followed ended Iran’s fragile democratic experiment, secured continued access to Iranian oil for Western companies, and restored the Shah of Iran to power. His regime would then be sustained by a steady outward flow of oil and a nearly endless influx of US weaponry. With CIA backing, his secret police, SAVAK, would terrorize and torture a generation of Iranians.
Yet Washington celebrated this new arrangement, claiming that Iran had been transformed into an “island of stability,” and a cornerstone of the “twin pillar strategy,” in which Washington would outsource regional Cold War policing to compliant authoritarian allies in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such subversion of nationalist movements and support for despotic monarchies, as well as the increasingly unequivocal backing of Israel, would generate intense backlash. Among the most visible early expressions of that was the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, demonstrating how US policy in the Middle East could reverberate domestically.
But the first unmistakable case of blowback arrived in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution. In that country, discontent had been simmering beneath the seemingly stable façade of the Shah’s rule for years. When the monarchy collapsed after months of protests and repression, the Islamic Republic would fill the political vacuum, drawing on the theological language of Shi’ism and the political rhetoric of opposition to the Shah, the United States, and Israel.
In the US, those developments were largely stripped of their historical context. Americans were instead cast as the innocent victims of irrational fanaticism. Why do they hate us? was the refrain that echoed across the Western media and the answers offered rarely confronted the long history of intervention and exploitation. Instead, they defaulted to a supposed civilizational conflict with Islam, which was portrayed as inherently antagonistic to “Western values.”
Such explanations obscured an uncomfortable reality—that the US had repeatedly undermined democracy across the region (as well as in other parts of the world) to advance its own interests. As a Pentagon commission report in 2004 acknowledged, the problem was not that people “hate our freedoms,” as President George W. Bush had reductively claimed, but that many “hate our policies.” In other words, the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001 were the ultimate, if deeply disturbing, expression of blowback.
Revolution and Counterrevolution in the Persian Gulf
Those widely resented policies from Washington were reinforced by its overreaction to the 1979 upheaval in Iran. That country’s new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, sought not only to transform Iranian society internally but envisioned the Islamic Republic as the opening move in a broader anti-imperialist struggle across the Middle East. For Washington and its reactionary regional allies, the specter of such potential revolutionary contagion posed a profound threat.
In January 1980, in an attempt to contain the Iranian regime, President Jimmy Carter articulated a new foreign policy position that placed the US on a collision course in the region. The Carter Doctrine declared the Persian Gulf a “vital interest” of the United States, warning that any attempt by an outside power to gain control would be repelled by “any means necessary, including military force.” In that fashion, Washington asserted an explicit claim to a protectorate thousands of miles from its shores. The United States, Carter made clear, was prepared to send soldiers there to ensure uninterrupted access to oil.
The strategic reorientation that followed proved violent and far-reaching, while marking a shift away from East and Southeast Asia as the principal theaters of Cold War conflict. As Andrew Bacevich observed in his book America’s War for the Greater Middle East, if you were to measure US involvement by the number of troops killed in action, the transformation was striking. From the end of World War II to 1980 almost no American soldiers were killed in the region. Since 1990, however, virtually none have been killed anywhere except in what Bacevich termed the “Greater Middle East.”
Measured in American lives alone, the subsequent costs would number in the thousands. Measured in civilians killed across the region, the toll would be vastly greater. Over the past several decades US-led or -backed wars have contributed to the deaths of millions of people and the displacement of tens of millions more, producing one of the most devastating population catastrophes since the end of World War II.
Proxy Wars and the Escalation Trap
The American shift toward the Middle East ensured that the United States would become deeply entwined in a cascade of conflicts. As regional actors moved either to defend a fragile status quo or exploit the upheavals that followed, Washington began instigating new conflicts in the region.
In Baghdad, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein opposed the new government in Tehran on ideological and strategic grounds. The emergence of a revolutionary Shi’a state next door threatened his Sunni-dominated Ba’athist regime that ruled over a Shi’a majority in Iraq. At the same time, Saddam sought to exploit what he perceived to be Iranian weakness, pressing longstanding revanchist claims to the oil-rich borderlands of southwestern Iran.
Saudi Arabia viewed these developments with similar alarm. In the capital Riyadh, policymakers feared that revolutionary Shi’ism might threaten the legitimacy of the kingdom’s Sunni Wahhabi monarchy. The call for a Shi’a revolution also raised concerns about unrest in its oil-rich Eastern Province, where Shi’a workers faced economic exploitation and near colonial conditions. Similar anxieties reverberated across the other Gulf monarchies.
Violence begets violence, and imperial war has a way of boomeranging back upon those who initiate it.
The United States responded by doubling down on support for the remaining pillars of its regional order, Saudi Arabia and Israel, while seeking to contain and roll back the perceived threat posed by Iran. Still interpreting regional upheaval through the prism of the Cold War, US policymakers also expanded their involvement elsewhere. In Afghanistan, the CIA launched the largest covert operation in its history, channeling weapons and support to the Afghan mujahideen resisting the Soviet Union’s occupation of that country that began in December 1979.
The Soviet intervention itself was shaped by the shockwaves of the Iranian Revolution. Leaders in Moscow feared a militant Islam on their southern flank that might embolden similar currents within Muslim-majority regions of the Soviet Union.
In Iraq, the US publicly tilted toward Saddam Hussein while simultaneously engaging in illegal weapons sales to Iran, with the funds received being rerouted to bankroll another American-backed war in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Civil War, worsened by Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, created the conditions for the rise of Hezbollah, which presented itself as a defender of marginalized Shi’a communities against Israeli military aggression and sectarian violence.
By 1986, after escalating regional violence and spillover, the administration of President Ronald Reagan took a step that paved the way for what would, in the next century, become Washington’s “War on Terror.” In April of that year, Reagan launched airstrikes in the dense heart of Tripoli on the home of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, holding him responsible for acts of non-state terrorism abroad, including support for armed movements from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Irish Republican Army.
That operation marked a significant escalation in the region and its justification would later be formalized as the Bush Doctrine: the claim that Washington could wage preemptive war anywhere against any state accused of supporting terrorism inside its country or outside its borders. That doctrine was no less illegitimate, illegal, or dangerous in the 1980s than it would become two decades later. As Daniel Ellsberg observed then (a point he would continue to press throughout his life, including after President Barack Obama ordered similar strikes on Libya in 2011), it seemed that the US had “adopted a public policy of responding to state-sponsored terrorism with US state-sponsored terrorism.”
In each instance, deeper involvement in the region produced deeper backlash. The US-backed Afghan jihad helped give rise to al-Qaeda in 1988 and paved the way for the Taliban’s seizure of power in 1996 and the failed 20-year American war in Afghanistan. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the Gulf War of 1991, which laid the groundwork for the criminal 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The instability that followed not only expanded Iran’s regional influence but contributed to the emergence of the Islamic State. In Lebanon, the power vacuum that Hezbollah came to fill resulted in the 1983 barracks bombing in Beirut, the deadliest day for US Marines since Iwo Jima.
The Lesson Not Learned
The pattern is difficult to ignore, despite our government’s persistent efforts to do so. Many of the actors Washington came to identify as its principal adversaries emerged either in direct response to US policies or had themselves once been cultivated by Washington in pursuit of short-sighted strategic aims. In case after case, conflicts initiated or intensified by the United States appeared to subside, only to reemerge in new, more volatile forms. Intervention produced instability; instability served to justify further interventions; and the cycle only repeated itself thereafter.
There is little reason to believe that Donald Trump’s war against Iran will prove any different. By now, the historical record should make that clear, which is why we must oppose the violence being carried out in our name, as it is wrong, criminal, and immoral. We must oppose it for the sake of our common humanity, but also for our own sake.
After all, history tells us one thing: When we wage unjust wars that terrorize distant populations in far-off lands, the violence rarely remains confined there. Sooner or later, in one form or another, it returns. Violence begets violence, and imperial war has a way of boomeranging back upon those who initiate it. We reap what we sow; the chickens, in time, invariably come home to roost.
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'It Was Blowback': Michigan Synagogue Attacker's Family Killed by Israeli Airstrike
"The problem with blowback is, it almost never hits the right people," said one observer.
Mar 13, 2026
The Michigan man who rammed his vehicle into a suburban Detroit synagogue Thursday lost four relatives to an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon last week, according to an official in the Lebanese town where the massacre occurred.
Ayman Mohamad Ghazali—a 41-year-old naturalized US citizen born in Lebanon—was killed during a shootout with security guards at the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield Township after crashing his truck into the building. Authorities said the vehicle contained mortar-type explosives and ignited upon impact. One security guard was struck by the vehicle.
No one else inside the synagogue was injured. Cassi Cohen, Temple Israel's director of strategic development, told The Associated Press that “thankfully, we have had many active shooter drills and our staff is prepared for these situations."
Jennifer Runyan, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau's Detroit field office, described the attack as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community."
However, a local official in Mashgharah, a town in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, told the AP on condition of anonymity that Ghazali's two brothers, niece, and nephew were among five people killed by a March 5 Israeli airstrike on their home while they were eating their fast-breaking dinner during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
US investigative journalist Ryan Grim published photos reportedly posted by Ghazali showing his four slain relatives.
Numerous observers called the attack on Temple Israel—which flies an Israeli flag outside the building—"blowback" from Israel's renewed war on Hezbollah in Lebanon, which was launched despite a November 2024 ceasefire agreement alongside the US-Israeli war on Iran.
"The guy's family was killed last week by Israel and he was taking revenge. That’s wrong. Murder is wrong," US political commentator and author Matt Stoller, who is Jewish American, said on X. "But this isn’t some uptick of antisemitism, it’s blowback. A lot of us have been saying that Israel is bad for the Jews. It is. We have to reject that country."
Others cautioned against conflating Israel with Judaism, with Grim asserting that "it is extremely important we separate the actions of a foreign government from an American synagogue, or any synagogue."
Rights groups have noted a dramatic rise in both Islamophobia and antisemitism following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 and Israel's genocidal retaliation.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)—which has led numerous protests against Israel's war on Gaza—said Friday that "Jewish communities, like all people, deserve to be safe in our houses of worship and schools."
"The person who reportedly carried out this attack was a man whose siblings, niece, and nephew were just murdered in Lebanon by Israeli bombs," JVP continued. "This is grief upon grief. War always begets trauma and further violence."
"It is clear that the Israeli government’s atrocities make all of us—including Jews—less safe," JVP added. "Israel carries out brutal wars and genocide against families and children, then falsely claims these war crimes are done in the name of Jews. This leads to more antisemitism."
"War always begets trauma and further violence."
More than 4,700 people have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli forces since October 2023, including over 1,100 women and children, according to Lebanese officials.
Israeli forces have also killed or wounded over 250,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the illegally occupied West Bank since the October 2023 attack. US and Israeli attacks on Iran have slain or injured thousands more people.
Originally coined by the CIA in the wake of its 1953 coup in Iran to describe the unintended and often deadly consequences of covert or military action, the concept of blowback gained widespread popularity after the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, which is often regarded as a classic example of the term in action.
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