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Urgent Message to Democrats: Stop Dragging Your Feet and End Trump's Iran War
Many congressional Democrats seem more interested in using Trump's war on Iran to score victories in the midterms than to use what power they do have to bring it to an end.
Apr 02, 2026
President Donald Trump’s illegal, increasingly unpopular war on Iran is sinking Republican prospects for winning the midterm elections, to the delight of Washington Democrats and liberal media. A couple of weeks before the US and Israel launched their blitzkrieg at the end of February, a Senate foreign-policy aide told Drop Site News that:
A substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats.
Party leaders certainly have been acting as if they’re strategizing with one eye on the midterms. In a February 20 statement, titled “The Risks of Donald Trump and His Administration Dragging Us into War with Iran,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) supported the then-impending war—as long as it was done the right way. He complained only that “the administration has yet to articulate to Congress and the American people what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign.”
For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians
At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.”
On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep US troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war.
As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet.
Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.”
Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote.
Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like?... Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.”
As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party.
And so it came to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts—the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.”
“Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner!
“This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself”
Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices.
Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to him suggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments:
If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government... you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you... proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform...
Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At The Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.”
By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89%.”
Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war:
The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences... They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security... This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself.
“A Gift to Our Country”
Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington.
More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim-American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.”
He wrote:“The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.”
Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed.
It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.
El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human, and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare for All. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide—and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.”
In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan... None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed... Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good healthcare or good schools.”
Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past 50 years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home.
Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.
* * *
Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves.
After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble.
Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile.
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In 'Tense' Meeting, Arab Leaders in Michigan Warn White House to Change Course on Gaza
"If President Biden wants a shot here in Michigan, he's going to need to do something different," said one leader.
Feb 09, 2024
A week after Arab American and Muslim leaders in Michigan refused a meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden's campaign over the White House's continued support for Israel's bombardment of Gaza, several representatives of the community met Thursday with a group of top Biden aides—but came away unconvinced that the administration understands the stakes involved in its failure to listen to demands for a cease-fire.
"If President Biden wants a shot here in Michigan, he's going to need to do something different," Abbas Alawieh, a senior Democratic strategist and spokesperson for Listen to Michigan, a group that is urging cease-fire supporters in the state to vote "uncommitted" on primary ballots on February 27, told HuffPost.
Alawieh's comments came after he, state Rep. Abraham Aiyash (D-4), Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, Wayne County Deputy Executive Assad Turfe, and others met with administration officials.
Alawieh told the outlet that the meeting was "very tense," with attendees informing U.S. Agency for International Development head Samantha Power and senior presidential adviser Tom Perez, among other officials, of specific demands.
The group reiterated its call for Biden to make a direct demand that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agree to a permanent cease-fire and for the U.S. to immediately reinstate funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
The suspension of UNRWA funds have left the agency risking a "complete collapse" of its humanitarian response in Gaza, where at least 27,947 Palestinians have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces since October 7. More than one million displaced Palestinians have taken shelter in UNRWA shelters, where aid workers are struggling to provide food, medical care, and potable water in the face of Israel's near-total blockade.
Hammoud said on social media after the meeting that the views of Arab Americans and the majority of Democratic voters who support a cease-fire and increased aid for civilians "have not been accurately captured by mainstream media and have failed to reach the highest office in our government" over the past several months.
"This meeting was held to ensure that the White House and those with the ability to change the course of the genocide unfolding in Gaza very clearly hear and understand the demands of our community, directly from us," said Hammoud.
In the meeting, said the mayor, the local and state leaders "remained uncompromising in our values and our demands."
"As citizens of the United States of America and representatives of the city of Dearborn, we have done our duty; now it is incumbent upon the president to do the same," said Hammoud.
But the meeting adjourned without the White House aides giving assurances that Biden would do so, even though a growing number of leaders in the state—both within the Arab American and Muslim communities and outside of it—have signed on to the Listen to Michigan campaign.
By voting "uncommitted" in the primary, supporters are hoping to send an urgent message to Biden that his refusal to meet the demands of the community—and 7 in 10 Democrats in an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released last week—could be a grave miscalculation and cost him crucial votes in the general election in November.
Shadb Singh, an organizer with Listen to Michigan, reported Wednesday that the campaign appears to be taking off with voters based on the attendance of a mass mobilization call.
Biden won Michigan, a key swing state, by just 154,000 votes in 2020, and the Muslim population in the state includes 200,000 registered voters.
Last month, before Hammoud and other leaders refused to engage with Biden during his campaign stop, the president dismissed a question from a reporter about his cratering support among Arab Americans amid his backing of Israel.
"We understand who cares about the Arab population," he said, comparing himself to former President Donald Trump, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination and has easily won several primary contests so far.
Alawieh said the White House officials were "lucky to be hearing from the expertise of people harmed by the very policies the Biden administration is championing," but the attendees were skeptical that the president's team understood the risk Biden is running by assuming he has the support of Arab Americans.
"This was about ensuring the administration sees the real impact of its policies, not just on foreign soil but right here, affecting our people, our families," Turfe told HuffPost. "We made it clear that any future engagement with the administration is conditional upon real action. The developments in Gaza will serve as the benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of the administration’s actions. The Biden administration must act swiftly and decisively to end this violence, honoring the principles of justice and human rights."
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Dearborn Mayor Among Wave of Michigan Officials to Join 'Uncommitted' Campaign
"We must hold our president accountable and ensure that we, the American taxpayers, are no longer forced to be accomplices in a genocide that is backed and funded by the United States government," said Mayor Abdullah Hammoud.
Feb 07, 2024
More than 30 state representatives, mayors, city council members, and other elected officials in Michigan on Wednesday announced they had joined a grassroots effort to push voters in the crucial swing state to send a clear warning to U.S. President Joe Biden in the upcoming Democratic primary by voting "uncommitted."
The elected officials, including Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, are joining the Listen to Michigan movement to signal to Biden that they will not commit to supporting him in the November general election until he uses his vast influence to stop Israel's slaughter of civilians across Gaza by calling for a cease-fire and ending his administration's financial backing of the Israel Defense Forces.
Hammoud, who garnered national attention late last month when he refused to meet with Biden during a campaign stop in Michigan, said he and other officials in the state "demand a better future and we intend to make our voices heard on February 27," encouraging voters to "pledge to vote 'uncommitted' in the upcoming presidential primary election."
"Under the direction of President Joe Biden, our government has failed to act to protect the lives of innocent men, women, and children," said Hammoud. "Worse yet, President Biden and his administration have suggested that there is an exception to this rule when it comes to Palestinian lives."
The Listen to Michigan campaign, led by Palestinian American community organizer and Dearborn resident Layla Elabed, officially launched on Tuesday with advocates noting that the Arab American population—more than 211,000 people—in the key state is a powerful voting bloc whose demands for a cease-fire Biden is ignoring at his own peril.
"We cannot support his financial backing of actions in Gaza that conflict with our core values of peace and humanity," said Elabed. "Voting 'uncommitted' is our way of demanding change and the vehicle to return our political power back to us... Many of us voted for Biden in 2020, including myself. We got out the vote for him and helped him win the state of Michigan. But now we are saying, 'Count us out, Joe.'"
Along with Hammoud, state Reps. Abraham Alyash (D-9), Alabas Farhat (D-3), and Erin Byrnes (D-15) signed a letter dated Tuesday, expressing their intention to vote "uncommitted" on their primary ballots. Wayne County Commissioners Sam Baydoun and Al Haidous, four Dearborn city councilmembers, and more than a dozen school board members from several cities were also among the officials who signed.
"We must hold our president accountable and ensure that we, the American taxpayers, are no longer forced to be accomplices in a genocide that is backed and funded by the United States government," reads the letter. "These are not empty words, they signify our steadfast commitment to justice, dignity, and the sanctity of human life, which is greater than loyalty to any candidate or party."
Listen to Michigan pointed out on its official website that "uncommitted" primary campaigns are not unheard of in the state. In 2008, when then-Democratic primary candidate Barack Obama's name did not appear on ballots after the state moved its voting date up, "his campaign mobilized young and Black voters to vote 'uncommitted' as a symbolic (and real) rejection of Hillary Clinton," garnering 40% of the vote.
The growing support for the effort among dozens of elected officials, said Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, is "a big deal."
"This is BIG!" added Lansing-based climate and housing organizer William Lawrence. "All Michigan folks—this is real, this has legs. Make sure your friends know to vote uncommitted."
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