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war on terror
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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US Appeals Court Upholds Verdict Against Contractor Liable for Abu Ghraib Torture
"This is a huge moment, a win that builds a foundation for a new precedent in the US," said one plaintiff. "Those who believe they are above the law will now think twice before violating human rights."
Mar 12, 2026
A federal appellate court on Thursday upheld a historic verdict against CACI Premier Technology, a military contractor found liable for its role in the torture of three prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s.
The three plaintiffs—middle school principal Suhail Al Shimari, fruit vendor Asa'ad Zuba'e, and journalist Salah Al-Ejaili—are represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and two law firms. CCR noted Thursday that Al Shimari v. CACI was first filed in 2008 under the Alien Tort Statute and "is the only lawsuit brought by Abu Ghraib torture victims to make it to trial."
These three survivors of Abu Ghraib—where US captors subjected prisoners to broken bones, death threats, electric shocks, extreme temperatures, sexual abuse, and more torture—finally got their day in court in April 2024. The following November, a federal jury in Virginia ordered CACI to pay each plaintiff $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million in punitive damages, for a total of $42 million.
"This victory isn't only for the three plaintiffs in this case against a corporation," Al-Ejaili said after the verdict. "This victory is a shining light for everyone who has been oppressed and a strong warning to any company or contractor practicing different forms of torture and abuse."
CACI unsuccessfully sought a new trial at the US District Court for the District of Virginia, then turned to the 4th Circuit, which heard arguments last September.
"We affirm the jury’s verdict in full," wrote Senior Judge Henry Floyd, joined by Judge Stephanie Thacker—both appointees of former President Barack Obama. Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., who was appointed by President Donald Trump, dissented.
CCR legal director Baher Azmy, who argued the appeal, said Thursday that "we are gratified yet again that the 4th Circuit rejected CACI's cynical arguments for impunity for its responsibility for the torture of our clients, which the jury confirmed in a historic judgment last year. Our courageous clients have waited so long for recognition and justice, and we are happy for them that this judgment affirmed their entitlement to it."
Joining the center in this fight were the firms Akeel & Valentine and Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler. Michael Buchanan, a partner at the latter and lead co-counsel for the plaintiffs, also expressed gratitude "for the court's careful review of this matter and for its decision to uphold a verdict that acknowledges the severe harm our clients endured at Abu Ghraib at the hands of CACI employees and military personnel."
"I have been honored to work on this appeal alongside an exceptionally skilled and dedicated team at Patterson Belknap, which included Andrew Haddad, Alex Mahler-Haug, and other lawyers and paralegals, and with our colleagues at the Center for Constitutional Rights," Buchanan said. "While no verdict can undo what these individuals suffered, this outcome affirms their courage and the fundamental principle that all must be held accountable for their actions."
Al-Ejaili also celebrated the development, declaring that "this is a huge moment, a win that builds a foundation for a new precedent in the US."
"This will cause a positive difference in the future. Those who believe they are above the law will now think twice before violating human rights," the plaintiff added. "Thank you to the US legal system and thank you to everyone who had anything to do with this win."
The appellate court's decision notably comes as the Trump administration and Israel have launched another war in the Middle East: a joint assault of Iran, alongside Israeli bombing of Lebanon. Evidence of war crimes—including attacks on schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure—has quickly mounted, fueling global demands for a diplomatic resolution.
This article has been updated with comment from lead co-counsel for the plaintiffs Michael Buchanan.
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'Heavily Armed Secret Police Force': ICE, CBP Amass $144 Million Weapons Stockpile
"In just one year, ICE’s spending commitments on weapons, ammunition, and accessories surged fourfold."
Feb 25, 2026
A report produced by the office of Sen. Adam Schiff reveals that federal immigration enforcement agencies amassed a gigantic weapons stockpile during the first year of President Donald Trump's second term.
In total, the report released by Schiff (D-Calif.) finds that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) committed to spending over $144 million on weapons and ammunition over the last year, a massive increase over these agencies' spending on weapons in years past.
"In just one year, ICE’s spending commitments on weapons, ammunition, and accessories surged fourfold—an increase of over 360 percent—when compared to ICE’s contracts in 2024," states the report. "In 2025, CBP’s contracts for weapons, ammunition, and accessories doubled when compared to CBP’s 2024 contract totals."
The report documents how both agencies have combined to spend tens of millions of dollars purchasing lethal weapons, including "AR-style rifles, pistols, and large quantities of accessories, such as optical sights for firearms and suppressors"; so-called "less-lethal" weapons including "TASERs, pepper sprays, tear gas canisters, and canister launchers"; and assorted kinds of ammunition.
The report adds that "records show that DHS’s procurement of weapons at immense scale is just beginning, as these contract awards contemplate even greater spending moving forward," which it says should serve "as a stark warning to the American public."
Schiff's report concludes with a warning about the US Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) "growing plans to build a heavily-armed domestic police force," adding that federal immigration agents' killings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti could only be the first of many tragedies to come.
In an analysis of the Schiff report published Wednesday, the New Republic's Greg Sargent argued that the Trump administration is trying to launch a domestic "war on terrorism" by bringing the kind of violence the US has deployed overseas back to the homeland.
"In a sense, we’re seeing yet more cancerous growth of the post-September 11 national security bureaucracy, but with a more intensified inward focus," wrote Sargent, who described ICE and CBP under Trump as a "heavily armed secret police force" in a Wednesday social media post.
Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks told Sargent that the dangers posed by ICE and CBP could outlast Trump's presidency.
"Trump is building up a well-funded, poorly trained paramilitary force that could easily take on a life of its own,” Brooks explained. “Once you have a massive moneymaking machine ginned up, it’s hard to reverse course and turn off the spigot.”
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