SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
war on terror
When You Aim at Regime Change, Be Careful What You Wish For
When Netanyahu proposed to Trump that they embark on regime change in Iran by assassinating its top leadership, neither seems to have imagined that this action would come back to bite them.
Jul 10, 2026
Soon after the Israeli and US attacks on Iran assassinated its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and four of his family members, as well as other senior leaders, President Donald Trump urged Iranians to rise up, saying: “To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably be your only chance for generations." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did the same in a video addressing the Iranian people, saying, “This is an opportunity that comes only once in every generation.” He called on them to “take to the streets in your millions and unite to bring down the ruling system.”
However, far from creating the outcome they fervently hoped for, the regime that emerged, after further assassinations, is “younger, savvier, ruthless, and more hard-line than ever.”
This is also evidenced by the choice of the second son of Khamenei as the new supreme leader. Mojtaba Khamenei (who was also injured in the attack on the Khamenei residence) was elected by a unanimous vote of the Assembly of Experts—after pressure by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with whom he has close ties. According to the Atlantic Council, “In political ideology and jurisprudence, Khamenei is considered to be more hard-line than his father.” Moreover, a source in Tehran notes: “They’ve just killed his family... He’s bloodthirsty now.”
The hard-liners appear to have further strengthened their hand during the recent week-long funeral events attended by millions. Ultra hard-line politicians are now publicly condemning the Iranian politicians involved in peace talks, including Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibad and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. This may account for the resumption of Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz in recent days—in spite of the ceasefire—which has led to several new rounds of fighting between the US and Iran.
The Desire for Revenge
The massive funeral event not only confirmed Khamenei’s status as a martyr, but also galvanized a tremendous desire for revenge in the Iranian population, with mourners waving red flags of revenge, chanting, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” and carrying signs calling for the killing of Trump and Netanyahu.
On the second day of the events, to thunderous applause, Poet Mohammad Resouli stated ominously: “Why is the most bastard man in the world still alive? The world is no longer a good place for Trump. Why should we not kill the man who killed our imam? It would be a disgrace if we did not.”
Violations of International and Domestic Law
The attacks on Iran were, in fact, a violation of international law, since they do not meet the requirements of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter regarding the right to self-defense but, instead, violate Article 2(4), which states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
In an article in The Guardian, entitled “Into the Void: How Trump Killed International Law,” the authors argue that “amid this chaos, there has been one consistent target for Trump’s contempt: the constraints imposed by international law, and its value system built around national sovereignty, including the prohibition of the use of force...” Indeed, in an interview with The New York Times in January, Trump made this point explicit: “I don’t need international law,” arguing that his power is limited only by “my own morality, my own mind.”
The killing of Khamenei was also in breach of the generally-accepted international taboo against the assassination of leaders. In fact, Trump also violated domestic US law—by violating Executive Order 11906, which states that “no employee of the United States Government shall engage in or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” This order, signed by President Gerald Ford 50 years ago, followed congressional investigations into previous US assassination plots against foreign leaders, such as Fidel Castro. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both broadened the scope of the ban, which is still in force, by dropping the “political” qualifier, making it illegal to “engage in assassination” per se.
Taboos such as these represent socially agreed-upon norms that certain actions are forbidden, and they play a crucial role in maintaining social order. Their codification in law helps to solidify the regulation of social interaction. Breaking a taboo can have serious consequences that, in extreme circumstances, can trigger violence.
In an article entitled, “Trump Opens the Pandora’s Box of Assassination,” Columbia University historian Timothy Naftali writes:
As killing foreign leaders gets easier for us, harming our leaders also presumably gets easier for others. The international taboo against foreign political assassinations has arguably had a stabilizing effect... To put a fine point on it, however tempting it may be to eliminate troublesome foreign leaders, no policy makers in a democracy wants to spark acts of retaliation that cost the lives of our own leaders in turn.
Luca Trenta and Arturo Jiminez-Bacardi, in “Khamenei Killing and the Perilous Death of the Assassination Ban,” suggest, “When a new Congress is sworn in next year, it should open an investigation into the Khamenei operation, hold public deliberations on the role of assassination in US foreign policy, and finally enact a statutory ban that unambiguously prohibits and criminalizes assassination once and for all.”
The Slippery Slope of Gradually Breaking Taboos
It has been argued that both the US and Israel began lowering their restrictions to the taboo on assassinations (or “targeted killings” as the US likes to call them or “eliminations” as the Israelis call them) in response to major terrorist attacks.
After the horrendous events of 9/11, and during the subsequent “war on terror,” it became common practice for the US to assassinate al-Qaeda operatives, including Osama-bin-Laden, as well as “terrorists” from other groups. Wikipedia offers a long list.
At the end of Trump’s first term, the US took a step closer to assassinating members of government when, on January 3, 2020, it assassinated Qasem Soleimani, “the second most powerful man in Iran,” who was commander of the Quds Force branch of the IRGC—justifying it by calling him a “terrorist” and providing a long list of grievous abuses.
However, it wasn’t long before the dangers of this action became evident, as US authorities uncovered several plots by Iranians to assassinate Trump administration officials associated with the killing, including Trump himself.
Israel also seemed to have increased its policy of “eliminations” following the horrific October 7, 2023 events, by assassinating the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in July 2024 and Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in September 2024, as well as many others. A long list is also available on Wikipedia.
Clearly, Trump is already feeling the heat from the Khamenei assassination. In a news conference at the end of the recent NATO summit in Türkiye, he said, “I’m No. 1 on the kill list for Iran,” joking that he would rather be “No. 1 on TikTok.” He added: “They had leaders; they’re gone, and they had another set of leaders; they’re gone. Now they have another set of leaders, they may be gone, who knows, and you know, I may be gone too, because I’m their No. 1 target.”
Indeed, because of concerns for his security, the Secret Service urged Trump to fly from Türkiye to the UK on the old Air Force One (which he did) rather than taking the retrofitted Qatari-gifted plane, since there are questions about whether the new Air Force One has the same defensive systems as the old one.
The intense Iranian desire for revenge will be likely to plague Trump, Netanyahu, members of their administrations, and their security services into the foreseeable future.
Surely it would have been much wiser to have adhered to international and domestic law and to have respected the taboo on the assassination of leaders. After all, this is what international law and established taboos are meant to do—establish rules of behavior to protect the social and international order.
As Trenta and Jimenez-Bacardi state:
The political vacuums that follow the assassination of heads of state can lead to civil war, chaos, unrest, and cycles of revenge. The Khamenei assassination has already turned into a regional war and sparked a global economic crisis. Simply put, a new era of political assassinations is likely to make the world less safe.
Let us hope that the revenge currently being called for in Iran never eventuates. Not only would it be tragic for a US president to be assassinated, but it could also be disastrous for Iran, since Trump has vowed that he would destroy the country in the event that it were successful in assassinating him, saying: “That would be the end. I’ve left instructions, if they do it, they get obliterated, there won’t be anything left.”
This has to be taken seriously since it could lead to even more unspeakable outcomes, potentially the breaking of another crucial taboo—on the use of nuclear weapons.
Keep ReadingShow Less
After Nearly 25 Years, I Sign Off... Wishing Trump Wasn't the Horrific Culmination of Our Disastrous 'War on Terror'
I’m at an age where my friends are indeed beginning to die and it pains me that, when I go, I’ll be leaving such a mess of an all-American planet to my poor grandchildren. They truly deserve better.
Jun 04, 2026
Okay, here’s what this old man remembers nearly a quarter of a century later.
I was living in New York City (as I still am) when, on September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes full of passengers hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 innocent people. Until that moment, of course, such a thing would have been beyond inconceivable, no less watchable on TV, in the United States of America. Had someone written up such a plot with Osama bin Laden and crew in the cast of characters, it would have been treated as the worst kind of unpublishable science fiction.
But, of course, it did indeed happen and, in some strange sense, in its wake (an all-too-appropriate word under the circumstances), our world did indeed seem to flip upside down. That was, of course, after President George W. Bush responded early that October by — god save us! — invading Afghanistan (which, at least to me, was a shock and a half in its own right) and launching his disastrous “Global War on Terror.” Sometime in the weeks that followed, my memory (not exactly trustworthy at almost 82 years of age) is that I saw an article deep inside the print New York Times (which, by the way, I still read daily on actual paper) noting that U.S. soldiers were by then fighting in parts of Afghanistan where the troops of the Soviet Union had struggled endlessly (and lost badly) during that imperial power’s disastrous Afghan war of the previous century, which did indeed help take it down. And that, too, in some grim fashion, stunned me. Talk about mistakes that history had all too clearly signaled should never happen again (and again and again)!
I was at the time (even if barely) online and so I copied that piece into an email and sent it out with a note to a small set of friends. And somehow that began the process that led to TomDispatch.
In a sense, it might even be possible to think of Donald Trump as the possible final chapter in this country’s global war on terror. Think of him, in fact, as the way that war came home.
I soon realized that, thanks to the online world, I could actually read around the globe — the British Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, etc. — and that out there in the rest of the universe, there were other ways this ever-stranger world of ours was being looked at than the ones that largely dominated attention here in the U.S., post-9/11. And so, as I began stumbling across ever more pieces that seemed to offer different perspectives on our increasingly eerie world, I started emailing them to a growing list of friends and acquaintances. And after a time — to my complete surprise — people I hardly knew or didn’t know at all emailed me that they wanted to be added to my list. And with those send-outs, I began including little introductory explanatory notes or sets of comments (which launched the future TomDispatch form with my eternal little introductions — literally thousands of them over these nearly 25 years — to every piece I posted at TD except my own).
And I remember exactly the moment when I suddenly realized that something out of the ordinary was happening not just in the ever-stranger world out there, but to me, too. Susan Sontag, a writer I had long admired but didn’t know from a hole in the wall, suddenly emailed me out of the blue and asked to be added to what would become the TomDispatch email list (though it wasn’t yet called that). I was stunned. And soon, I was sending out to — I no longer remember exactly how many — but certainly several hundred people (with more being added every week). And that was the moment when someone I hardly knew (though he, too, was on my mailing list), Hamilton Fish of the Nation Institute, called me out of the blue and asked if I might, in the future, be interested in turning those emails of mine into a website that he then did indeed set up for me and that he — not I — called “TomDispatch.”
Initially, at the new site, I simply did what I had been doing in my emails. I continued to find interesting pieces published elsewhere about our ever stranger and more disturbing world, wrote little introductions of my own, and then put in their headlines and first paragraphs with a link to the full piece wherever it had first appeared. At some point, however, I started writing longer commentaries of my own on a world that seemed to grow stranger by the week. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I knew a surprising number of writers whose voices, I thought, were distinctly needed in the strange post-9/11 world we were already living through.
After all, among other things, I had been an editor, first at Pantheon Books for 15 years in the previous century and later, in this one, at Metropolitan Books, the publishing house my old friend (and Pantheon coeditor) Sara Bershtel had set up. I had, for instance, published Chalmers Johnson’s remarkable book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire at Metropolitan in 2000 to essentially no attention, minimal (and not particularly good) reviews, and few sales. Osama bin Laden’s assault on New York City and Washington, D.C., however, turned that book into a nationwide bestseller and put that title word of his into the language in a big-time fashion (and he would indeed write for TomDispatch memorably in the War on Terror years that followed).
The War on Terror Comes Home, A Terrible Science Fiction Novel
And yes, Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks were indeed a nightmare, but this country responded to them almost unimaginably badly by creating a full-scale, seemingly never-ending set of further nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq (and, of course, over the years from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Somalia in Africa, not to speak of all those global CIA “black sites” meant for the torture of Global War on Terror prisoners). And out of all those nightmares and so much more (none of which I ever would have imagined possible once upon a time) came the presidencies (and who would have believed that there could be two of them!) of Donald (the mad duck) Trump.
From the start, TomDispatch was witnessing and reporting on America’s distinctly imperial fate. I was watching with both horror and fascination as the greatest power (perhaps ever) on planet Earth (once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991) was somehow going down, down, down, without even a helping hand from an opposing imperial power. After all, early in this century, China had yet truly to rise and now that it has, it’s not acting like a typical imperial power of history. It has (at least as yet) not launched its own version of a Global War on Terror and its leaders seem remarkably intent not on colonizing the rest of Asia in some unexpected fashion, but on making a fortune producing the world’s green energy machinery (including, at the moment, 80% of global solar energy panels), even if they’re also still outdoing every other country on this planet — despite Donald Trump’s efforts — in burning fossil fuels and pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere).
In some strange fashion, I watched and recorded at TomDispatch just how my country was playing out its grim version of the predictable decline of all imperial powers, historically speaking, in a distinctly up-close-and-personal fashion. And of course, in 2016, this country gave decline a remarkable new meaning on an increasingly strange and disturbed planet by electing Donald J. Trump as president.
As my version of TomDispatch ends (and Nick Turse’s launches), I find myself at my advanced age (with my friends beginning to die around me) in a world I simply could never have imagined. Don’t even get me started on artificial intelligence, which, as Bernie Sanders has pointed out, could someday “replace humans in controlling the planet”! Unreligious as I may be, I’m with the Pope on AI — though perhaps even more so. My own feeling is that no genuine intelligence could have been senseless enough to create such an obvious nightmare to come.
And the War on Terror Comes Home Yet Again in the Form of Donald Trump
In a sense, it might even be possible to think of Donald Trump as the possible final chapter in this country’s global war on terror. Think of him, in fact, as the way that war came home, big time! In his own fashion, he could hardly have been more of a terror and, to make matters so much worse, in 2026, a year expected to be the second hottest in recorded history, he seems remarkably intent on making war not just on Iran, or any other random country like Somalia or Nigeria, but on this very planet itself. Even his anti-immigrant agenda is, as the Guardian recently reported, ensuring that ever more fossil fuels go into the atmosphere via the stunning number of planes deporting those immigrants, helping make ever more areas of the planet ever hotter, and — of course! — ensuring that ever more people will end up as — yes! — migrants.
In short, whether it’s climate change, Iran, or you name it, Donald Trump (the second time around) is already giving heat new meaning.
And none of this (not a bit!) would I have believed in November 2001 when all of it began for me. Had you tried to show me such a future then, I would have simply laughed you out of the room and gone about my business.
In a sense, you might say that the war on terror simply never ended, since my country has never stopped bombing other countries around the world, the latest (but undoubtedly not the last), of course, being Iran. And I suspect that, without that “war,” Donald Trump would have been inconceivable.
Yes, all in all, we humans are truly a strange (and strangely unnerving) crew and, worse yet, over the decades from atomic warfare to full-scale war on the planet itself, we seem eerily driven to develop the means to be ever more destructive.
I’m at an age where my friends are indeed beginning to die and it pains me that, when I go, I’ll be leaving such a mess of an all-American planet to my poor grandchildren. They truly deserve better. And once upon a time (if I even imagined them coming into this world of ours), I might have hoped that someday in the then-distant future I would have signed off TomDispatch by claiming that I was indeed leaving them on at least a modestly better planet than when I began so long ago.
No such luck, of course, and that makes me sad indeed. I mean, we already knew that we were truly on the planet from hell when, on his third try, Donald Trump actually managed to garner 49.8% of the popular vote and win another four unbelievable years as president of the anything but United States.
Yes, anyone (even I) certainly could have hoped for better. In fact, I certainly did — even if such hopes proved unrealistic indeed. Of course, one can (and should) still hope that the next great imperial power, obviously China (if, in fact, there are to be more great powers on this ever less great planet of ours), might indeed prove more reasonable and less Trumpian. At least, that country’s leadership plans to make a fortune off the decarbonization of Planet Earth by producing the equipment, from electric vehicles to solar panels, needed to green this world of ours (even while continuing to pour record amounts of fossil fuels into the atmosphere).
Let’s also not forget that other former great power, Russia, which continues fighting its miserable war in Ukraine into its fifth year, while, of course, pouring ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (as all wars now do), while only recently launching actual nuclear missiles (though with dummy warheads instead of nuclear payloads) against Ukraine. (Just what we need on this planet of ours, of course — the threat of actual nuclear warfare!)
Yes, all in all, we humans are truly a strange (and strangely unnerving) crew and, worse yet, over the decades from atomic warfare to full-scale war on the planet itself, we seem eerily driven to develop the means to be ever more destructive. And with that grimly in mind and only wishing things were better, let me sign off on almost 25 years at TomDispatch. Sigh…
Keep ReadingShow Less
A Memorial Day Reminder: Not One Post-9/11 War Has Been Worth It
Our leaders continue to spend money on wars they think will make the United States the undisputed power in the world—wars that instead kill millions of people abroad, endanger US troops, and make life harder at home.
May 25, 2026
As Memorial Day approached, polls showed nearly two-thirds of US voters oppose the war against Iran. They’re right. After decades of war since 9/11, Americans now largely agree: War isn’t worth it.
The Iran war has killed thousands of Iranians and Lebanese and displaced hundreds of thousands more. People in poor countries around the world are facing fuel shortages, power outages, and food insecurity, with much worse to come.
Here in the United States, the war has already cost more than $50 billion, and the cost is only going up—not just at the gas pump but in opportunity. For that $50 billion, we could have paid for healthcare for 3 million people in this country and gotten about 1.5 million kids into Head Start, according to the Institute for Policy Studies National Priorities Project.
Which makes us safer?
For the $16 trillion the US had spent on the military after 9/11 before the Iran war, we could have made transformative investments in healthcare, education, and renewable energy.
President Donald Trump would like us to believe that no price is too high to stop Iran’s “nuclear threat.” But Iran isn’t a nuclear threat. Year after year, including 2026, US intelligence agencies agreed that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.
In 2015, Iran agreed to cut its stockpile of enriched uranium, reduce its reactors, and submit to unprecedentedly intrusive United Nations inspections. The United States, in return, agreed to end many of the sanctions that were crippling Iran’s economy.
It worked. Intelligence agencies around the world, including in the United States, agreed that Iran was complying. UN inspectors kept a watchful eye on Iran’s reactors, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz flowed freely, and Iran was still not trying to build a nuclear weapon, maintaining that a bomb would violate Islamic law.
However, Trump tore up the agreement in 2018. He didn’t pretend Iran was violating it; he just claimed he could “get a better deal.” He couldn’t.
Instead, Trump joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ratcheted up threats against Iran. Eventually, those threats turned into reality—first in a short-term bombing campaign in June 2025 and then a full-scale US-Israeli war this year.
Despite repeated ceasefire declarations and claims from the White House that “we’ve won,” the war continues months later. Thousands are dead, gas prices are shockingly high, and the Strait of Hormuz (which was running fine before Trump trampled the nuclear deal) remains largely closed.
It’s easy to say that diplomacy works and war does not. That’s not just a statement of principle—it’s the truth.
Diplomacy is the only strategy that’s ever worked to change Iran’s behavior. It wasn’t because the US asked nicely. It was because the US negotiated seriously; changed its own aggressive behavior; and stopped using its economic, political, and strategic power as acts of war against Iran.
Is this war worth the human, economic, or environmental costs? Clearly not. You could say the same of Trump’s other second-term conflicts—including his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and his attacks on Somalia, Yemen, Venezuela, and Nigeria.
In fact, today most Americans would agree that none of the major wars in this country’s recent memory have been worthwhile—not in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iraq again.
For the $16 trillion the US had spent on the military after 9/11 before the Iran war, we could have made transformative investments in healthcare, education, and renewable energy. We could have erased student debt and virtually wiped out child poverty at home and globally.
Instead, our leaders continue to spend money on wars they think will make the United States the undisputed power in the world—wars that instead kill millions of people abroad, endanger US troops, and make life harder at home.
Veterans know this. “The US has been at war in one form or another since my deployment in the Persian Gulf, 36 years ago,” said Michael McPhearson, executive director of Veterans for Peace.
“Trillions of tax dollars spent, thousands of US military service members dead, and tens of thousands wounded. The toll on the rest of the world is even more staggering, while warmongers and those who send us to war get richer,” he added.
“It’s time to invest in people and life and stop spending money on death and destruction,” McPhearson said.
I agree—and so do most Americans.
This piece was originally published in DC Journal.
Keep ReadingShow Less
When A Bully Has a Bomb: Trump’s 'Preventive' War on Iran
With a complete disregard for multilateral diplomatic agreements and international coalition building, the United States has once again entered into a violent conflict in the Middle East, providing no clear objective and contributing to the country’s instability.
May 16, 2026
On May 11, 2026, President Donald Trump spoke in a press conference, dismissing claims of a successful ceasefire deal with Iran, calling the most recent agreement “garbage” and describing the ceasefire agreement as “being on life support.” Trump's rejection of the ceasefire agreement reflects a common theme in his second term: favoring military aggression over diplomatic processes.
Trump has been acting through unilateral strategies as he has failed to work through international institutions (such as the United Nations or the United Arab Emirates) and to secure approval from Congress or the international community regarding going to war with Iran.
Instead, the US has joined hands with Israel, supporting Israel’s over 40-year-old goal to destabilize Iran while discarding their own diplomatic relations with Iran. But the question is, why? Why is it that the US can so quickly withdraw from Iran’s nuclear agreement when the Arms Control Association has reported: “The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released its quarterly report on Iran’s nuclear program June 6, and, unsurprisingly, the report found that Iran is complying with its commitments under the multilateral deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).”
These questions point to a growing issue: Multilateral diplomacy in the Middle East has been weakened and replaced by large-scale combat operations. Trump’s actions reflect a historical pattern in US foreign policy that has persisted since the post-Cold War Era, when the United States emerged as a global superpower. This trend of unilateral intervention by the United States was accelerated after the 9/11 attacks that resulted in the launch of the “War on Terror.”
Powerful leaders are bypassing systems of global cooperation and disregarding international law, undermining multilateral agreements while civilians die as a result.
Donald Trump’s unilateral approach to Iran reflects and intensifies these historical trends.
The partnership between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demonstrated that the United States’ foreign policy is not the result of international consensus but rather a bilateral political agreement between the two leaders, driven by their own self-interests rather than collective security. We are witnessing a dangerous shift away from multilateral decision-making and toward decision-making concentrated in the hands of a few leaders for their own personal and national interests. The dangers of this shift are already coming to fruition. According to Al Jazeera, Iranian civilians are being impacted by the war, with a deadly attack on school children ages 7-12 being one of the most notable of the war. Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns states, “This harrowing attack on a school, with classrooms full of children, is a sickening illustration of the catastrophic and entirely predictable price civilians are paying during this armed conflict.”
There are also negative impacts on Gulf States and their relationship to the US due to the military presence in these regions. Al Jazeera reports: “At their closest points, Israel and Iran are less than 1,000km (620 miles) apart. The distance from Tel-Aviv to Iran’s capital, Tehran, is about 1,600km (1,000 miles). Iran has retaliated by attacking US bases across the Middle East. Most of these attacks have been intercepted.” The United States is now contributing to the region’s instability, as they fear retaliatory attacks from Iran. Without a defined military objective, support from the United Nations, or any international coalition, the potential of another drawn-out and morally corrupt Middle Eastern conflict becomes a frightening reality.
Some of the most concerning aspects of this conflict are its ideological drivers. Trump claims that Iran poses an imminent threat to the United States because of its missiles and nuclear program. Trump also claims that he has entered this war to bring about regime change for the Iranian people. According to a video published by Channel 4 News, none of these “concerns” actually hold up. This source reports the US Defense Intelligence Agency saying, as of May 2025, Iran had no missiles capable of striking the US. It is also reported in an Associated Press article that there was no US intelligence indicating a preemptive strike by Iran. These so-called threats are unsupported by available intelligence, which leads us to believe that Trump had different reasons for starting this war, such as distracting the US public from his poor handling of the Epstein files. One speaker, Azadeh Moaveni, in the same Channel 4 News segment, hypothesizes that Trump is acting rashly in war because of his declining popularity in domestic politics. Trump’s disapproval ratings have continued to rise, and with the midterm elections nearing, he is acting out of desperation to gain popularity.
However, this hypothesis is critiqued, as many of his supporters are angered by the hypocrisy in his actions—claiming to put America first while initiating wars in other countries. So even though the war waged with Iran has garnered him even more disapproval, why won’t he stop it? Well, the same speaker hypothesizes that Donald Trump wants Ronald Reagan's political stature. “He wants to be remembered,” she says. The ego of Donald Trump and the United States’ enduring romance with Israel is proving to be a recipe for instability in the Middle East as unilateralism becomes more normalized, international law weakens, and civilians are left in cycles of prolonged violence.
Trump’s war on Iran has exposed how dangerous situations can get when the restraints of multilateralism are not utilized. We are currently living in a period in which the direction of many nations rests in the hands of a few powerful ones—who have proven themselves willing to disregard humanity, order, and the balance of power. This underscores the broader issue at hand, where multilateral diplomatic agreements in the Middle East are being weakened and disregarded in favor of ultimately resorting to military pressure.
Egotistical leaders like Donald Trump, who leads the administration of one of the world's most powerful countries, are proving disastrous for the Middle East. Powerful leaders are bypassing systems of global cooperation and disregarding international law, undermining multilateral agreements while civilians die as a result. The Middle East and other vulnerable regions face perpetual instability as systems of global cooperation are increasingly undermined in favor of powerful nations’ self-interests.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Stop Trump's High Seas Killing Spree
The US must immediately end these boat strikes and take accountability for the harms caused to the victims and their families. And Congress must do its job of conducting oversight to ensure transparent and independent investigations of these strikes.
May 16, 2026
The US military has been carrying out extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Pacific over the past nine months with impunity.
On May 8, the US military struck another boat in the eastern Pacific, killing two people and leaving one survivor. US Southern Command claimed “the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes” and “was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”
According to The Intercept, there have now been 58 such boat strikes since September that have killed at least 193 people. As with the May 8 attack, the names and nationalities of most of these victims remain unknown.
The Trump administration has accused civilian boats of transporting narcotics to the US and says its killing “narco-terrorists.” But the Pentagon has provided no evidence for these claims or any indication that the people killed posed an imminent threat.
The use of unlawful force will become more normalized at home and abroad unless the Trump administration is held accountable for these illegal killings and its blatant abuse of power.
International and US law do not allow the use of the military to kill civilians suspected of crimes. Boat bombing on the high seas is not a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nor is it curbing the flow of drugs into the United States, as President Donald Trump claims, or combating the root causes of drug use.
Even if the boats did carry drugs, the appropriate response would be to lawfully intercept and detain the suspects and afford them due process of law.
In a desperate attempt to provide legal cover for these murders, the Trump administration is asserting that the US is engaged in an “armed conflict” with unspecified drug cartels—the same kind of broad legal authority invoked by the George W. Bush administration in its post-9/11 “war on terror.”
But there is no armed conflict in the Caribbean or the Pacific. The people on those boats are civilians who are not legitimate military targets. “You just can’t call something war to give yourself war powers,” noted University of Pennsylvania professor Claire Finkelstein.
Legal and human rights experts agree.
Last October, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned the boat strikes. “None of the individuals on the targeted boats appeared to pose an imminent threat to the lives of others or otherwise justified the use of lethal armed force against them under international law,” Türk said in his October 31 statement.
Despite the unsubstantiated, fearmongering claims pushed by the Trump administration, investigations have shown that several of those people killed were fishermen trying to make a living for their families. On January 20, the US attacked the Ecuadorian fishing boat La Fiorella. None of the eight fishermen aboard have been seen since.
Survivors have also endured abuse. In two separate Pacific attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats in March, 36 survivors said they were “abducted and tortured by American forces and taken by boat all the way to El Salvador before being returned to Ecuador,” according to an investigation by Drop Site News.
“They handcuffed us, put hoods over our heads and pushed us around. We were terrified they were going to kill us,” recalled Jhonny Sebastián Palacios, one of the survivors, in an interview with The Guardian.
The US must immediately end these boat strikes and take accountability for the harms caused to the victims and their families. And Congress must do its job of conducting oversight to ensure transparent and independent investigations of these strikes.
The use of unlawful force will become more normalized at home and abroad unless the Trump administration is held accountable for these illegal killings and its blatant abuse of power.
When federal immigration agents killed American citizens earlier this year, we saw all too clearly the risks of letting the government shoot people and call them “terrorists.” It leaves all of us less secure, undermines the rule of law, and can’t be allowed to become routine.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Small Boats Destroyed by US
The Trump administration is normalizing militarism in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
May 08, 2026
A US military strike on May 4 killed two mariners in an alleged “narco boat” campaign which now has a cumulative death toll of at least 188. The pace of extrajudicial executions is ramping up, according to The Guardian. But why?
The serial murders could be, as the Trump administration claims, a genuine counter-narcotics operation. Or Mr. Trump and company may be conducting a demonstration exercise of executive power. Alternatively, the “kinetic strikes” may reflect more domestic concerns or perhaps foreign policy issues. Another possibility is that the administration is intentionally cultivating an image of unpredictability associated with “madman theory” of deterrence. We interrogate those explanations.
Counter-Narcotics Rationale
When small boats were first being blown out of the water off the coast of Venezuela last September, stopping the epidemic of fentanyl deaths was presented as a national-security emergency.
This claim was despite failure of the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s reports from 2017 through 2025 to list Venezuela as a fentanyl producer or trafficker. This was backed by comprehensive studies from the United Nations. Almost all the fentanyl enters the US from land routes, according to the US State Department.
The old “war on drugs” was morphed into the “war on terror.”
The White House initially warned that these small outboard motorboats would actually make the 1,370-mile oceanic journey to attack the homeland. Consequently, overwhelming military force was necessitated to deter them. The largest armada ever was deployed in the Caribbean: an aircraft carrier, a nuclear submarine, a number of battleships, stealth bombers, etc.
Later, the War Department signaled that the naval deployment would be “enduring” regardless of the drug interdiction mission, suggesting that was not the purpose of “bringing a howitzer to a knife fight” in the first place. Strikes, some two-thirds of them to date, were extended to the eastern Pacific.
The US subsequently invaded Venezuela on January 3, kidnapping its president and first lady. On May 1, President Donald Trump threatened that the US Navy may “take on Cuba.” This is without drug interdiction as the central pretense.
Shifting Legal Justifications
The administration did not initially articulate a detailed legal doctrine after the first lethal strike in September. The broad rubric of the president’s responsibility to defend the homeland was proffered as if the US were being attacked rather than the other way around. In this initial stage, the rhetoric echoed the “war on drugs” with only a vague legal rationale.
Early polling by the Harris organization surprisingly showed initial public support for the strikes. Democratic Party discomfort centered mainly on procedural issues regarding secrecy and constitutional war powers authority within a larger bipartisan consensus over expanding national-security tools and legitimizing militarized counter-narcotics policy.
Soon, the Trump administration’s discourse transitioned to “narco-terrorism.” SOUTHCOM statements began referring to traffickers as “Designated Terrorist Organizations” and “unlawful combatants.” This legal maneuver was needed because simple criminal behavior such as drug trafficking cannot legally justify extralegal executions. Increasingly the administration cited cartel violence as something comparable to warfare in order to move beyond criminal law.
The administration’s new legal category to justify arbitrary use of naked military force without arrests or trials came on October 1. Trump notified Congress that the US was engaged in a “non-international armed conflict.” Accordingly, alleged combatants could be lethally targeted, eliminating customary due process.
This was backed by a classified Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion, which transforms ordinary criminals into “terrorists” or “enemy combatants.” With this legal sleight of hand, strikes were normalized as wartime actions rather than exceptional interdictions. To this day, the OLC document remains secret.
By late 2025, the justification was further expanded to constitute collective self-defense in a regional war. Much to the protests of their heads of state, the US president asserted his prerogative to intervene in Columbia and Mexico to solve their drug problems. This argument of preserving regional stability—while actually achieving the opposite—bolsters the claimed legal justification by pretending that Washington not only acts in its own interest but also that of neighboring states.
By 2026, the strikes became institutionalized as routine hemispheric conflict against “narco-terrorists,” shifting a law-enforcement framework toward a war framework. The old “war on drugs” was morphed into the “war on terror.”
Domestic Political Symbolism
Another interpretation is the strikes are aimed at domestic audiences. The attacks in Latin America are thus confounded with domestic concerns over insecure borders and the punishment of perceived enemies. Fox News posted this comment after the latest extrajudicial murders: “They’re like gnats. Stupidly annoying but.. removable!”
Missiles attacks on small boats demonstrate the administration taking dramatic action against supposed threats. The imagery communicates strength and decisiveness. This explains the unusual practice of displaying videos. Never mind that Trump’s bragging of success should have led to the cessation of strikes rather than ramping them up.
A Method to the Madness
Washington capriciously flaunts its lawlessness. Defying logic is the apparent inconsistency between (1) claiming the strikes “almost totally stopped” maritime trafficking while simultaneously (2) escalating rhetoric about the existential danger trafficking poses, requiring expanded force.
This suggests that there may be a method in Trump’s madness. The obvious contradiction implies that the objective is not merely operational success but continual demonstration of unconstrained authority. The guard rails are down.
The evidence suggests that the strikes serve multiple purposes: operational interdiction, political symbolism, deterrence signaling, and above all demonstration of US imperial might.
Unlike previous administrations that justified US imperial actions as “democracy promotion,” “responsibility to protect,” and upholding “international law,” Trump unapologetically assumes the posture that the “rules-based order” is one where the hegemon makes the rules and the rest follow his orders.
Impunity is paraded rather than hidden. The administration’s secrecy and shifting legal theories are consistent with a mission prioritizing political and psychological effects. The message to Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, or Mexico’s Claudia Scheinbaum is deviation from Washington’s dictates carries high risks.
Corporate Media
Trump’s egregiousness presents a challenge for the usual follow-the-flag corporate press. Initially their coverage expressed shock over the strikes with mild questioning of their legal basis relating to constitutional authority and lack of due process.
By late 2025, press coverage shifted from treating the strikes as novel to accepting them as routine. Around the same time, what passes as the “liberal” media—such as The Washington Post, Reuters, AP, and Politico—began to more strongly question the legal basis of the strikes but not the strategic objectives.
More recently, press coverage of the strikes might be characterized as acceptance through regularization. This reflects audience fatigue and the broader post-9/11 normalization of targeted killing practices.
Hemispheric force projection
The evidence suggests that the strikes serve multiple purposes: operational interdiction, political symbolism, deterrence signaling, and above all demonstration of US imperial might. The strikes reflect a broader and growing trend by the imperial power to conduct cross-border operations against non-state actors without formal declarations of war.
This shift is tied to Pentagon doctrines emphasizing "great-power competition," "integrated deterrence," and persistent hemispheric "force projection" against both state and non-state actors. Related is the declamation by War Secretary Pete Hegseth of a “Greater North America,” a US-defined security zone extending from Greenland to the Equator.
Meanwhile, The Guardian reports: “Cocaine production is at a record high and global drug prices are at historic lows.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Major US Wars Since Korea Killed Over 4 Million Civilians, Cost Nearly $6 Trillion: Analysis
Trump’s Iran War is killing almost twice as many civilians per day as Afghanistan and, during the first week, cost nearly three times as much per day as Iraq.
Apr 30, 2026
US President Donald Trump's war in Iran has passed the two-month mark with little to show for it besides thousands of dead civilians, gas prices exceeding $4 a gallon, and tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds spent.
It's just the latest in a decades-long series of US-led wars that have cost unfathomable amounts of blood and treasure, according to an analysis out this week by Al Jazeera.
It estimates that major US military engagements since 1950—in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—have directly cost the lives of nearly 4.5 million civilians and more than $5.7 trillion.
The data, collected into a sprawling open-source WarCosts archive maintained by TheDataProject.AI, comes from a variety of government reports, peer-reviewed academic research, and investigative organizations.
The civilian casualty number notably only includes those directly caused by the wars themselves, not those caused by the resulting losses of food, healthcare, or war-related diseases. It also does not include the lives lost in proxy conflicts funded by the US, Saudi Arabia's brutal war in Yemen, which resulted in an estimated 150,000 violent civilian deaths between 2015-22, or Israel's more than two-year genocidal war in Gaza, which has resulted in at least over 75,000 deaths, and likely many more.
The dollar figure, meanwhile, does not include the additional $2.2 trillion the US is expected to spend caring for veterans of the post-9/11 wars until 2050, according to Brown University's Costs of War research series.
(Graphic by Al Jazeera, data from TheDataProject.AI's WarCosts database)
Even compared with the staggering figures throughout US history, the cost of the war in Iran so far is uniquely high.
The Pentagon estimated that during just the first six days of the war, the US government spent an average of $1.88 billion per day, nearly three times the daily cost of the next most expensive major conflict, Iraq.
On Wednesday, Pentagon comptroller Jules Hurst told Congress that the Iran War had cost about $25 billion in total since it began two months ago. But many critics, including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), have suggested that this number is "totally off" and the cost is likely much higher.
Stephen Semmler, a data analyst and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, estimated based on statements from officials, federal procurement and operations data, and reporting on military deployments and armaments use that by March 13—just two weeks into the conflict—the war had already cost about $28.7 billion, over $2.1 billion per day. This analysis included the military's operational costs, the costs of weapons, damage to US military assets, and subsidies to Israel.
The Trump administration has reportedly requested an additional $200 billion in military funding from Congress for the war.
The war in Iran resulted in 1,701 civilian deaths during its first 40 days, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, equivalent to about 43 per day—nearly double the number killed per day in Afghanistan.
(Graphic by Al Jazeera, data from TheDataProject.AI's WarCosts database)
What distinguishes the Iran War from previous US military adventures is its staggering unpopularity. At its start, polls showed 43% of Americans disapproved of Trump's decision to launch the war. Disapproval had jumped to 60% as of April 12.
With the exception of the Korean War, which began very unpopular and gained approval over time, no other major US conflict has begun with so little backing from the US public—just 9% disapproved of the Afghanistan War when it began, 23% disapproved of Iraq, and 24% disapproved of Vietnam, and it took years for the majority of the public to turn against them.
(Graphic by Al Jazeera, data from Gallup and Ipsos)
The WarCosts data center estimates that the nearly $8 trillion spent on these major wars could have paid for a century of four-year public college for every American, 400 years of clean drinking water for everyone on Earth, or more than 200 years of universal pre-K for every child.
Citing a recent expert estimate that the Iran War could cost $1 trillion if it goes on for a decade, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) lamented in a social media post that "somehow, there is always money for war, but never enough money for housing, education, or the needs of working people."
The senator said, "We must and will change our national priorities."
Keep ReadingShow Less
How Trump's Department of Homeland Security Brings the War on Terror Home
The Trump administration is conducting its own homegrown version of counterinsurgency warfare right here in the United States of America.
Apr 30, 2026
America’s Department of Homeland Security has been receiving lots of scrutiny right now from journalists and ordinary citizens like me—and for good reason! Detaining people en route to their kids’ schools, in hospitals, or at work shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind these days when I think of “freedom,” “civil rights,” or “America.” Nor should spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to rebuild warehouses so that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, can hold people without charges in subhuman conditions. What do you think?
In all of this mayhem, it’s easy to overlook new human rights violations because there are so many each day. Violations of the rule of law have become the air Americans breathe.
In a matter of months, ICE has leaped far from its mandate as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) civilian investigative arm—not its muscle. Note its agents’ forced-entry tactics, its recent 40% shorter training protocols that stress the use of force over knowledge of our Constitution, and a dramatic rise in use-of-force incidents and deaths in custody. And it has more than doubled in size!
Instead of a workaday force that makes sure the rules are followed, it’s become an internal police force that bears increasing resemblance to what the United States military has been doing in dozens of other countries around the world as part of the never-ending Global War on Terror (GWOT) that this country has been waging for almost a quarter-century now in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks. America’s wars are indeed coming home.
Our Wars, Ourselves
The War on Terror has been notable for its heavy reliance on special forces operations like nighttime raids on civilian homes and incursions into mosques, schools, and marketplaces to search for enemy combatants or information. In particular, the US scaled back large troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan after its failed wars in those countries, and yet, by 2016, about 70% of the world’s nations had US special operations forces deployed in them. At the height of the Afghanistan war in 2010-2011, US special operations forces were conducting thousands of nighttime raids into Afghan homes in search of suspected terrorists.
The violence our troops have used in our names should not be easy to stomach, even from afar.
Since those special forces operate outside of conventional battlefield settings, often with little planning and without embedded journalists, the public has had few chances to scrutinize their activities. Not surprisingly, then, we haven’t paid much attention to the civilian deaths that resulted. Roughly 40%—or close to half a million—of those killed directly in our wars have been civilians, an unnerving number of them children. Our military’s reliance on special operations, urban warfare, and proximity-based ways of identifying suspected terrorists (more on that later) means that many people with no connection whatsoever to the warring parties have been shot down or bombed out in their homes, markets, or schools, among other places.
And that’s because the US military has come to rely on a form of targeting called “pattern-of-life surveillance,” whereby they look for suspected opposition leaders by using what they know of their daily routines to aid with target identification. This approach holds some serious implications for the safety of civilians and has arguably led to extra anger and so the ability of armed opposition groups to recruit new members more easily.
The intimacy of death in our wars, combined with an increasingly unaccountable Pentagon that has isolated itself from journalists, while using its own secretive “justice” system, means that knowledge of civilian deaths often emerges only months or even years after the original events (if and when journalists find eyewitnesses willing to provide their accounts). As a result, the collective lack of awareness of most Americans has been striking and, in recent years, has been increased by the misconception that drone warfare—an ever more prominent part of our wars—is more “precise” at targeting enemy combatants than boots-on-the-ground combat.
21st Century Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
One thing is certain: US military servicemembers who have fought in those wars do know what they entail (and many carry that intimate knowledge with them in particularly haunting ways). As a clinician, I specialize in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which you’ve likely heard of by now. It’s a condition characterized by flashbacks; a desire to avoid anything that reminds you of what happened; and a deep sense of anger or ongoing edginess, anxiety, depression, and mistrust.
For people who have fought in such foreign wars and manage to make it back, everyday life in America can be riddled with imagery that triggers painful memories. For this generation of veterans, among whom are those who were charged with kicking down family doors on night raids, a child’s playful scream on a playground might trigger memories of the boy who screamed in horror when you rammed down the door of his home in Kabul, Afghanistan. The sight of a discarded doll on the ground at that same playground might trigger a flashback to the market in Iraq where a little girl dropped everything as she fled the explosion of an improvised explosive device (IED) with her mother. A cornfield in the town where you grew up could transport you back to the rural Afghan village where you shot a farmer you thought was a terrorist.
There’s a reason why events like the infamous rampage of American troops through the village of My Lai in 1968 during the Vietnam War and the massacre that followed (when they killed hundreds of unarmed civilians) still remain etched in the memories of many Americans of a certain age, whereas I’d bet that most of us would be hard pressed these days to name particular instances when US troops murdered civilians in our contemporary wars. Perhaps there are simply too many such murders, or maybe killing has been in the collective air for so long—in our video games, in Hollywood films, in our militarized police force—that we don’t care as much anymore.
The Fog of War
Were we, however, to pay more attention and look more closely, the violence our troops have used in our names should not be easy to stomach, even from afar. Take the story of the 2005 shooting of 24 civilians in the small city of Haditha, Iraq. Once a peaceful, shade-dappled middle-class residential area, Haditha was occupied by American troops who conducted nighttime raids on civilian homes in search of “enemy combatants.”
Being in the wrong place at the wrong time took on urgent meaning for Haditha’s residents, even as being seen around the US military base nearby could mean risking decapitation by enemy troops, since members of al-Qaeda were also watching. One day, an IED blew up a Marine Humvee (an all-terrain military vehicle), killing one American soldier and injuring two more. In the hours that followed, Marines entered three homes and shot almost everyone inside, nearly wiping out three families and 24 civilians, including at least 10 young children. The head of that Marine unit claimed that the victims were somehow responsible for that IED explosion (because they had not stopped it), though the only link was that they happened to live in the neighborhood where it took place. In its award-winning coverage of the incident 19 years later, The New Yorker offered this quote from the letter of the lawyer for the Marines: “I trust you have no sense of… the stress of combat or the fog of war that precedes from that.”
If the administration can violate constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure when it comes to people in their homes, then it’s your guess or mine who will next end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Though that grim incident stands out in my mind because of the vivid coverage it finally received, what came to be known as the Haditha massacre was anything but the only one in which civilians became direct targets of American forces in this country’s War on Terror. Take the multiple incidents in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2010 and the years that followed, when US and Afghan forces killed farmers and day laborers they misidentified as enemy Taliban fighters. Or consider the 2010 nighttime raid by US special operations forces in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, when troops attacked the home of a family gathering to celebrate a child’s birth, killing two pregnant women, a teenage girl, and two male relatives (though the US-NATO forces involved initially claimed that the women had been killed prior to their assault).
There are far too many incidents to name here, but I think you get the picture of a war in which scenes that you and I might otherwise normally relate to became enmired with violence for no obvious reason.
The Ripple Effects at Home
There are many parallels that can be drawn between the US War on Terror and the Department of Homeland Security’s current immigration crackdown here in the US, and you’ve probably noticed some of them. Take the reliance of DHS and ICE on patterns of movement among targeted populations to sweep up large numbers of “illegal aliens,” a tendency to detain (or even shoot) first and ask questions later (if at all), and something we haven’t even talked about yet—the deportation of detainees to countries where they are likely to be mistreated or even tortured in prisons with far laxer human rights standards than we have (much like the Central Intelligence Agency’s grim global “black sites” in the Global War on Terror). This points to the sort of operational flexibility that military commanders and many Americans troublingly accept as part of our present national security operations.
Most troubling to me is that in May 2025, DHS issued an internal memo authorizing its agents to enter people’s homes without a warrant signed by a judge. Instead, those agents only need an administrative warrant signed by another immigration official (based on a suspicion that they have reason to remove someone living in the home). A handful of high-profile incidents since then show that ICE agents are indeed entering homes forcibly.
According to a New York advocacy group, in November 2025, ICE agents knocked down a family’s door in the borough of Queens in New York City and pointed a gun at a mother and four children before forcibly removing her from her bed. They did not produce a warrant and alleged that they were looking for someone who turned out not even to live at that address. Similarly, in September of that year, hundreds of armed federal agents descended on a Chicago apartment building at night in search of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, some landing in Black Hawk helicopters on the roof. They detained dozens of residents, including children whom they took from their beds, zip-tied, and held for hours, some separated from their parents or guardians.
If the administration can violate constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure when it comes to people in their homes, then it’s your guess or mine who will next end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, their fates shaped by President Donald Trump’s choice of an enemy of the day or the urges of stressed-out ICE agents.
Trauma and the Everyday
Counterinsurgency wars are often the bloodiest types because troops attempt to root out the enemy in the general population. Our 21st-century War on Terror has shown that this country remains more than capable of fighting like that today.
One of my favorite anthropologists, Begoña Aretxaga, drove home the horror of such combat. She documented political violence against Basque nationalists in late 20th-century Spain. State officials raided homes and communities, planted car bombs, and kidnapped activists. As she pointed out, such trauma is “horror cropping up in the routines of ordinary life.” In the cities where she did research, people watched their neighbors and relatives being “disappeared” or getting killed, while fear permeated everyday events like taking a walk through their neighborhood.
We can look at our military’s actions as well as ICE’s in detail and refuse to accept “terror” among us (however the government conceptualizes that elusive term!) as a reason to mistreat others.
Today, none of us should be surprised that the Trump administration is conducting its own homegrown version of counterinsurgency warfare right here in the United States of America. Tactics once used abroad are increasingly our new normal. I don’t think it helps that each new development shocks so many of us more than the last, making it hard (for me at least) to look at what DHS and ICE are doing with fresh surprise each time such actions prove to be distinctly so far beyond the pale of what the founders laid out in our Constitution.
Yet understanding the costs of war also offers us an opportunity. We can look at our military’s actions as well as ICE’s in detail and refuse to accept “terror” among us (however the government conceptualizes that elusive term!) as a reason to mistreat others. We can denounce atrocities ranging from that Chicago raid to possible future versions of the Haditha massacre.
We can also think more clearly about the root causes of why our war on terror has indeed been coming home—literally. (It should be no surprise that about a third of ICE officers reportedly have had some kind of experience in the US military.) While we’re protesting what the Trump administration is doing, we should also think about the way it’s been slashing the mental health staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans need our help, too, rather than being left in isolation and shame.
After all, even those who break and enter American homes aren’t aberrations. They are not just among us, they are us: For years, they have acted in our names, including abroad, when all too many of us were barely paying attention. And when we ignore what they did over there, we allow the same things to happen here.
Keep ReadingShow Less
With Help From Platner, Former Top Obama Official Admits 'Forever War Has Been Destroying America From Within'
"We like to frame our wars as virtuous, but they are not," says Ben Rhodes.
Apr 22, 2026
Ben Rhodes, who served deputy national security advisor under former US President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017, has done a fair number of mea culpas in the years since he left government service. But a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday punctuates with a fresh admission: "We like to frame our wars as virtuous, but they are not."
Rhodes comes to this statement circuitously as he writes about recent time spent with Graham Platner, the US Army and Marine veteran who served tours in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as an infantryman who is now running as a Democrat for the US Senate in Maine to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Platner, who has recently opened up a double-digit lead against his primary rival, two-time Maine Gov. Janet Mills, has been an outspoken anti-war voice since putting his hat in the ring for elected office and Rhodes, who cut his teeth defending the forever wars during the Obama years, says Democratic Party leaders—and voters wherever they are—would be wise to listen to what he has to say.
"The forever war has been destroying America from within, like an organism that must keep growing to survive, filling us with fear of outsiders and contempt for one another," writes Rhodes.
Most Democrats, observes Rhodes, don't talk about war the way Platner does, and that's not just a feature of his wartime experience compared to those in positions of power or paid to pontificate for think tanks or on the corporate news networks.
After traveling around with Platner on the campaign trail in Maine, Rhodes concludes that "Americans must change their relationship to war itself."
"One reason we have a hard time reckoning with the forever war is that it undermines our own story," he continues. "We like to think of America as a force for good, acting out of enlightened self-interest, our military fighting for freedom around the globe. Is that really what’s been happening?"
In their conversation, Platner explained that "most people get it," suggesting those who live and work in the real world, outside of DC or within media echo chambers, understand the costs of the nation's endless wars. “Do you think this country should spend more on schools and hospitals and less on bombs?" asked Platner rhetorically. "A lot of people are like, yeah, that’s pretty obvious.”
When Platner had his epiphany that the wars he fought in Iraq and Afghanistan were a mistake, Rhodes said he, still working for the White House in those years, was exactly the kind of person the soldier was thinking of when he said that the "people running the war didn’t even seem to know the point of the war," calling it "a self-licking ice cream cone" that could not admit its failures.
"Listening to [Platner] talk, I knew intuitively what he was saying," writes Rhodes. "I would have been one of those people back in 2011, believing that what we were doing was helping Afghans."
For someone so enmeshed in the politics of US war-making and defending the foreign policy of past US governments from criticism, Rhodes confesses the pitfalls of American exceptionalism and where it can lead. And again, he quotes Platner:
We are so broken emotionally when it comes to our politics that we’ve literally created this story that it’s inherent in being a competent political leader to kill civilians. If you’re not willing to do some hard things and drop some bombs, then you’re not up to the task of power. I think it’s the opposite. You’re not up to the task of being in power if you do not think about the cost of violence. If that’s not at the front of your mind, then I don’t think you are morally in the right place to be in positions of power.
Such an argument directly implicates not just past presidents, but certainly US President Donald Trump, currently waging a new war of choice against Iran, as well as his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who openly celebrates the killing prowess ("lethality") of the US military while characterizing the laws of war as impediments.
Contextualizing why he has come to conclude that contemporary US wars lack virtue, Rhodes writes that the conflicts we have been waging abroad for most of this century have also done tremendous and lasting damage here at home. "They resemble," writes Rhodes, "a declining empire sowing chaos along its periphery as a matter of strategy: Economic and political elites profit while the Americans who fight suffer along with the places they attack."
As Platner told Rhodes, such admissions must be spoken about publicly in order for them to lead to meaningful change in the country. And voices like Platner's, argues Rhodes, must be listened to because the "visceral and moral reckoning he advocates is the only way to truly dismantle the forever war, change our priorities and detoxify our country."
"To save ourselves, we must stop this cycle of violence," Rhodes concludes. "We must find meaning not in our capacity to kill or control others, but in each other."
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More Stories
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy