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If not stopped soon, this war could easily turn into a global conflagration, effectively into World War III

Jeffrey D. Sachs & Sybil Fares | March 16, 2026 | Common Dreams

The Israel-US war on Iran is engulfing the entire Middle East and could escalate to global war. The economic consequences are already severe and could become catastrophic. The Strait of Hormuz carries approximately one-fifth of all oil traded globally, and 30 percent of the world’s LNG. A sustained closure of the Strait would trigger an energy shock without modern precedent.

The conflict is likely to spiral out of control because the US and Israel are dead set on hegemony in the Arab world and West Asia – one that combines Israeli territorial expansion with American-backed regime control across the region. The ultimate goal is a Greater Israel that absorbs all historic Palestine, combined with compliant Arab and Islamic governments stripped of genuine sovereignty, including on choices as to how and where they export their oil and gas.

This is delusional. No country across the region wants Israel to run wild as it is doing, murdering civilians across the entire region, destroying Gaza and the West Bank, invading Lebanon, striking Iraq and Yemen, and carpet-bombing Tehran. No country wants its hydrocarbon exports under effective US control. The war will end if and only if global revulsion at US and Israeli aggression forces these countries to stop. Short of that, we are likely to see the Middle East in flames and the world in an energy and economic crisis unprecedented in modern history. The war could easily turn into a global conflagration, effectively into World War III.

Yet, there exists an alternative. The war could stop on rational grounds if Israel and the US are decisively called to account by the rest of the world. Ending the war requires a set of interlinked steps to provide basic security for all parties, and indeed for the world. Iran needs a permanent end to the US-Israel aggression. The Gulf countries need an end to Iran’s retaliatory strikes. The Palestinians need an independent state. Israel needs lasting security and the disarmament of Hamas and Hezbollah. The whole world needs the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and international monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program to ensure it abides by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as Iran says it wants to do. And all countries want, or should want, real sovereignty for themselves and their region.

Collective security could be achieved in five interconnected measures. First, the US and Israel would immediately end their armed aggression across the entire region and withdraw their forces. Second, Iran would stop its retaliatory strikes across the GCC and resubmit to monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency under a revised Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which President Trump recklessly abandoned in 2018. Third, the Strait of Hormuz would reopen with mutual agreement of Iran and the GCC. Fourth, the two-state solution would be immediately implemented by admitting Palestine as a full member state of the UN. Israel would be required to end its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and Syria. Fifth, the UN recognition of the State of Palestine would form the basis for a comprehensive regional disarmament of all non-state actors, verified under international monitoring. The end result would be a return to international law and the UN Charter.

Who would win in this plan? The people of the region, of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the rest of the world. Who would lose? Only the backers of Greater Israel, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and Mike Huckabee, who have brought the world to the brink of destruction.

Here are the five steps in more detail.

First: End the US-Israeli Armed Aggression.

Israel and the US would stop their aggression and withdraw their forces. In turn, Iran would cease its retaliatory strikes. This would not be a mere ceasefire. Rather, it would be the first step of an overall peace agreement and collective security arrangement.

Second: Return to the JCPOA.

The nuclear question would be resolved through strict monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, not through bombing campaigns that merely put Iran’s enriched uranium beyond international monitoring. The UN Security Council would immediately reinstate the basic framework of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), under which Iran must strictly comply with IAEA monitoring and agreed limits on its nuclear program, while economic sanctions on Iran would be lifted.

Third: Reopen the Strait of Hormuz in an Iran-GCC Framework.

The Strait of Hormuz would be quickly reopened, with safe passage jointly guaranteed by Iran and the GCC. The GCC countries would assert sovereignty over the military bases in their countries to ensure that the bases would not be used as launchpads for renewed offensive strikes against Iran.

Fourth: The Two-State Solution.

The two-state solution would be implemented, by admitting Palestine into the UN as the 194th permanent member state. This requires nothing more than the US lifting its veto. Palestinian statehood is in accord with international law and with the Arab Peace Initiative, which has been on the table since 2002. In turn, the countries in the region would establish diplomatic relations with Israel, and the UN Security Council would introduce peacekeepers to ensure the security of both Palestine and Israel.

Fifth: An End to Armed Belligerency.

In conjunction with the two-state solution, all armed belligerency in the region would end forthwith, including the disarmament of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other armed non-state actors. In the case of Palestine, the disarmament of Hamas would underpin the authority of the Palestinian state. In the case of Lebanon, the disarmament of Hezbollah would restore Lebanon’s full sovereignty, with the Lebanese Armed Forces as the sole military authority in the country.

The disarmament would be verified by international monitors and guaranteed by the UN Security Council.

The key point is that the Israel-US war on Iran has not occurred in a vacuum. The Clean Break strategy, developed by Netanyahu and his American neocon backers in 1996, and implemented since then, calls for Israel to establish hegemony in the region through wars of regime change, with the US as the implementing partner. As NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark revealed after 9/11, the US drew up plans a quarter century ago to overthrow governments in seven countries: “starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” We are therefore living through the culmination of a long-standing plan by Israel and the US to dominate the Arab world and West Asia, create a Greater Israel, and permanently block Palestinian statehood.

We are not optimistic about the likelihood of our plan. The Israeli government is murderous and Trump is delusional about US power. We are perhaps already in the early days of WWIII. Yet because the stakes are so high, it’s worth laying out real solutions even if they are long shots. We do believe, however, that the non-Western world—the part that is not vassal states to US power—understands the urgency of peace and security.

Who, then, could champion a peace plan that the US and Israel will resist with every means at their disposal, until the weight of global opposition and economic catastrophe leaves them no choice but to accept it?

There is one main group, and that is the BRICS nations.

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and the bloc’s expanded membership, which now includes the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, represent approximately half of the world’s population and more than 40 percent of global GDP (compared to 28 percent for the vaunted but overblown G7 countries). The BRICS have the credibility, the economic weight, and the absence of the historical complicity in Middle East imperialism to bring the world to its senses. The BRICS should convene an emergency summit and present a unified framework incorporating the conditions for peace and security, which in turn would be pressed at the UN Security Council. There, world opinion would tell the US and Israel to stop pushing the world towards catastrophe, and would remind all countries to adhere to the UN Charter.

Source: commondreams.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (QNN)- Nine Palestinian police officers were killed in a targeted Israeli strike on their vehicle while they were on duty in central Gaza on Sunday, in another violation of Trump’s so-called ceasefire and one of the deadliest attacks since the Israeli-US assault on Iran began.

In a statement, the Ministry of Interior and National Security in Gaza confirmed the “heinous crime committed by the Israeli occupation on Sunday afternoon, when it targeted a police vehicle carrying several officers and personnel in the central Gaza.”

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/2033203301190193211]

The Ministry added that Israel targeted them while they were “performing their duties monitoring markets and maintaining security and public order during the holy month of Ramadan.”

[https://x.com/QudsNen/status/2033183321002332271]

The attack resulted in the killing of nine officers and personnel:

• Colonel Iyad Tawfiq Abu Youssef (Director of the Intervention and Public Order Police in the Central Governorate)
• First Sergeant Abdul Rahman Munir Al-Hamsi
• First Sergeant Rami Ibrahim Harb
• Sergeant Youssef Mohammed Mustafa
• Soldier Abdullah Hossam Badwan
• Soldier Wissam Akram Al-Hafi
• Soldier Fathi Raafat Oweida
• Assistant Musab Ziad Al-Durra
• Assistant Tawfiq Azmi Al-Khalidi

The Ministry also noted that the repeated Israeli attacks targeting police facilities and striking police officers and personnel “constitute a war crime and a blatant violation of international humanitarian law, as police facilities are civilian protection institutions safeguarded under international law and must not be targeted.”

There has been a spike in Israeli attacks targeting police in the war-torn Strip despite the ceasefire that took effect in October, which Israel has repeatedly violated by killing hundreds and blocking the entry of much-needed aid.

According to Palestinians and rights groups, such attacks are part of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians, as it seeks to dismantle the enclave’s security and justice structures by undermining public order and spreading chaos and insecurity.

Israeli forces have killed more than 640 Palestinians since the “ceasefire” went into effect, including over 288 children, women, and the elderly.

Over 72,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since the war began on October 7, 2023.

The attack, which is one of the deadliest attacks in Gaza since the Israeli-US assault on Iran began, comes just hours after Israel committed a massacre in central Gaza, killing a family of four: the mother, who was pregnant, the father, and their son.

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Doubtless, the war launched by US President Donald Trump is not popular among ordinary Americans.

According to the latest public opinion poll, only a minority of Americans—part of the dwindling core of Trump’s supporters—believe that the US-Israeli aggression against Iran has merit.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in early March 2026, only 27 percent of Americans approve of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran—while 43 percent disapprove and 29 percent are unsure.

This pro-war constituency is likely to remain supportive of Trump until the end of his term in office, and long after.

However, the war on Iran is not popular, and it is unlikely to become popular, especially as the Trump administration is reportedly fragmented between those who want to stay the course and those desperate for an exit strategy. Such a strategy would allow their president to save face before the midterm elections in November.

Mainstream media—aside, of course, from the pro-war chorus in right-wing news organizations, podcasters, and think tanks—also recognize that their country has entered a quagmire.

If it continues unchecked, it will likely prove worse than the war in Iraq in 2003 or the long war in Afghanistan, which lasted 20 years and ended with a decisive American defeat in August 2021 following the withdrawal of US forces and the collapse of the Afghan government.

Both wars have cost US taxpayers an estimated $8 trillion, including long-term veteran care and interest on borrowing, according to the Brown University Costs of War Project.

Iran is already promising to be even more costly if the insanity of the war—instigated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war-crazed government—does not end very quickly.

Many Americans may understand the difficult situation in which Trump’s unhinged behavior and his unexplained loyalty to Netanyahu have placed their country. What they rarely confront is the moral dimension of that crisis.

Though they speak of the war’s failure—the lack of strategy, the lack of preparation, the absence of an end goal, and the confusion surrounding its objectives—very few in mainstream media have taken what should have been the obvious moral position: that the war itself is criminal, unjustifiable, and illegal under international law.

That position should have been obvious the moment the first bomb was dropped over Tehran. The aggression—particularly while negotiations between Iran and the United States were underway under Omani mediation—was ethically indefensible.

Any remaining doubt should have disappeared when US-Israeli strikes hit civilian areas, including schools and residential districts in the city of Minab in southern Iran, killing hundreds of civilians, mostly children and women.

This moral silence is not new. In fact, it has often been masked by a familiar rhetorical device: the selective invocation of women’s rights.

In nearly every US war on Arab and Muslim countries, women’s rights have featured heavily in the propaganda used to justify war. The vast majority of mainstream media organizations, think tanks, human rights groups, and activists—even those who rejected military interventionism on principle—agreed at least on that particular premise: the urgency of women’s rights.

They used Malala Yousafzai as a symbol of girls’ education and women’s rights, presenting her as a model of American benevolence. At the same time, they ignored the fact that among the countless innocent Muslims killed across the Middle East and Asia in the last few decades—some counts place them in the millions—children and women represented a large share of the victims.

The same scenario was repeated in Gaza during the ongoing genocide, where UN agencies estimate that women and children make up roughly 70 percent of the more than 72,200 Palestinians killed since October 2023. According to data compiled by ‘UN Women’ and Gaza’s health authorities, the total includes an estimated 33,000 women and girls.

Yet mainstream media continues to center Israeli claims about abuses of women’s rights by Hamas in Gaza, as if the tens of thousands of women killed and maimed by Israeli bombardment were not even worthy of serious consideration.

The same pattern is now repeating itself in Iran. The administration of Donald Trump—a man known for his degrading views and actions toward women—has been allowed, along with war criminal Netanyahu, to frame the war against Iran as a struggle for women’s rights and liberation.

They cultivated a network of supposed women’s rights activists, presenting them as authentic Iranian voices whose mission was to rescue women from massive human rights abuses in their own country. Even on the Left, many fell into that trap—denouncing Trump on the one hand, while still absorbing and reproducing his and Israel’s propaganda.

Now that thousands of women and children have been killed or wounded in the US-Israel unprovoked, unethical, and illegal war on Iran, many of these same voices have fallen silent, quietly placing women’s rights on hold until the outcome of the onslaught becomes clear.

Though much of the media now expresses doubt about Trump’s war, the moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences.

Complaints about rising energy prices, commentary about Trump’s political immaturity, and criticism of his failure to assess the situation properly before ordering bombs to fall have replaced the moral argument altogether.

Equally absent is Netanyahu’s role in the war, as well as the stranglehold Israel exerts over successive US administrations—Republican and Democrat alike—including the supposedly ‘America First’ president.

This logic dominates much of the mainstream strategic debate. Commentators such as Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, and others have repeatedly argued, in one form or another, that the United States must avoid being consumed by Middle Eastern conflicts and instead concentrate on what they describe as the central geopolitical challenge of our time: the rise of China.

While it is important to highlight the unpopularity of America’s latest military adventure, such opposition must rest on moral and legal grounds.

That said, mainstream liberal media should not be confused with genuine anti-war voices. Their objection to war is rarely principled. They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security.

This is not opposition to war.

It is the logic of war itself.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kim Scipes

Donald Trump, in all his hubris and idiocy, and in response to Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu, launched an illegal and unconstitutional war on Iran beginning on February 28, 2026. It was not provoked by Iran, and it clearly was not well planned for by the United States or Israel.

Trump, who has suffered from delusions of adequacy throughout his political career, had certainly gotten full of himself. Thinking he had been elected “God,” not to the presidency, he has been asserting US power around the world blatantly; he’s not even lying about it. His attack on Venezuela went extremely well for him, capturing the president, Nicolas Maduro and his wife and political leader on her own account, Celia Flores, without any US casualties. (And obviously not worried about the Cuban and Venezuelans his invading force killed.) Hey, isn’t this fun!

Obviously watching the world’s reaction to his kidnapping of Maduro and Flores, and seeing nothing being done to counter such, and under pressure from Netanyahu, Trump decided to attack Iran, thinking they’d give in as apparently Venezuela’s leadership quickly did. [What’s not recognized by many is that the US has basically been at war with Venezuela since 1999; their economic sanctions have caused much death, sickness, and emigration, among everything else; according to the British medical journal Lancet (November 2025), US sanctions over all (not just Venezuela) have caused 564,258 deaths annually between 1971-2021, as compared to 106,000 battle deaths during the same period; by my math, that’s over 28 million killed by US sanctions in the 50 year period.]

But Iran is not Venezuela: knowing the threat of nuclear-armed Israel to Iran, the Iranian leaders have been preparing for foreign attack for many years, including by working on nuclear arms themselves; the 2016 agreement with the Obama Administration limited Iranian efforts for 15 years; thinking he could arrange a better deal, Trump had withdrawn from that in his first term. After Trump’s attack on Iranian nuclear facilities last June, Iran apparently restarted its efforts. (For a good explanation, see “Trump’s Claim About Obama Nuclear Deal and Iran’s Nuclear Development” by Saranac Hale Spencer, March 12, 2026, at https://www.factcheck.org/2026/03/trumps-claim-about-the-obama-nuclear-deal-and-irans-nuclear-development/.)

However, Iran’s missiles to date cannot reach the United States; they can, however, reach Israel. And Netanyahu apparently was worried since his on-going genocidal war against the Palestinians is continuing…. And so, Bibi basically played Trump into the war.

And while some Americans compare this current attack on Iran with W’s on Iraq in 2003, or any one of a number of “events” initiated by the United States, such as the invasion of Grenada in 1983 or Panama in 1989, many around the world think the proper comparison is with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 or Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

But Trump apparently thought that the Iranians would bow down once attacked and beg for relief. Oops!

The problem—among many others—is that Trump and his sycophants currently at the top of the US government know nothing of history. Let me explain.

We can divide all the countries of the world into two categories. The first are imperial countries (commonly referred to as the “developed,” “first world,” countries or, “the West”). (If one wants to get more precise, there are the “traditional” imperialist countries of Western Europe and Japan, and then there are the “settler white colonies” of the US, Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa.) In general, the traditional imperialist countries invaded these countries, stole the raw materials, natural resources, land, and sometimes people from the countries they colonized, and without any consideration of what effects they had on their victims, brought these resources back to the respective home country to develop it, while maintaining continued control of each victimized country and its resources for as long as possible. The settler white colonies permanently stole the land from the indigenous peoples who populated them, often providing work and/or land for other white immigrants, and then afterwards engaged in imperialist theft to develop these former colonies; the US being the most “successful” of all of the white settler countries. This is why the US and Canada, the countries of Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia live at a qualitatively higher standard of living than the other countries of the world: being more militarily vicious over the last 500 years, they stole these resources, supplementing the value created by and stolen from workers in capitalist countries.

The other countries of the world have each been colonized by the imperial countries in the past or even remain colonies today; see Puerto Rico and Palestine as examples of continuing colonies today! This means each has been victimized; their people killed, and harmed in multiple ways, their raw materials and natural resources stolen, etc. Every country in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East—formerly called the “third world”—had been colonized by at least one of the imperial countries by 1940, except for two: (1) Thailand (formerly Siam) which served as a buffer state between the French and English empires in Southeast Asia, and (2) Iran (Persia).

So, Trump is trying to intimidate a country of 90 million people that has never been conquered in something like 5,500 years and, for some strange reason, they aren’t giving in to the global punk and bully. (And, unfortunately, US service people with others in the Gulf States and Israel are the ones going to be hurt, not our global fascists, Trump, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, or Bibi Netanyahu.) The US didn’t do well in Iraq, with its approximately 24 million people, so I’m wondering how they expect to subjugate 90 million in Iran with this understanding…?

And there has been all-but-no planning on what to do after the initial air attacks in a war that has already cost the US over $11 billion in the first week alone…. How are they going to conquer the Iranians? And I’ll give everyone a clue: it will not be done by air power alone, no matter how sophisticated or technologically advanced our’s might be: no war in human history has ever been won by air power alone.

Plus, the Iranian military technology seems pretty sophisticated from what I’ve seen to date, and the US might not get its way as it expected. They have done a significant amount of damage to a number of targeted countries, including Israel, which has seen successful in their attacks on Tel Aviv and Haifa. They also have done a lot of damage to US facilities and bases in the Gulf States.

And Trump, in his imperial arrogance, didn’t even bother to present his case to the American people. He had the State of Union, where he had a significant audience, and he failed to make his case, to rally Americans behind his imperialist war. Talk about chickenshit.

But what can we expect from one who hid behind his daddy’s money and connections to avoid even being eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War? Many veterans—I enlisted in the USMC in 1969 for four years, not an astute career move at the time, and eventually attained the rank of Sergeant, although fortunately was never deployed overseas, and “turning around” while on active duty—call him “Commander Bonespurs,” with extreme contempt.

And most Americans don’t support this war. And that’s before we see serious price rises, inflation increases, and body bags come home. And these things will increasingly impinge upon the national consciousness.

The reality is that the US Empire is dying. The economic foundation of the empire—which is absolutely crucial to its existence—is fast falling. As of March 13, 2026, the National Debt is at $38.8 trillion, and increasing fast: it was less than one trillion dollars (actually $908 billion or $ .9 trillion) when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981: it has grown approximately $37 trillion in the 45 years since then. (The $ .9 trillion debt took 192 years to accumulate.) This debt is approximately 120% of Gross National Product, which means even if every American didn’t get paid or investments realized, we could not eradicate it in a year! This also means that any economic growth we’ve had since 1981 has been based on writing “hot checks,” not substantive economic production: it’s bullshit.

The reality is that we cannot take care of Americans, or good people in the world, no matter what we’re told. Capitalism has failed, and it’s not coming back. We have to reject imperialism in all of its manifestations and create a new economic system that takes care of all of us around the globe while rejecting domination in all forms.

But while the situation has been presented, we need to also consider how the press has covered the war. To that, I now turn.

Press Coverage of the War

Understanding how the press covers the war is important. Most Americans have not traveled outside the country, and especially not into any of the colonized or formerly colonized countries of the world. Therefore, we are dependent on the press to accurately present what is going on.

But the media is not this neutral institution that “objectively” covers the news, as it likes to project. The problem—which is almost never acknowledged—is that each media outlet has its own interests when presenting the news: while they might be accurate in some situations, the decision as to how to cover an issue such as the war is shaped by how that particular news outlet perceives its own interests. Each media outlet—whether the New York Times, Fox News, CNN, MS NOW, or even Democracy Now!, as well as each other outlet—perceives developments from recognizing its own interests. Period. And that is why we get extremely contradictory views of the news; and why people understand the world according to the media they watch. It’s not magic; each media outlet presents its view of the world according to its own interests, and this shapes how their news consumers see the world differently than some other outlets’ audiences.

Now, while I haven’t done a formal study, it has been very surprising to me how much the US media has challenged the Trump administration’s projection of the need for war and the war itself. Other than Fox—whose views are ideologically right-wing, as opposed to conservative, and impossible for this analyst to watch—almost every other media outlet has rejected or at least challenged the Trump perspective. They might not understand a lot, but they get the smell of bullshit and don’t like it. They are certainly not convinced of the necessity or the righteousness of Trump’s attack on Iran.

And they have been reporting on the economic consequences of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the impact on ordinary Americans, especially at the gas pump; this is an attack on Trump’s followers, who have probably been hurt economically more than anyone else. This will soon be augmented by cutting off fertilizer—something like one-third of all which comes through the Strait—which will increase the price of food as time goes on.

This certainly distinguishes the media coverage from the fawning lies and support for George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq; of which, Democracy Now! was a notable exception.

But the mainstream media’s understanding is, nonetheless, extremely limited. First of all, they insist on bringing former US military commanders on air to comment on the military developments. Since the US record on wars in Asia since World War II has been pathetic—I score them at 0-3-1 (with the “tie” being in Korea in the early 1950s)—I don’t see why these generals have such legitimacy.

But the bigger problem is that while they may understand the military aspect of the war, they don’t know much, if anything, about the politics of the war, and the politics are always much more inclusive and broader than any military aspects. It is said the US never lost a major conflict with the Vietnamese liberation forces during the US invasion of their country; I don’t know if this is true or not, but when I visit or work in Vietnam, it’s the (North) Vietnamese flag I see waving over the country, not that of the South or the US!

The other problem that I recognize is that the history of Iran is incomplete, if not completely missing. At best, I see them referring (incompletely) to developments in 1979, when the Mullahs and the students rallied the people in what has been called the Iranian Revolution to overthrow the Shah of Iran. That, supposedly, is when the wheels feel off the train in Iran. (The part that is missing on that angle is that after the Revolution, the Mullahs turned on the students and executed something like 10,000-13,000 if my memory is correct; that gave the religious leaders almost total control over the country.)

But what is almost never recognized is who put the Shah into power: where did he come from?

In 1953, the CIA, operating under Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy’s grandson, and the British MI-6, led an operation that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mossedegh, replacing him with the Shah, Rezi Pavlevi. He was a bastard, and his SAVAK—internal security agency—was recognized as truly vicious; and they had been trained by CIA operatives. (For a recent account, see Alfred W. McCoy’s Cold War on Five Continents, published earlier this year by Haymarket Books, pp. 149-162).

In other words, the problems with Iran have overwhelmingly developed from the actions by the United States! The US government said they knew how to run the country—or so they thought—but it appears they didn’t know as much as suggested!

But my main argument is this: if the media only goes back to 1979, it is lying. It’s giving the American people a false story; it is propaganda and must be challenged. We cannot allow Americans to continue to not think about the impact of the operations of “our” CIA.

One other thing to think about when considering press coverage of this war: why are there almost no pictures of damage from Iranian attacks from Israel? We know, from alternative sources such as Al-Jazeera and independent political analysts, that Iranian missiles and drones have hit targets in Israel; in fact, an oil refinery in Haifa was severely damaged. Yet no pictures: how come? According to former US Army colonel, Larry Wilkerson—one of the few former military officers who has some idea of what’s really going on—speaking on Democracy Now!, Israel has officially banned photographs from being taken of the damage! This suggests that their missile defenses have been considerably less successful in protecting Isreal and its population than claimed.

And this gets to a larger issue: in wartime, especially, every US government lies. (I won’t comment on foreign governments, as they almost certainly do as well, but that is outside of this focus on US-based media.) We can document this back to World War II (at least) and it involves every subsequent administration since, both Democrat and Republican. The press has ignored this reality, and thus present comments by Trump and his cronies as if they can be trusted; they cannot.

In short, this war is a disaster: my bet is that Trump will be thumped by the Iranians. The economic impact of the war is broad and getting more so. The people most hurt by these economic consequences are those of Trump’s base. And Trump is not in control, no matter what Pete Hegseth, etc., says.

We on the left need to recognize the global nature of the war specifically, but also US imperialism: we cannot confine our analysis to just the US or even North America but must take a global perspective. The overwhelming threat to the well-being of people around the world is the US Empire. We need to use this situation to confront not only Trump and the Empire, but the Democrats acquiescence and projection of this. We can either stand with the people of the world, or the Empire: there is no alternative.

Kim Scipes, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest in Westville, IN.

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Alfred W. McCoy

In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Among the “antique legends” most helpful in understanding the likely outcome of the current U.S. intervention in Iran is the Suez Crisis of 1956, which I describe in my new book Cold War on Five Continents. After Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, a joint British-French armada of six aircraft carriers destroyed Egypt’s air force, while Israeli troops smashed Egyptian tanks in the sands of the Sinai Peninsula. Within less than a week of war, Nasser had lost his strategic forces and Egypt seemed helpless before the overwhelming might of that massive imperial juggernaut.

But by the time Anglo-French forces came storming ashore at the north end of the Suez Canal, Nasser had executed a geopolitical masterstroke by sinking dozens of rusting ships filled with rocks at the canal’s northern entrance. In doing so, he automatically cut off Europe’s lifeline to its oil fields in the Persian Gulf. By the time British forces retreated in defeat from Suez, Britain had been sanctioned at the U.N., its currency was at the brink of collapse, its aura of imperial power had evaporated, and its global empire was heading for extinction.

Historians now refer to the phenomenon of a dying empire launching a desperate military intervention to recover its fading imperial glory as “micro-militarism.” And coming in the wake of imperial Washington’s receding influence over the broad Eurasian land mass, the recent U.S. military assault on Iran is starting to look like an American version of just such micro-militarism.

Even if history never truly repeats itself, right now it seems all too appropriate to wonder whether the current U.S. intervention in Iran might indeed be America’s version of the Suez Crisis. And should Washington’s attempt at regime change in Tehran somehow “succeed,” don’t for a second think that the result will be a successfully stable new government that will be able to serve its people well.

70 Years of Regime Change

Let’s return to the historical record to uncover the likely consequences of regime change in Iran. Over the past 70 years, Washington has made repeated attempts at regime change across the span of five continents — initially via CIA covert action during the 44 years of the Cold War and, in the decades since the end of that global conflict, through conventional military operations. Although the methods have changed, the results — plunging the affected societies into decades of searing social conflict and incessant political instability — have been sadly similar. This pattern can be seen in a few of the CIA’s most famous covert interventions during the Cold War.

In 1953, Iran’s new parliament decided to nationalize the British imperial oil concession there to fund social services for its emerging democracy. In response, a joint CIA-MI6 coup ousted the reformist prime minister and installed the son of the long-deposed former Shah in power. Unfortunately for the Iranian people, he proved to be a strikingly inept leader who transformed his country’s oil wealth into mass poverty — thereby precipitating Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

By 1954, Guatemala was implementing an historic land reform program that was investing its mostly Mayan indigenous population with the requisites for full citizenship. Unfortunately, a CIA-sponsored invasion installed a brutal military dictatorship, plunging the country into 30 years of civil war that left 200,000 people dead in a population of only five million.

Similarly, in 1960, the Congo had emerged from a century of brutal Belgian colonial rule by electing a charismatic leader, Patrice Lumumba. But the CIA soon ousted him from power, replacing him with Joseph Mobutu, a military dictator whose 30 years of kleptocracy precipitated violence that led to the deaths of more than five million people in the Second Congo War (1998-2003) and continues to take a toll to this day.

In more recent decades, there have been similarly dismal outcomes from Washington’s attempts at regime change via conventional military operations. After the September 2001 terrorist attacks, U.S. forces toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Over the next 20 years, Washington spent $2.3 trillion — and no, that “trillion” is not a misprint! — in a failed nation-building effort that was swept away when the resurgent Taliban captured the capital, Kabul, in August 2021, plunging the country into a mix of harsh patriarchy and mass privation.

In 2003, Washington invaded Iraq in search of nonexistent nuclear weapons and sank into the quagmire of a 15-year war that led to the slaughter of a million people and left behind an autocratic government that became little more than an Iranian client state. And in 2011, the U.S. led a NATO air campaign that toppled Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s radical regime in Libya, precipitating seven years of civil war and ultimately leaving that country divided between two antagonistic failed states.

When Washington’s attempts at regime change fail, as they did in Cuba in 1961 and in Venezuela last year, that failure often leaves autocratic regimes even more entrenched, with their control over the country’s secret police strengthened and an ever-tighter death grip on the country’s economy.

Why, you might wonder, do such U.S. interventions invariably seem to produce such dismal results? For societies struggling to achieve a fragile social stability amid volatile political change, external intervention, whether covert or open, seems to invariably be the equivalent of hitting an antique pocket watch with a hammer and then trying to squeeze all its gears and springs back into place.

The Iran War’s Geopolitical Consequences

By exploring the geopolitical implications of Washington’s latest intervention in Iran, it’s possible to imagine how President Donald Trump’s war of choice might well become Washington’s very own version of the Suez crisis.

Just as Egypt snatched a diplomatic victory from the jaws of military defeat in 1956 by shutting the Suez Canal, so Iran has now closed off the Middle East’s other critical choke point by firing its Shahed drones at five freighters in the Straits of Hormuz (through which 20% of global crude oil and natural gas regularly passes) and at petroleum refineries on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf. Iran’s drone strikes have blocked more than 90% of tanker departures from the Persian Gulf and shut down the massive Qatari refineries that produce 20% of the world supply of Liquified Natural Gas, sending natural gas prices soaring by 50% in much of the world and by 91% in Asia — with the price of gasoline in the U.S. heading for $4 a gallon and the cost of oil likely to reach a staggering $150 per barrel in the near future. Moreover, through the conversion of natural gas to fertilizer, the Persian Gulf is the source for nearly half the world’s agricultural nutrients, with prices soaring by 37% for urea fertilizer in markets like Egypt and threatening both spring planting in the northern hemisphere and food security in the global south.

The extraordinary concentration of petroleum production, international shipping, and capital investment in the Persian Gulf makes the Straits of Hormuz not only a choke point for the flow of oil and natural gas but also for the movement of capital for the entire global economy. To begin with the basics, the Persian Gulf holds about 50% of the world’s proven oil reserves, estimated at 859 billion barrels or, at current prices, about $86 trillion.

To give you an idea of the scale of capital concentration in the region’s infrastructure, the national oil companies of the Gulf Cooperation Council invested $125 billion in their production facilities in 2025 alone, with plans to continue at that rate for the foreseeable future. To keep the global oil tanker fleet of 7,500 vessels that largely serves the Persian Gulf afloat, it costs nearly $100 million for a single large “Suezmax” tanker — of which there are about 900 normally on the high seas, worth a combined $90 billion (with frequent replacements required by the corrosion of steel in harsh maritime conditions). Moreover, Dubai has the world’s busiest international airport at the center of a global network with 450,000 flights annually — now shut down by Iranian drone strikes.

Despite all the White House media hype about the terrible swift sword of America’s recent airstrikes, the 3,000 U.S.-Israeli bombing runs against Iran (which is two-thirds the size of Western Europe) in the war’s first week pale before the 1,400,000 bombing sorties over Europe during World War II. The striking contrast between those numbers makes the current U.S. air attacks on Iran seem, from a strategic perspective, like shooting at an elephant with a BB gun.

Moreover, the U.S. has limited stocks of about 4,000 interceptor missiles, which cost up to $12 million each and can’t be rapidly mass-produced. By contrast, Iran has an almost limitless supply of some 80,000 Shahed drones, 10,000 of which it can produce each month for only $20,000 each. In effect, time is not on Washington’s side if this war drags on for more than a few weeks.

Indeed, in a recent interview, pressed about the possibility that Iran’s vast flotilla of slow, low-flying Shahed drones might soon exhaust the U.S. supply of sophisticated interceptor missiles, Pentagon leader General Dan Caine was surprisingly evasive, saying only, “I don’t want to be talking about quantities.”

Whose Boots on the Ground?

While economic and military pressures build for a shorter war, Washington is trying to avoid sending troops ashore by mobilizing Iran’s ethnic minorities, who make up about 40% of that country’s population. As the Pentagon is silently but painfully aware, U.S. ground forces would face formidable resistance from a million-strong Basij militia, 150,000 Revolutionary Guards (who are well-trained for asymmetric guerrilla warfare), and Iran’s 350,000 regular army troops.

With other ethnic groups (like the Azeris in the north) unwilling or (like the Baloch tribes in the southeast, far from the capital) unable to attack Tehran, Washington is desperate to play its Kurdish card, just as it has done for the past 50 years. With a population of 10 million astride the highland borders of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the Middle East without their own state. As such, they have long been forced to play the imperial Great Game, making them a surprisingly sensitive bellwether for larger changes in imperial influence.

Although President Trump made personal calls to the top leaders in Iraq’s Kurdistan region during the first week of the latest war, offering them “extensive U.S. aircover” for an attack on Iran, and the U.S. even has a military airbase at Erbil, Kurdistan’s capital, the Kurds are so far proving uncharacteristically cautious.

Indeed, Washington has a long history of using and abusing Kurdish fighters, dating back to the days of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who turned their betrayal into a diplomatic art form. After he ordered the CIA to stop aiding the Iraqi Kurdish resistance to Saddam Hussein in 1975, Kissinger told an aide: “Promise them anything, give them what they get, and f… them if they can’t take a joke.”

As Iraqi forces fought their way into Kurdistan, killing helpless Kurds by the hundreds, their legendary leader Mustafa Barzani, grandfather of the current head of Iraqi Kurdistan, pleaded with Kissinger, saying, “Your Excellency, the United States has a moral and political responsibility to our people.” Kissinger did not even dignify that desperate plea with a reply and instead told Congress: “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

Last January, in an amazingly ill-timed decision, the Trump White House betrayed the Kurds one time too many, breaking Washington’s decade-long alliance with the Syrian Kurds by forcing them to give up 80% of their occupied territory. In southeastern Turkey, the radical Kurdish PKK Party has made a deal with Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan and is actually disarming, while Iraq’s Kurdistan region is staying out of the war by respecting a 2023 diplomatic entente with Tehran for a peaceful Iran-Iraq border. President Trump has called at least one leader of the Iranian Kurds, who constitute about 10% of Iran’s population, to encourage an armed uprising. But most Iranian Kurds seem more interested in regional autonomy than regime change.

As Trump’s calls upon the Kurds to attack and the Iranian people to rise up are met with an eloquent silence, Washington is likely to end this war with Iran’s Islamic regime only further entrenched, showing the world that America is not just a disruptive power, but a fading one that other nations can do without. Over the past 100-plus years, the Iranian people have mobilized six times in attempts to establish a real democracy. At this point, though, it seems as if any seventh attempt will come long after the current U.S. naval armada has left the Arabian Sea.

From the Granular to the Geopolitical

If we move beyond this granular view of Iran’s ethnic politics to a broader geo-strategic perspective on the Iran war, Washington’s waning influence in the hills of Kurdistan seems to reflect its fading geopolitical influence across the vast Eurasian land mass, which remains today the epicenter of geopolitical power, as it has been for the past 500 years.

For nearly 80 years, the United States has maintained its global hegemony by controlling the axial ends of Eurasia through its NATO alliance in Western Europe and four bilateral defense pacts along the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia. But now, as Washington focuses more of its foreign policy on the Western Hemisphere, U.S. influence is fading fast along the vast arc of Eurasia stretching from Poland, through the Middle East to Korea that scholars of geopolitics like Sir Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman once dubbed the “rimland” or “the zone of conflict.” As Spykman put it succinctly once upon a time: “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”

Since the rise of Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy in 2016, major and medium powers along that entire Eurasian rimland have been actively disengaging from U.S. influence — including Europe (by rearming), Russia (by challenging the West in Ukraine), Turkey (by remaining neutral in the present war), Pakistan (by allying with China), India (by breaking with Washington’s Quad alliance), and Japan (by rearming to create an autonomous defense policy). That ongoing disengagement is manifest in the lack of support for the Iran intervention, even from once-close European and Asian allies — a striking contrast with the broad coalitions that joined U.S. forces in the 1991 Gulf War and the occupation of Afghanistan in 2002. With Trump’s micro-militarism in Iran inadvertently but clearly exposing the limits of American power, Washington’s fading influence across Eurasia will undoubtedly prove catalytic for the emergence of a new world order, which is likely to move far beyond the old order of U.S. global hegemony.

Just as Sir Anthony Eden is remembered ruefully today in the United Kingdom as the inept prime minister who destroyed the British Empire at Suez, so future historians may see Donald Trump as the president who degraded U.S. international influence with, among other things, his micro-military misadventure in the Middle East. As empires rise and fall, such geopolitics clearly remains a constant factor in shaping their fate –- a lesson I try to teach in Cold War on Five Continents.

In difficult times like these, when events seem both confused and confusing, Mark Twain’s “broken fragments of antique legends” can remind us of historical analogies like the collapse of the power and influence of Great Britain or of the Soviet Union that can help us understand how the past often whispers to the present — as it indeed seems to be doing these days in the Straits of Hormuz.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

The war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.

Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.

Resources – as the Venezuelans know – are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponized.

Let them eat dirt.

International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.

They spew the same hypermasculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.

Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.

“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in “The World After Gaza.” “The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil – the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilized societies – cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”

The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.

They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers. They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse. No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorize the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in “1984.” “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials. I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.

Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps. They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes. In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.

These concentration camps, where there is no due process and people are disappeared, are designed for us. And by us, I mean the citizens of this dead republic. Yet we watch, stupefied, disbelieving, passively waiting for our own enslavement.

It won’t be long.

The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls what is happening “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Oh, the critics say, don’t be so bleak. Don’t be so negative. Where is the hope? Really, it’s not that bad.

If you believe this you are part of the problem, an unwitting cog in the machinery of our rapidly consolidating fascist state.

Reality will eventually implode these “hopeful” fantasies, but by then it will be too late.

True despair is not a result of accurately reading reality. True despair comes from surrendering, either through fantasy or apathy, to malignant power. True despair is powerlessness. And resistance, meaningful resistance, even if it is almost certainly doomed, is empowerment. It confers self-worth. It confers dignity. It confers agency. It is the only action that allows us to use the word hope.

The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in “The Sane Society.”

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Lebanon and Iran. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media.

The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza. Those who name and denounce this evil are smeared, blacklisted and purged from university campuses and the public sphere. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, and see your broadcasting license revoked, as the Chair of the F.C.C. Brendan Carr has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.

Those are the only choices left.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans.

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ranjan Solomon

The war that is coming is not the first one. There were other wars before it. When the last one came to an end there were conquerors and conquered. Among the conquered the common people starved.”
Bertolt Brecht – a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet.

War in West Asia has once again revealed a painful truth: the language of strategy and security often hides the deeper reality of human suffering. Political leaders speak of deterrence, regime change, nuclear threats and military objectives. Yet beneath these calculations lies the lived reality of ordinary people whose lives are shattered by forces far beyond their control. The ongoing confrontation between Iran, Israel and the United States is not merely a geopolitical contest; it is a rapidly expanding human tragedy.

The present war escalated dramatically after joint United States and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets in February 2026, justified largely in terms of concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme and regional influence. The attacks triggered a wave of retaliatory missile and drone strikes by Iran across the region, transforming what had long been a shadow conflict into open warfare.

As with most wars, the first and most immediate victims have been civilians. Hundreds have been killed and thousands injured across the region, with major cities in Iran and Israel experiencing direct missile strikes. Early reports indicate that more than a thousand people have already died in Iran alone, with children among the casualties and entire residential areas struck during the bombardment.

The destruction is not limited to loss of life. Hospitals, schools and vital infrastructure have been hit or severely damaged, undermining the basic systems that sustain civilian life. The World Health Organization has warned that attacks on healthcare facilities in Iran have already been documented, raising serious concerns about the collapse of medical services during the conflict.Israel has suffered severe consequences too as well as US combatants. In war situations, it is the innocents who face the worst consequences without choice.

Beyond the immediate violence lies another profound consequence of war: displacement. Fear of further attacks has forced large numbers of people to flee major urban centres. Tens of thousands have left Tehran alone, while millions across Iran have reportedly moved internally in search of safety.

In neighbouring countries such as Lebanon and across the wider region, similar patterns of displacement are emerging as civilians attempt to escape the expanding theatre of war.

Displacement brings with it the erosion of normal life. Families abandon homes, children lose access to education, and livelihoods disappear overnight. For many, exile becomes a prolonged condition rather than a temporary interruption. Refugee movements triggered by this conflict could place enormous strain on neighbouring states already dealing with the aftermath of previous regional wars.

The psychological consequences are equally devastating. War leaves invisible wounds that statistics rarely capture. The trauma of bombardment, displacement and sudden loss reshapes individual lives and collective memory. Children who grow up under the constant threat of missile sirens and air strikes carry these experiences long into adulthood.

What makes the current conflict particularly alarming is its potential to widen geographically. Unlike earlier localized confrontations, this war has already begun to involve multiple actors across West Asia. Armed groups allied with Iran operate in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, while American military bases across the region have become potential targets for retaliation.

Such dynamics create a dangerous chain reaction in which the battlefield expands beyond national borders. The war has already caused displacement in Lebanon and heightened tensions across the Gulf. If the conflict continues to escalate, millions more civilians could find themselves trapped in its widening arc.

The economic consequences are also reverberating far beyond the region. Disruptions to energy supply routes and fears over the security of the Strait of Hormuz have pushed global oil prices sharply upward. These shocks ripple across the global economy, affecting fuel prices, food costs and inflation in countries far removed from the battlefield.

For ordinary people in developing countries, including India, these economic tremors translate into rising costs of living and greater economic insecurity. Thus the human consequences of this war are not confined to West Asia; they extend globally through interconnected markets and supply chains.

At the heart of this unfolding tragedy lies a deeper paradox. Wars are often launched in the name of security, deterrence or national survival. Yet they frequently produce the very instability they claim to prevent. The confrontation between Iran, Israel and the United States risks entrenching cycles of retaliation that make lasting peace increasingly difficult.

Moreover, the war threatens to overshadow and deepen existing humanitarian crises across the region. Gaza remains devastated from previous rounds of conflict, with reconstruction painfully slow and humanitarian access restricted. The expansion of regional hostilities risks diverting attention and resources from populations already living in extreme distress.

History repeatedly demonstrates that wars in the Middle East rarely remain contained. The conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan all began with limited objectives but evolved into prolonged humanitarian catastrophes with global consequences.

The present war carries similar risks. A prolonged confrontation could deepen regional instability, trigger further displacement and strain already fragile political systems across West Asia.

Ultimately, the most enduring cost of war is not measured in military gains or strategic advantage. It is measured in broken families, shattered communities and generations forced to rebuild lives amid ruins.

The Iran–Israel–USA war therefore demands not only diplomatic attention but moral clarity. The pursuit of military dominance in a region already scarred by decades of conflict can only deepen the cycle of suffering.

If the world fails to prioritise de-escalation and genuine diplomacy, the tragedy unfolding today may become yet another chapter in the long history of wars whose consequences are borne not by the powerful who declare them, but by the ordinary people who must live with their aftermath.

Ranjan Solomon has worked in social justice movements since he was 19 years of age. After an accumulated period of 58 years working with oppressed and marginalized groups locally, nationally, and internationally, he has now turned a researcher-freelance writer focused on questions of global and local/national justice.

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Lylla Younes

Among the most targeted groups of Israel’s expanded war on Lebanon have been medical workers. Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Authority has been the hardest hit.

BEIRUT, LEBANON—In early October 2025, Lebanese paramedic Haj Qassem Sultan stood outside Marjayoun Government Hospital in southern Lebanon and addressed Lebanese TV.

“Our message is clear. Even if we are killed one by one, we will not abandon our duty,” he said. “We will continue to serve Khiam and Marjayoun and Al-Taybeh and Debbine and all of our sacred land.”

He was attending a memorial for seven of his colleagues who were killed exactly one year earlier in an Israeli airstrike on ambulances parked outside the hospital. Five other paramedics, including Sultan, were wounded in the attack, in what human rights groups said was an apparent war crime.

On Friday, Sultan was killed in another Israeli strike on an Islamic Health Authority (IHA) medical center in Burj Qalaouiyah in southern Lebanon’s Bint Jbeil District. The bombing destroyed the facility, killing 12 people, including on-duty doctors, paramedics, nurses, and three patients.

The majority of the victims worked with the IHA, a healthcare and emergency service provider affiliated with Hezbollah that operates rescue and medical services in Beirut’s southern suburbs and across much of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

Sultan “was very loved, very respected,” IHA spokesperson Mahmoud Karaki told Drop Site News. “He was always present among the people. Everyone knew him.”

The day after the attack, Israel doubled down on its attacks on emergency workers with its military spokesperson, claiming without evidence that Hezbollah was making “military use of medical facilities and ambulances” and that occupation forces would target them if they did not cease.

A strike on Monday on a house in Kfar Sir, just north of the Litani River killed one person. When an ambulance from the IHA arrived, a second strike killed two paramedics and wounded another, according to the state-run National News Agency. Two more IHA ambulances were targeted on Monday in separate strikes, killing four more paramedics.

“Some of our personnel have been killed at our medical centers, others while they were out in the field, trying to pull people out from under the rubble,” he said. “The exact place they went to do their rescue work was targeted again once they arrived,” he added, a tactic known as a double tap strike.

The Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, condemned the escalating attacks on medical workers in Lebanon. “These incidents highlight the ongoing assault on Lebanon’s healthcare system, which is crucial for the populations it serves,” Ghebreyesus wrote in a social media post. “WHO condemns this tragic loss of life and emphasizes that health workers must always be protected. According to international humanitarian law, medical personnel and facilities should never be attacked or militarized.”

Israel dramatically escalated its assault on Lebanon with relentless airstrikes and ground incursions on March 2, two days after the U.S. and Israel began striking Iran. Last week Israel ordered the forced displacement of all of southern Lebanon and launched a ground invasion. Over the past two weeks, at least 850 people have been killed across the country, including over 100 children. More than 850,000 people have been displaced. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz likened the operation to the genocidal assault on Gaza and said on Monday that Lebanese residents in the south of the Litani River would not be able to return to their homes indefinitely.

Among the most targeted groups of Israel’s expanded military campaign have been medical workers. Over the past two weeks, Israeli attacks have struck 13 medical and ambulance centers and forced five major hospitals to shut down, according to the health ministry. At least 38 have been killed so far, including personnel from the IHA, the Red Cross, and the Islamic Risala Scout Association, a medical and rescue organization affiliated with Lebanon’s Amal Movement. The IHA has been the hardest hit, with more than two dozen killed, according to Karaki.

The Israeli military itself has been accused of using ambulances in military operations in Lebanon. Most notably, during its attack on the town of Nabi Chit in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley last week that killed 41 people, the Lebanese Army accused Israeli commandos of moving through the area using ambulances marked with the insignia of the IHA.

Human rights groups say Israel’s targeting of medical personnel and infrastructure is part of a deadly pattern that emerged during Israel’s assault on Gaza. Hospitals in the enclave were systematically bombed, raided, and destroyed and some 1,700 health care workers were killed during the first two years of the genocide, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. During Israel’s assault on Lebanon between October 8, 2023 and late November 2024 when a “ceasefire” was put into effect, Israeli attacks killed at least 222 medical and civil defense personnel and injured hundreds more, according to the Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

Researchers with Amnesty International examined four cases in which Israeli forces struck first responders in Lebanon during that period. According to Kristine Bekerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, the organization found no evidence that the facilities or vehicles hit in those attacks were being used for military purposes at the time.

“We looked at attacks affecting the Islamic Health Authority, but we also examined strikes on organizations with no connection to Hezbollah, like the Lebanese Civil Defense and the Red Cross, and in different parts of the country,” Bekerle told Drop Site. “We saw a range of civilian actors—some loosely affiliated with Hezbollah, others with no affiliation at all—being killed, wounded, or targeted.”

“From an international law perspective, civilians and civilian objects should not be targeted for attack,” Bekerle added. “But healthcare workers, facilities, and ambulances are especially protected.”

Bekerle noted that the Israeli military has a long record of publishing lies, but even if the claim were true, it would not justify broad attacks. Under international humanitarian law, an army must demonstrate that a specific object is being used for military purposes, for example, a particular ambulance in a particular location at a specific time. “You cannot simply declare that all ambulances are legitimate targets,” Bekerle said.

“What we’re seeing between Lebanon and Gaza is this big broadening of what constitutes an ‘acceptable’ target to the military,” she added. “The reality is that a civilian entity affiliated with a non-state armed group is not automatically targetable.”

Israel’s massive and unprecedented displacement orders in Lebanon have made the work of Lebanese first responders all the more dangerous.

Moussa Shaalan, a medic with the Lebanese Civil Defense in the coastal city of Sour, told Drop Site that the current war is the hardest he has experienced in more than three decades of service.

“The difference this time is that there are many more people in the villages,” Shaalan said. “They say they can’t afford the rent in other parts of the country…and that when they fled north, they were humiliated. They tell you they would rather die at home,” he added. “So the demand for emergency services under dangerous conditions is much higher.”

Most of the places being struck are still densely populated and full of children, Shaalan added. He fears the death toll will continue to rise, particularly since Israel has begun targeting civilian infrastructure such as bridges and roads that enable rescue teams to reach the wounded.

Karaki, the IHA spokesperson, said Israel’s attacks on first responders are part of a broader effort to force people from the region.

“The presence of a team of first responders offers a last remaining sense of security for people who have chosen to remain steadfast on their land,” he said. “That’s why the occupation targets healthcare workers who have nothing to do with what’s happening on the battlefield.”

Lylla Younes Investigative journalist and writer based in Beirut

17 March 2026

Source: dropsitenews.com

By Ranjan Solomon

“When the powerful wage war, it is the voiceless who are buried beneath its silence.”

We all want the horror in Gaza to end. But the reality is harsher than we are willing to admit: it has not ended. It has been pushed into the shadows.

Today, the world’s gaze is fixed on the escalating confrontation involving Iran, the United States, and Israel. Missiles, retaliation, and the spectre of regional war dominate headlines. Yet, beneath this spectacle, another crisis deepens – less visible, less reported, but no less devastating.

Gaza is being starved, not in isolation, but in the cover provided by a wider war. This is not conjecture. Analysts and humanitarian observers have already warned that the Iran war has shifted global attention away from Gaza, allowing Israel greater operational and political space to intensify its actions. The consequences are immediate and severe: border crossings have been restricted, aid deliveries curtailed, and the fragile lifelines sustaining Gaza’s population have been further weakened.

War, in this sense, is not only fought with bombs. It is also fought through distraction.

The Politics of Distraction

Every major conflict produces a hierarchy of attention. Some crises dominate the global stage; others are relegated to its margins.

The war with Iran has done precisely this – it has reordered global concern. Diplomatic energy has shifted. Media bandwidth has narrowed. Public outrage, once focused on Gaza’s devastation, has been diluted. Even humanitarian advocacy struggles to break through the noise of a larger, more geopolitically “significant” war. This shift is not neutral. It has consequences on the ground. When scrutiny diminishes, impunity expands.

The reduction of international pressure creates a permissive environment—one in which policies that might otherwise provoke outrage can proceed with minimal resistance. In Gaza, this has translated into tighter restrictions on aid, reduced humanitarian access, and worsening conditions for an already besieged population. The logic is brutally simple: what the world does not see, it does not stop.

Starvation as Strategy

The humanitarian situation in Gaza was already catastrophic. Now, it is entering an even more dangerous phase. More than 100,000 children face acute malnutrition. But this statistic, stark as it is, does not fully capture the violence of what is unfolding. Acute malnutrition is not merely hunger – it is the systematic breakdown of the human body. Fat reserves are consumed, muscles deteriorate, immune systems collapse, and, ultimately, vital organs fail.

This is not an unintended by-product of war. It is the result of policies that restrict food, fuel, and medical supplies. Since the escalation with Iran, crossings into Gaza have been repeatedly closed or severely limited, disrupting the flow of essential goods. The impact is immediate: shortages intensify, prices rise, and humanitarian agencies struggle to maintain even minimal levels of support. In such conditions, aid itself becomes precarious—subject to political calculation and military priorities. Starvation, therefore, becomes a tool.

The Destruction of Self-Sufficiency

To understand the depth of Gaza’s crisis, one must look beyond aid and examine the destruction of its internal capacity to survive.

Over 86 percent of Gaza’s farmland has been damaged or destroyed. Irrigation systems lie in ruins. Water wells are unusable. Greenhouses have been flattened. The infrastructure that once allowed Gaza to produce its own food has been systematically dismantled. This is not incidental damage. It is structural.

A population that cannot feed itself becomes dependent. And dependency is not merely an economic condition- it is a political one. It places survival itself under external control. In this context, the Iran war amplifies an already existing dynamic. By diverting attention and reducing scrutiny, it allows the continuation—and deepening—of policies that entrench this dependency.

War as Cover

History offers countless examples of how larger conflicts create cover for actions elsewhere. The present moment is no different.

As missiles fly between Israel and Iran, Gaza recedes from the centre of international concern. The urgency that once drove calls for ceasefire, humanitarian access, and accountability is replaced by the immediacy of a new war.

This is not to suggest that the Iran conflict is fabricated or insignificant. It is real, dangerous, and regionally destabilizing. But its political effect is unmistakable: it reshapes priorities. And in that reshaping, Gaza is pushed further into invisibility.

Even the language of diplomacy reflects this shift. Proposals framed as regional stabilization – often associated with figures such as Donald Trump – risk subsuming Gaza within broader geopolitical calculations. In such frameworks, Palestinian rights are not central; they are negotiable. The danger is clear: Gaza becomes a bargaining chip in a larger game.

The Illusion of Humanitarianism

In response to Gaza’s suffering, the international community often turns to humanitarian aid. While necessary, this response is fundamentally limited. Aid can alleviate immediate suffering, but it does not address the structures that produce that suffering. When the flow of aid itself is controlled, restricted, or weaponized, it becomes part of the problem.

The Iran war exacerbates this limitation. With resources, attention, and political will redirected, humanitarian efforts in Gaza face additional constraints. Funding becomes uncertain. Access becomes more difficult. The already fragile system of support begins to fracture. In such a context, humanitarianism risks becoming a substitute for justice—a way of managing crisis without confronting its causes.

Resistance in the Ruins
Yet, even in these conditions, Gaza is not passive. Across the territory, farmers and community groups are attempting to rebuild what has been destroyed. With minimal resources, they are repairing irrigation lines, restoring wells, and cultivating small plots of land. Greenhouses are being reconstructed. Crops are being grown.

These efforts are fragile and limited. They cannot compensate for the scale of destruction. But they represent something vital: the refusal to surrender to imposed dependency. To grow food in Gaza today is not merely an economic activity. It is a political act. It asserts the right to live with dignity. It challenges the structures that seek to reduce a population to perpetual reliance on aid. It insists that survival must not be dictated by external control.

A Crisis of Conscience

The question that emerges is not only political, but one of justice.

What does it mean for the world to watch one war while another continues in its shadow? What does it mean for attention to shift, for outrage to dissipate, for suffering to become background noise? The answer is uncomfortable. It means that global concern is not evenly distributed. It means that some lives are rendered more visible -and therefore more valuable – than others. It means that silence, even when unintended, becomes complicity.

Gaza today is not only a site of humanitarian crisis. It is a test of whether the international community can hold multiple truths at once—whether it can recognise that a new war does not erase an ongoing one.

Beyond the Shadow

Gaza cannot be allowed to disappear into the margins of a larger conflict. The war with Iran may dominate headlines, but it must not obscure the realities on the ground in Gaza. The restriction of aid, the destruction of infrastructure, and the use of starvation as a weapon demand continued attention and accountability. To see Gaza clearly requires resisting the logic of distraction.

It requires insisting that no war, however large, justifies the neglect of another. It requires recognizing that the suffering in Gaza is not an isolated tragedy, but part of a broader system of power and control. Above all, it requires a refusal to accept that some crises matter more than others. Because in Gaza, even now, life continues under conditions designed to extinguish it. And in the shadow of war, that struggle becomes even harder to see – and even more urgent to confront.

Ranjan Solomon has worked in social justice movements since he was 19 years of age. After an accumulated period of 58 years working with oppressed and marginalized groups locally, nationally, and internationally, he has now turned author- researcher-freelance writer focussed on questions of global and local/national justice.

23 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ashraf Zainabi

Power does not always end with a bang; more often, it loosens quietly. The story of the Roman Empire is a case in point. Rome did not collapse the day the barbarians arrived. By then, something essential had already weakened. Its frontiers were wide, its armies still formidable, its name still carried weight, but the confidence that once bound everything together had begun to slip. That is usually how decline begins, not with defeat, but with hesitation.

It is in this light that recent remarks by Donald Trump about NATO should be read. Calling an alliance a “paper tiger” may sound like routine political rhetoric, but such language rarely appears out of nowhere. It tends to surface when there is already a sense, quiet but growing, that something is no longer working as it once did.

For decades, NATO symbolized certainty. It carried the promise that its members, despite their differences, would stand together when confronted with a serious threat. That promise was never tested lightly, and perhaps that is why it held. The Cold War provided a clear structure, a defined adversary, a shared fear, and a common purpose. The world today is less clear.

The tensions around Iran have exposed a subtle but important shift within the alliance. The United States, along with Israel, has adopted a firm and forward posture. Several European members, however, have responded with caution. Their reluctance is not dramatic; there are no formal breaks or dramatic exits. But there is a noticeable pause, a weighing of costs, a preference for distance. This is not simply disagreement. It is a difference in instinct.

Rome experienced something similar when its provinces began to respond to the centre with calculation rather than commitment. Orders were still issued, but they were no longer followed with the same certainty. Local priorities began to take precedence over imperial ones. The empire still functioned, but it no longer moved as one. There is a quiet parallel here.

NATO today still speaks the language of unity, but its actions suggest a more careful, case-by-case approach. Participation is no longer assumed; it is discussed. Commitments are no longer automatic; they are considered. This does not mean the alliance is collapsing, but it does indicate that its internal rhythm has changed.

One place where this change becomes visible is the Strait of Hormuz. This narrow stretch of water carries a significant share of the world’s oil, making it critical far beyond its geography. Any disruption there is felt quickly, in fuel prices, in markets, in everyday life, from Europe to Asia and from Arab to Africa and to Kashmir.

For Washington, securing such a route appears as a shared duty. For many European governments, the same situation looks different. The risks of deeper military involvement, the pressures at home, and the memory of past conflicts all shape a more cautious response. Neither side is unaware of what is at stake. They simply judge the path forward differently. This is where alliances are tested, not in agreement, but in divergence.

Another feature of Rome’s decline was not just what happened, but how it was seen. As long as Rome appeared stable, its authority held. But when cracks became visible, confidence faded quickly. Allies hesitated. Rivals grew more assertive. Perception began to shape reality.

The same risk exists for NATO. When disagreements are expressed openly, especially in sharp terms, they travel far. They are heard not only within the alliance, but beyond it. Questions arise, not always spoken, but present, about how firm the alliance really is. And once such questions take root, they are not easily dismissed.

For places like Kashmir, this may seem distant, yet the effects are not. A shift in the security of the Strait of Hormuz can influence fuel costs overnight. A change in how major powers align can alter the broader environment in which smaller regions exist. The world is interconnected in ways that do not allow such developments to remain isolated.

Still, it would be too simple to say that NATO is declining in the way Rome did. History does not repeat itself so neatly. What it does offer, however, are patterns, warnings about what happens when systems grow complex, when burdens become uneven, and when shared purpose begins to blur.

NATO is not an empire, and it does not face the same conditions. But it does face a similar question, how to remain coherent when its members no longer see every issue through the same lens. That question does not have an easy answer.

It may require a quieter kind of adjustment, less about grand declarations and more about redefining expectations. It may mean accepting that unity today does not look like it did in the past. Or it may demand a more serious effort to rebuild a common understanding of what the alliance is meant to do. What is clear is that ignoring the shift will not reverse it.

Trump’s remark, stripped of its tone, points toward a gap, between what is expected and what is offered, between leadership and participation. Whether that gap widens or narrows will shape the alliance in the years ahead.

Rome, in its final centuries, still carried the appearance of strength. Its symbols endured even as its substance weakened. By the time the end came, it felt less like a sudden fall and more like the conclusion of a long process.

NATO stands far from such an end. Yet, like all large systems, it is not immune to the slow pressures that history has shown time and again. The real question is not whether it is decaying. The real question is whether it can sense the early signs, and respond before they become something more difficult to contain. Till these questions are discussed and answered, NATO is indeed declining towards decay.

Dr. Ashraf Zainabi is a teacher and researcher based in Gowhar Pora Chadoora J&K

23 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org