By Andre Damon
What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.-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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S., 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.-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.
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, U.S. 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 U.S. 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 spill-over, 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 U.S. had “adopted a public policy of responding to state-sponsored terrorism with U.S. state-sponsored terrorism.”
In each instance, deeper involvement in the region produced deeper backlash. The U.S.-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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
Eric Ross is an organizer, educator, and PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.From its inception, the American presidency has bound immense destructive capacity to the temperament of a single individual. It is an office that concentrates not only authority but impulse by placing a military juggernaut in the hands of an individual.
Alice Roosevelt once distilled this dynamic with biting precision, remarking that her father (President Roosevelt) wished “to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” Beneath the wit lay the indictment of an untethered ego.
Today, that strain of vanity has been eclipsed by Donald Trump. Ego is not merely a trait but an overarching principle that has converted statecraft into spectacle. Personal whims are reality; any contradiction is a threat. What emerges is more than political volatility; it is a destabilization that seeps outward, unsettling the fragile architecture of international order.
Clinical insight offers a useful lens. Mary Trump is a psychologist and Donald Trump’s niece. She describes a “monstrous ego” that has reduced the Oval Office into an arena of impulse and dominance. According to her, Trump’s core team is not a cabinet of peers but a collection of enablers. She calls them “weaker, more craven and just as desperate.” Within such a structure, advisers become amplifiers, selected less for judgment than for their willingness to reflect and reinforce.
The fallout sees governance morphing into spectacle. Its logic is laid bare in self-inscribed tokens of power like Trump’s commemorative gold coins and his signatures emblazoning future currency notes. Contagious, it results in loyalists curating the same iconography. Kash Patel’s personalized sneakers with his own and the FBI initials to Pete Hegseth’s conspicuous tattoos; governance morphs into an orbit of narcissism.
The most dangerous aspect of this dogma is what psychologists identify as narcissistic injury. This is the moment when reality refuses to conform with delusions. Within an individual, the fallout is contained. In a president, it has ruinous consequences. Slights are magnified and setbacks personalized. Decision-making, under these conditions, is less a calculation of consequence than a destructive reflex of conserving self-image.
The recent purge within the Pentagon should be understood in this context. It is not an act of strategic recalibration. Finding scapegoats is a desperate gesture of portraying control. Supposed to cauterize wounded pride, it is merely a balm for the bruising realization of a feckless conflict with Iran. In such moments, governance ceases to be an instrument of statecraft and becomes an apparatus of psychological self-preservation.
In such conditions, truth inevitably becomes malleable. It is distorted, diluted or outrightly discarded. The pattern is not new. The claims of WMDs that initiated the 2003 Iraq invasion were totally fabricated. The tragedy that saw over a million perish was an irreversible reality.
This demonstrates the disastrous consequences when deception is institutionalized to validate the self at all costs. This paradigm is starkly visible again in the narratives enabling the Gaza genocide and the strikes on Iran. Curated intelligence reports and the ever-shifting justifications make a mockery of established facts.
In “The Second Coming”, Yeats laments the incarnation of ruin: “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” In his vision, the disintegration of order did not herald a new one but the emergence of something unrestrained and primal. The destruction wrought by narcissism is far more insidious. It does not emerge from chaos; it engineers it. Conflict and disorder become an assertion of self.
History offers fewer poetic parallels. Roman Emperor Caligula governed through spectacle and fear. He was known for his cruelty in prolonging his victims’ sufferings. Through their entire ordeal, he had these words of Roman tragedian Lucius Accius on his lips – oderint dum metuant – let them hate, so long as they fear me.
In the modern era, such a mindset carries unprecedented stakes. The fusion of personal volatility with nuclear capability renders miscalculation existential. John Kennedy warned about a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. He called it “peace of the grave or security of the slave.” – subjugation or annihilation. This is the calamitous binary that we see invoked from Gaza to Iran. The strikes on Iran and its retaliation starkly illustrates how quickly provocation and response can spiral beyond initial intent. What began as an assertion of might has morphed into a destructive conflagration.
The world remains riveted with Iran. Gaza, with its ongoing sufferings has become a sidelined tragedy. In one case, resistance commands attention; in the other, endurance slips from view. The defining pathology is the chilling distillation of an egocracy where sanity has been subsumed by one man’s unbounded ego that cannot bear the ignominy of his being diminished. This is the ultimate manifestation of Trump’s Egocracy.
Mir Adnan Aziz explores the forces which shape power, belief and society. He can be reached at miradnanaziz@gmail.comIranian air defenses shot down an F-15E Strike Eagle jet over western Iran Friday, the first US aircraft shot down by Iranian fire since the war began. Following the downing, US special forces launched a rescue operation inside Iran to recover the pilot. Axios reported that “US special forces located one of the crew members and rescued him, alive, on Iranian territory.” The other crew member remains missing inside Iran.
The rescue operation came as roughly 7,500 Marines from three Marine Expeditionary Units and a combat brigade from the 82nd Airborne Division’s Immediate Response Force arrived or were en route to the Persian Gulf, joining more than 50,000 US service members already in the region. The buildup points toward a ground invasion.
Following the downing of the aircraft, President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social: “With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE.” Seizing Iran’s oil would require a ground invasion and occupation.
A second aircraft, an A-10 Thunderbolt, was shot down in a separate incident the same day. The pilot ejected over Kuwaiti airspace and was rescued. Two HH-60G rescue helicopters sent to recover the F-15E’s crew were also hit by Iranian fire, injuring US personnel aboard before returning to base. In all, four American aircraft were struck in a single day—the worst losses of the five-week war.
The shoot-downs came two days after Trump addressed the nation in a prime time speech in which he threatened to destroy Iranian society. “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks,” Trump said Wednesday. “We are going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.” He threatened to hit “each and every one of their electric generating plants,” and said he had not yet struck Iran’s oil only because doing so “would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding.”
“We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” Trump said in the same speech. “They have no antiaircraft equipment. Their radar is 100 percent annihilated. We are unstoppable as a military force.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared on March 31: “Iran knows that, and there’s almost nothing they can militarily do about it.” Forty-eight hours later, Iran shot an American fighter jet out of the sky.
As the Intercept noted, “Neither the White House nor the Pentagon responded to requests for comment on how Iran could down an advanced US aircraft when the country supposedly no longer possesses anti-aircraft weaponry.” The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed responsibility for the shoot-down.
The Washington Post verified footage of US refueling and rescue aircraft operating roughly 90 miles inside Iranian territory. Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said the low-altitude flights indicated “willingness to take a lot of risk.”
Meanwhile, Politico reported Friday that US officials were warning that the military was running out of targets to strike. Roughly half of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers remain intact despite more than 12,000 US and Israeli strikes since February 28. The New York Times reported that Iranian operatives have been digging out underground bunkers struck by American and Israeli bombs and returning them to operation within hours. Iran is deploying decoys, making it difficult for US intelligence to assess how many launchers have actually been destroyed.
The destruction continues to widen. On Thursday, Trump posted footage of US strikes hitting the newly constructed B1 bridge between Tehran and Karaj, which was due to open this year. Trump wrote: “Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!”
On Friday, a drone struck a Red Crescent relief warehouse in Iran’s southern Bushehr province. Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, one of the country’s most prominent institutions, was hit during strikes on the capital. Iran has struck back at Gulf energy infrastructure—hitting a power and water desalination plant in Kuwait and a Kuwait Petroleum refinery, underscoring the vulnerability of Gulf states that depend on desalination for drinking water.
Five weeks of bombing have killed more than 5,000 people, the vast majority of them Iranian civilians. More than 85,000 civilian structures have been damaged, including 64,000 homes and 600 schools. Between 3 and 4 million Iranians have been internally displaced. Iran’s 90 million people have been cut off from the outside world by a near-total internet blackout since February 28.
Thirteen American service members have been killed and nearly 370 wounded. Brent crude has surged more than 60 percent and gasoline has passed $4 a gallon. The war has cost at least $25 billion—and the administration is asking for more.
On Friday, Trump released the largest defense budget in American history: a $1.5 trillion Pentagon request for fiscal year 2027, a 44 percent increase. The budget cuts the Environmental Protection Agency by 52 percent, the State Department by 30 percent and NASA by 23 percent. It eliminates the National Endowment for Democracy. It cuts $73 billion from environmental, health and education research to pay for warships, missiles and a “Golden Dome” missile defense system. Jessica Riedl, a budget analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the purpose of the budget is “to push Congress to approve the largest defense spending increase since the Korean War.”
The war is expanding. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that the Israel Defense Forces will demolish all homes in Lebanese border villages “like in Rafah and Beit Hanoun.” More than 600,000 Lebanese have fled their homes. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for making the Litani River Israel’s new northern border.
Originally published in WSWS.ORG
4 April 2026
Source: countercurrents.org
