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By Chris Hedges

Trump is dangerous not simply because of his imbecility and unbridled narcissism, but because he lacks the core attributes of empathy and understanding that define the human soul.

26 Mar 2026 – The most profound realities of human existence are often the ones that can never be measured or quantified. Wisdom. Beauty. Truth. Compassion. Courage. Love. Loneliness. Grief. The struggle to face our own mortality. A life of meaning.

But perhaps the greatest conundrum is the concept of a soul. Do we have a soul? Do societies have souls? And, most basically, what is a soul?

Philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Arthur Schopenhauer, have all grappled with the concept of a soul, with Schopenhauer preferring to define the mystical force within us as will. Sigmund Freud used the Greek word psyche. But most have accepted, whatever the definition, some version of a soul’s existence.

While the concept of the soul is opaque, soullessness is not. Soullessness means something inside of us is dead. Basic human feelings and connections are shut down. Those without souls lack empathy. I saw the soulless in war. Those so calcified inside they kill without any demonstrable feeling or remorse.

The soulless exist in a state of insatiable self-worship. The idol they have erected to themselves must be constantly fed. It demands a never-ending stream of victims. It demands abject obedience and subservience, publicly on display at Trump cabinet meetings.

Psychologists, I expect, would define the soulless as psychopathic.

I write this not to get into an esoteric debate about the soul, but to warn what happens when those without souls seize power. I want to write about what is lost and the consequences of that loss. I want to caution you that death, our death — as individuals and as a collective — mean nothing to those without souls.

This makes the soulless very, very dangerous.

Those who lack souls have no concept of their own limitations. They feed off a bottomless and self-delusional optimism, giving to their cruelest deeds and bitterest defeats, the patina of goodness, success and morality.

Those without souls — as Paul Woodruff writes in his small masterpiece “Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue” — do not have the capacity for reverence, awe, respect and shame. They believe they are gods.

The soulless cannot respond rationally to reality. They live in self-constructed echo chambers. They hear only their own voice. Civic, familial, legal and religious rituals and ceremonies that transport those with souls into the realm of the sacred, into a space where we acknowledge our shared humanity, forcing us, at least for a moment, to humble ourselves, are meaningless to those without souls. Those without souls cannot see because they cannot feel.

The soulless, enslaved by narcissism, greed, a lust for power and hedonism, cannot make moral choices. Moral choices for them do not exist. Truth and falsehoods are identical. Life is transactional. Is it good for me? Does it make me feel omnipotent? Does it give me pleasure? This stunted existence banishes them from the moral universe.

Human beings, including children, are commodities to the soulless, objects to exploit for pleasure or profit or both. We saw this soullessness displayed in the Epstein Files. And it was not only Epstein. Huge sections of our ruling class including billionaires, Wall Street financiers, university presidents, philanthropists, celebrities, Republicans, Democrats and media personalities, consider us worthless.

Thucydides understood. Reverence is not a religious virtue but a moral virtue. Woodruff went so far as to define it as a political virtue. Reverence for shared ideals, Woodruff writes, is the only thing that can bind us together. It is the only attribute that ensures mutual trust. Reverence allows us to remember what it means to be human. It reminds us that there are forces we cannot control, forces that we will never understand, forces of life that we did not create and must honor and protect — including the natural world — and forces that allow us moments of transcendence, or what in religious terms, we call grace.

“If you desire peace in the world, do not pray that everyone share your beliefs,” Woodruff writes. “Pray instead that all may be reverent.”

Trump’s celebration of himself is made manifest in his stunted vocabulary of superlatives and his rebranding of national monuments. He tears down the East Wing to construct his gaudy and oversized $400 million ballroom. He proposes a 250-foot-tall memorial arch, adorned with gilded statues and eagles, in honor of himself, an arch that will be bigger than the Arch of Triumph erected by North Korean dictator Kim II Sung in Pyongyang. He is planning a “National Garden of American Heroes” that will include life-size statues of celebrities, sports figures, political and artistic figures deemed by Trump to be politically correct, along with, of course, himself. His face adorns the sides of federal buildings on huge, well-lit banners. He changed the name of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. He added his name to the headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has announced a new fleet of U.S. naval vessels called Trump-class battleships.

These are monuments not only to Trump, but to a perverted ethic, to the insatiable self-worship that defines the inner void of the soulless. Monuments, houses of worship and national shrines dedicated to justice, self-sacrifice and equality, which demand from us humility and introspection, which require the capacity for reverence, mystify the soulless.

The soulless have no sense of aesthetics. They have no sense of balance, symmetry and proportion. The bigger, the gaudier, the more encrusted in gold leaf, the better. They seek to shut out everything and everyone else, to herd us with offerings to the feet of Moloch.

When the soulless wage war it is part of this perverted drive to build a monument to themselves. When war goes badly, as it is going in Iran, the soulless, unable to read reality, demand greater levels of violence and destruction. The more they fail, the more they are convinced everyone has betrayed them, the more they descend into a tyrannical rage.

Trump, potentially facing a humiliating debacle in Iran, will lash out like a wounded beast. It does not matter how many suffer and die. It does not matter what weapons, including nuclear weapons, must be employed. He must triumph, or at least appear to triumph.

“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’” Father Zossima asks in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” “I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

This is the plight of the soulless. They seek, in their misery, to make their hell our own.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.

30 March 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Zarni

Defiant Iranian, Lebanese & Palestinians set a high bar of revolution against the savage West, most specifically Israel-US empire that has leeched on our collective humanity & the environment.

17 Mar 2026 – In the last nearly 40-years I have lived, in Western societies – specifically the United States and the United Kingdom. As a foreign student, labourer, professional, father, and husband. In permanent exile, from my native Buddha-forsaken Myanmar.

Living in liberal democracies, if only relatively speaking, has exposed me to the dominant schools of woman’s liberation ideologies – particularly what has come to be referred to as “imperial feminism” or “glass ceiling feminism”.

Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton, among other a million names including celebrities and white feminist icons, spring to mind.

Mind you I started from a very low bar on issues of sexism and misogyny: my native Myanmar continues to be soaked in sexism and racism. I still reel from the stains of my own cultural upbringings.

Then of course there are “Third World” feminism and radical black feminisms, which I was insufficiently exposed to during my 8 years in US graduate schools 30 years ago.

I will readily admit that these are subjects I am least informed about. The more I open my mouth on feminism the more I will expose myself as yet another pig, trying to mansplain feminism.

Suffice it to say that I am grateful to friends and comrades who send me items which they think will help me grow as a scholar, an activist and simply a human.

Here I wish to share 2 conversations by revolutionary minds with organic links to West Asia’s liberation movements and anti-imperialist resistance:

1. susan abulbaha’s 20 minutes video-recording on anti-semitism allegations levelled at her and the New York Mayor Zohran Mamdadi’s errorneous condemnation of her, as a Palestinian to defend his own wife.

30 March 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Edward Curtin

“One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it — it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.”
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

12 Mar 2026 – Anyone who is not sick at heart and raging over the slaughter of over 165 young Iranian girls at a school by the American-Israeli monsters waging war on Iran is depraved and evil. It sickens me to state something so obvious, but I am afraid it is true that many are not distraught by the news. A nod to “how terrible” and on with the war is a common response for those who even know about it, not just because of moral indifference but because of the acceleration of digital news reporting that disappears today before it has become tomorrow. The young girls are forgotten with each passing day in the U.S. and Israel – but not in Iran. For war criminals Trump and Netanyahu, the death of those children is a joy on the way to further slaughter of the innocent.

On the other hand, there are many in this functionally illiterate U.S.A. with its functionally illiterate president who have probably never heard of this war crime. And U.S.-Israeli war crimes are so common that they come and go like ripples on a stream, like a scroll through a “smart phone.” Little penetrates the propaganda bubble, and when it does, it is quickly replaced by the illusion that once these bad guys are swept out of office these wars will end because our good guys will return in the game of musical chairs to make all copacetic. Peace will reign, as in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, etc.

I repeat a question that I have asked before, but to what avail I know not: Why do Americans think the United States has 750 + military bases in over 80 countries, supported by a bi-partisan consensus? The answer is blatant except for idiots and those willfully blind, and there are plenty of both.

The United States is an imperial warfare state and these bases exist to wage wars around the world, as the U.S. has done. End of story.

The Jeffrey Epstein Files release, aside from diverting the public’s attention from Iran, Ukraine, etc., has caused many people to contemplate how certain rich and connected people conspire behind the scenes for nefarious sexual purposes but also to manipulate financial and political matters. To the most naïve, the naming of so many prominent people – university presidents, politicians, bankers, et al. – in this criminal club is very surprising.

Yet, more perversely, the Epstein long-running serial (not the reality for the victims of the sexual abuse) is entertainment in Neil Postman’s sense of Amusing Ourselves to Death, the title of his prescient 1985 book wherein he argued television had redefined the modern sense of reality, truth, and intelligence; had achieved the status of myth, “a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible”; that had turned everything into entertainment. Narcoticized by their technological obsession, he argued, people were losing themselves in a fantasy world of unending diversions, as television news was becoming entertainment and all a show, the business of show business. In Postman’s words: “Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western World.” Facts, data, and the delusive “news of the day” were abundant, but all in the fragmented and pseudo context of televised amusement.

One can only scream in accord when contemplating today’s digital internet Screen Society in which mini-televisions accompany people everywhere in the form of cell phones, keeping them constantly entertained with pointillistic nanosecond “news” catered to their personal tastes and devoid of any context.

While the inner workings of the imperial ruling class might not usually involve as much sexual abuse as the Epstein Serial, or what the journalist Pepe Escobar calls “the Epstein Syndicate,” its members have long conspired to control their wealth, power, and political domination of the masses. Waging wars, globalizing their control (started greatly circa 1985), filling the coffers of the military industrial complex that they own, are prime goals. Many of these vile creatures, of course, in their hubris, thinking they are in full control, have entered a trap of international espionage and sexual blackmail, as is evident in the Epstein case, where the presumed controllers are the controlled.

Despite their wealth and power, their little boy minds and sexual avidities have drawn them to “pleasure islands” where they have been exposed as jackasses braying their little boy innocence. They thought Epstein and his intelligence handlers in Israel, Britain, and the U.S were offering them deeper access to the Syndicate’s Inner Cabinet, but they failed to see the trap doors. Yet now that the Epstein “scandal” has received partial exposure, aside from the few that must be sacrificed to appease the public, most skate and profit mightily. It’s an old game of propaganda as palimpsest.

Just the other day, I had coffee with a friend whose family ties to these imperial ruling class criminals go back more than a century. We discussed his life as a dissident within his wealthy family’s connections to the CIA, the Rockefellers, Morgans, Harvard, the Kennedy assassinations, the industrial corporations essential to the warfare state and massive profits (G.E., General Dynamics, Lockheed, etc.), Wall Street, the banks, corporate media, Big Tech, and on ad infinitum. Many details of a gross world of privilege, betrayal, and endless lies where all the insiders know and associate with each other despite different political parties; what, if you were a sensitive child with a conscience, would repulse you, as it did my friend.

We could call it the Old School Wasp Ruling Class except that old is new and White Anglo Saxon was never just that but connected early on to Zionism and its wealthy supporters in and out of government, here and in Israel. Endless connections that most people alive today know nothing about. The hypocrisy involved is appalling and staggering.

The moneyed elite’s hatred for ordinary people is extreme, and their use of the word “democracy” to cover their crimes is routine. Their proclivities have been inculcated in them within the unreal bubble of filthy lucre and its cultural trappings by their parents and reinforced by those toadies who kiss their asses for access to their worlds of ease and glitz. The same is true for the new billionaires who have recently joined the club and are surrounded by sycophants and tongue hangers.

One of the saddest realities of political life is the way people are fooled again and again by the propaganda these people and their media at the entertainment circuses that they own and that pass lies for news feed them. That it is the same slop dished out endlessly from different media cooks means nothing. The conservative media simply shout for war and more war, while the liberal play both sides (anti-war and pro-war) against the middle in a hypocritical manner to support the wars that the U.S. wages endlessly. The most insidious garbage is swallowed by those who consider themselves “intellectuals” and highly educated.

When my friend mentioned one of his parents’ famous associates, Walter Lippmann, who would stay at their home when he was young, I was reminded of Edward Bernays and others who laid the foundations for today’s mind control. Lippmann, a prominent journalist termed the “Father of Modern Journalism,” and Bernays, the so-called “Father of Public Relations,” were two heavyweight insiders who, beginning in the 1920s laid the groundwork for U.S. government and corporate propaganda today. Their work extended into the 1970s. Bernays, the paradigm for the propagandist on the inside, and Lippmann, the model for the slick journalist on the outside, each worked his side of the invisible fence.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . .
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. (my emphasis)

Edward Bernays penned those words in 1928 to open his book, Propaganda. They perfectly summarize the truth of how the U.S. is ruled.

Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s double nephew (his mother was Freud’s sister and his father was Freud’s wife’s brother). He was born in Vienna, Austria, but his family moved to New York when he was very young. He worked as a propagandist for the U.S. government during WW I. He coined the term “the engineering of consent,” and for many decades worked behind the scenes for the major corporations (General Electric, the American Tobacco Company, United Fruit, etc.), politicians, and the U.S. government to manipulate the public’s mind – e.g. convincing women to smoke by calling cigarettes “torches of [women’s] freedom” and helping the CIA in its 1954 coup in Guatemala against the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, and so much more. He was a master shadowy manipulator and anti-democrat who served the interests of the imperial ruling class and was highly respected by it for his techniques of propaganda and mind control that rendered reality “virtual” in the service of power.

Lippmann, while considered a journalist and public intellectual, and who, unlike Bernays who worked almost exclusively behind the scenes as a member of the “inner cabinet,” labored for “the inner cabinet” mostly from the outside-in through his newspaper columns. In books, which the average newspaper reader didn’t read, he advocated a similar elitist credo as Bernays, advocating that the government use symbols and movies to prevent the public from independent thought and to control them emotionally. In an early book, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (1914), whose words could have been written today by snide elitists, the CIA and its assets (and have in similar words), he wrote:

The sense of conspiracy and secret scheming [among the public] which transpires is almost uncanny. ‘Big Business,’ and its ruthless tentacles, have become the material for the feverish fantasy of illiterate thousands thrown out of kilter by the rack and strain of modern life. It is possible to work yourself into a state where the world seems a conspiracy and your daily going is beset with an alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil. Everything askew – all the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a deliberate evil intelligence, and men like Morgan and Rockefeller take on attributes of omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity would reduce to barbarous myth.

Both Lippmann and Bernays thought of ordinary people as nasty creatures that had to be controlled through lies and deception. They were pioneers in the inside-outside technique of propaganda that has been used for a long time by the government and their media allies to confound ordinary people. By inside-outside I mean that for propaganda to be effective, those using it need to have many working secretly to develop and exercise techniques of deception like Bernays and the CIA, and public media figures like Lippmann who reinforce the lies but in a seemingly “reasonable” way from the outside. The latter group is employed at the large media companies that are owned by the very rich outright or by massive international media monopolies. The CIA and other American intelligence agencies secretly develop propaganda techniques and have their people placed within all departments of the government (see Understanding Special Operations: 123 ff.) and throughout the mass media to work the public from the outside. Of course, as is evident from the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its joint evil war with the U.S. against Iran, Israel and its Mossad play a large part in this as well, not only influencing Trump and the U.S. Congress, but much of the U.S. government and media, where they have placed many assets.

A homely basketball analogy is apt in describing how the propaganda game is played: One successful basketball strategy known as “Inside-Out” is to have players drive to the basket to begin the game, which forces the defense to contract near the basket, which in turn opens up scoring opportunities from the outside. It is simple but effective, depending, of course, that the players can shoot and make some baskets.

Enter Trump, who seems to be and may be clinically insane or just plain evil like his Israeli counterpart Netanyahu, and who on the face of it seems to contradict much of this inside-out approach to controlling the masses. Like a bull escaped from a pen, he just bellows threats and wages wars at home and abroad, seemingly not caring whether or not he convinces the population that his actions are just and in their interest. It’s as if he is announcing to all who voted for him, that they were fools to believe for a moment that he wouldn’t start any new wars and would end America’s “endless wars,” and to those who didn’t vote for him, “Fuck you, too.”

In the past, presidents felt compelled to try to justify through propaganda the wars and coups they waged, from Vietnam to Iraq to Libya, etc. No matter how obvious their lies, like Colin Powell holding up a little vial to show how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (which he later said was a mistake and not a lie to cover his complicity), they told them and used all the propaganda at their disposal to make them sound true, having “journalist” friends and assets provide justifications. Trump seemingly doesn’t care.

Some say that is because he is a complete anomaly and was able to twice become president by some strange twist of fate. If that is so, it would be the first and second time in modern history that it happened. A man with no political experience, a comical reality-tv joke, a bombastic fat party boy with weird dyed hair who talks like a version of an East Coast Valley Girl, a womanizer, a very wealthy New York real estate wheeler and dealer, etc. gets the votes of middle Americans who are losing their farms and factory jobs and are angry at the government. All sorts of explanations have been given for this “anomaly,” except that it was not one, except in appearance.

Before Trump was first elected in 2016, it was accepted that one could never be elected president of the U.S. unless one checked off a list of boxes approved by the inner controllers of the Democratic and Republican parties. Independent or small party candidates like Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson were never given a real chance but were viewed as spoilers. In 2000, Trump entered the primaries seeking the Reform Party’s nomination but dropped out. He had no chance, even if he had won it, and he knew it. Then came sixteen years of burnishing his establishment credentials. So by 2016, and then again in 2020 and 2024, he was the Republican Party’s nominee, clearly a member of the establishment’s two-party club that had (and has) a lock on the presidency. He was an insider.

So if this insider is no longer following the traditional propaganda script of inside/outside, it is highly likely that those who control the political parties for the imperial ruling class have invented a new technique of mind control to serve their purposes. Since more and more people are starting to question the conventional propaganda as U.S. society cracks up, a new technique must be added to the old – a turning of things inside-out and further out, so to speak. Give Trump free range to say and do the most outlandish things, the things that many have come to suspect were previously said only by the hidden manipulators like Bernays and the CIA, and one side of the western “free press/media” will rip him for his grotesquely brazen mouth and actions, while the other will praise him. The latter will claim that he has finally liberated the country, while the former will rip him as a maniac. Both, however, owned by the same imperial ruling class that might disagree over tactics but not U.S. long term strategy, and knowing Trump got elected because he is a political insider which they must deny, will be satisfied that the masses are confused, angry, and divided, and therefore more easily controlled.

They call it “transparency,” and no one has to answer the question of why, under Republican and Democratic presidents, the U.S. has 750 + military bases in over 80 countries all around the world from which they have been waging wars for many decades, some of which have recently been attacked by Iran, after the U.S./Israel waged the current savage war of aggression against it in a continuation of The Great Game.

Orwell called it Doublethink in Nineteen Eighty Four:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

Yes, we are through the looking-glass, but even Alice finally woke up before it was too late.

Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories.

30 March 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Ann Garrison

Dan Kovalik and Jeremy Kuzmarov’s Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change was published on September 1, 2025. What can it teach us now that the empire has pulled the trigger on three more nations resisting its drive to dominate?

11 Mar 2026 – In his introduction to Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change, filmmaker Oliver Stone calls it a warning against what regime change means for the people living in the nations targeted, and a call to organize to prevent future regime-change wars, but we haven’t been doing well at that, to say the least. Barely more than a year after Bashar al-Assad’s government fell in December 2024, the US military’s elite Delta Force swept into Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, President of the National Assembly of Venezuela. Then, according to the State Department, the US government began “marketing Venezuelan crude oil in the global marketplace for the benefit of the United States, Venezuela, and our allies.” On a particularly humiliating note, 200,000 barrels of crude oil that would have gone to Cuba were shipped to Israel. Americans had long been conditioned to accept this by the media drone about Maduro being a dictator and a narco-trafficker, an accusation made up out of whole cloth.

Trump then imposed a harsher blockade than ever on Cuba and even threatened “a friendly takeover” if that didn’t bring the Cuban people to their knees. Next, he followed Israel into war with Iran, which eminent MIT weapons expert Theodore Postol says could easily go nuclear and spread beyond the Middle East. This goes well past “what regime change means for the people living in the nations targeted.”

Many elements of the story of Syria’s fall have been repeated over and over again. Chapter 7, “Shades of the Gulf of Tonkin: Chemical Weapons as False Flag” describes the chemical weapons fraud, echoing the Tonkin Gulf fraud used to justify the US entry into the Vietnam War and the weapons of mass destruction fraud used to justify the Iraq War. Obama had tried other arguments to justify “intervention” in Syria, but chemical weapons was the story that finally stuck, convincing many Westerners that US air strikes were necessary. Kovalik and Kuzmarov quote Obama, who asked, “What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?”

The chemical weapons story, which anguished so many Western leftists, defied logic. Even if Assad were that indifferent to the pain of his own people, why would he do that which would most certainly give foreign aggressors an excuse to attack? As Kovalik and Kuzmarov explain, this appealed to Orientalist stereotypes of despotism and savagery regurgitated by all the corporate media, helping our ruling class and misleaders take us into yet another imperialist war.

Who would gas their own people? Non-white people of course, which includes Arabs, no matter the actual color of their skin. This argument was strangely persuasive to the liberal intelligentsia even though anti-racism and identity politics are at the heart of their concerns.

Chapter 8, “A War by Other Means: Sanctions and the U.S. Regime Change Operations,” tells the story of trade strangulation imposed by the overwhelming economic power of the US, who not only deny even basic medicines to sanctioned countries but also restrict trade so as to suppress economic development, causing widespread hardship and unemployment. US sanctions typically frighten less powerful nations into “overcompliance,” causing them to refuse to trade with sanctioned countries for fear of falling afoul of the US and, for example, losing their own access to US markets.

“In 2023,” Kovalik and Kuzmarov write, “more than 609,000 Syrian children under the age of five were reportedly stunted from chronic malnutrition, 12 million Syrians lacked enough food to meet daily dietary needs, and 90% of Syrians were said to be living in poverty.” The same liberal intelligentsia who fell for the chemical weapons fraud also tend to know little about how sanctions strangle a people and are therefore easy to convince that the suffering of Syrians, Venezuelans, Cubans, or Iranians are due to the incompetence, callousness, or greed of their leaders.

What do Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran share in common that makes them subject to sanctions’ strangulation, false flags, and military force?

“The targets of regime change,” Kovalik and Kuzmarov write, “are inevitably leaders who are independent nationalists intent on resisting U.S. corporate penetration of their countries and challenging U.S. global hegemony. Bashar al-Assad fit the bill for the latter because he backed Palestinian resistance groups and stood up to Israel, aligned closely with Iran and Russia, and adopted nationalistic economic policies. Assad was also growing economic relations with China and refused to construct the Trans-Arabian Qatari pipeline through Syria, endorsing instead a Russian approved ‘Islamic’ pipeline running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon.”

The details and the pipelines vary, and there does seem to be a pipeline involved more often than not. However, as the late great Glen Ford said, any nation that tries to raise an independent head against the empire becomes “geostrategic.” That’s why the US had to do away with the socialist New Jewel Movement on the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada in 1983. Grenada’s population is 115,000 and its only export is nutmeg, but even that couldn’t become the people’s property.

Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran all share fierce resistance to Israel, the last settler colonial state, and to the Zionist expansionism that now has us all wondering what the boundaries of “Greater Israel” are.

Kovalik and Kuzmarov tell us that Syria’s new ruler, Ahmed al-Sharaa claims to “love Israel” and wants to build a Trump tower in Damascus and open up Syria’s oil and gas industry to US corporations. Prior to his ascension to the presidency, al-Jolani headed an Al Qaeda affiliate, Tahrir al-Sham, backed by Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UK, France, Canada, the US, and Israel.

“The president of Syria,” Trump said, “who I essentially put there, is doing a phenomenal job.”

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

30 March 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Richard E. Rubenstein

Descriptions of the current U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah pay considerable attention to innovations in military technology – in particular, the relatively low-priced drones, mines, speedboats, and missiles used by the Iranians to achieve something approaching parity with the far more heavily armed North Americans and Israelis. Although these are notable developments, the intense focus on technology obscures other innovations that are equally important, disturbing, and revealing.

One of these is the rise of decapitation warfare: a marked shift away from the traditional goals of destroying the enemy’s military forces in battle and capturing its territory. Decapitation wars are large-scale struggles in which attackers attempt to defeat an enemy regime by targeting and assassinating a substantial number of its civilian and military leaders. The current war in Iran, begun by the U.S. and Israel during negotiations without any immediate provocation or threat by Iran or its allies, is one of the first such wars.

Targeted killing, of course, has long played a role in warfare. In ancient as well as modern wars, hostile armies tried to kill or capture each other’s commanders, and enemy kings or sovereigns have also been considered fair game. But modern states accustomed to fight conventional wars have had strongly mixed feelings about assassination, considered as a form of irregular or unconventional warfare. In the U.S., following revelations in Congressional hearings of lethal CIA and Special Forces targeting operations, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders prohibiting those acting on behalf of the U.S. government from “engaging in or conspiring to engage in” political assassination. These orders are technically still in effect, but especially after the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, they were reinterpreted or ignored to permit American regimes to order the targeted killings as part of the U.S. “war on terror.”

Thus, the administration of President Obama used the “terrorist enemy” category to justify the killing of jihadists such as Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the latter an American citizen killed by a drone attack in Yemen in 2011. Donald Trump employed similar language ten years later when he ordered the assassination of an high Iranian official, Revolutionary Guard Major General Qasem Soleimani, also by a drone strike. President Joe Biden ordered 77 lethal attacks against people considered terrorists in Africa and the Middle East. But the most proficient practitioners of targeted killing have been the Israelis, who since the turn of the century have assassinated hundreds of leaders of paramilitary groups and political parties such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, as well as top civilian and military officials of governments deemed hostile. From the 1970s onward, Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence organization, became the world’s most feared and potent source of targeted killings (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n06/andrew-cockburn/beware-the-mattress). Recent wars have integrated the roles of Mossad and the Israeli Defense Forces in increasingly lethal decapitation campaigns aimed not only at top officials but those much lower on the leadership ladder.

A major escalation in this form of warfare occurred in 2024, when Israelis detonated explosives placed in pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah militants), killing 42 people, including 15 civilians, and wounding more than 4,000. Lethal actions formerly associated with “anti-terrorist” campaigns were expanded and incorporated in conventional war scenarios beginning with the so-called 12-day war of June 2025, when Israeli and U.S. forces killed several dozen Iranian scientists and Revolutionary Guards officials as well as bombing Iran’s nuclear production facilities. The war against Iran initiated in February 2026 began with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, his family, and members of his cabinet, and proceeded over the next month to target scores of Iranian political and military leaders as well as scientists, engineers, and administrators. This strategy, linked with efforts to incite a popular overthrow of the Islamic Republic regime, has obliterated the old distinction between irregular tactics such as targeted killings and conventional warfare.

What caused this pronounced turn toward decapitation warfare? And what are its likely consequences and implications?

Causes: The assassination of public officials has most often been a response by civilians to perceived tyranny. Targeted killings by states have usually been a response to perceived rebellion (or what modern states have come to call terrorism). In both cases, efforts to eliminate particular “enemy individuals” deny the legitimacy of a popular organization or regime (thus, the phrase “terrorist state”) and imply that if certain individuals can be eliminated, so can the organization, ideology, or regime. This assumption – frequently erroneous, as it turns out – seems to have been a factor in the U.S.-Israeli decision at the start of the current war to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei.

Targeting specific individuals, as the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos points out, “shifts the political arena from social conflicts between classes or social groups to the individual political entrepreneurship of leaders conceived as metonyms for collective enemies.” Prof. De Sousa also notes the tendency of decapitation warfare to expand the range of targets to include “political leaders, military figures, scientists in strategic fields, or opinion leaders.” https://savageminds.substack.com/p/decapitation-and-the-end-of-politics?

To understand this shift in military tactics, it helps to be aware of a key characteristic of the present historical moment: the crisis of the U.S. global empire. The great challenge for American rulers since the 1960s-70s has been to maintain and expand U.S. global supremacy while reducing the fiscal and political costs of fighting lengthy and difficult wars of repression or counter-revolution. After their defeat in Vietnam, U.S. leaders eliminated the military draft and created an all-volunteer armed force. After the inconclusive or counter-productive results of the costly Afghanistan and Iraq wars, they developed a strategy of relying on a combination of proxy states, special forces, and air power to achieve their military aims without committing substantial land or naval forces to battle. Targeted killings (or, in the case of Venezuela, kidnappings) are a tactical corollary of the general strategy of “war without battles.” Decapitation warfare purports to be a low-cost way of maintaining imperial control of subject regions such as the Middle East.

Consequences: The Iran War, at least to this point, gives the lie to the assumption that targeted killings reduce the costs of empire-maintenance. Indeed, the costs imposed by Iran’s closing the Strait of Hormuz to international oil traffic affect the entire global economy and have weakened U.S. international alliances. As a result, the Trump regime has been compelled to ship thousands of troops to the region and to threaten a return to more conventional forms of warfare. But the consequences of decapitation tactics go far beyond the immediate results of their use in Iran and Lebanon.

To begin with, most scholars agree that targeted killings of leaders are seldom effective to eliminate a political organization, regime, or movement, since mobilizations based on mass discontent or other compelling motives will find ways to replace lost leaders with new ones. (See https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-decapitation-will-not-solve-united-states-iran-problem.) In the case of Iran, the notion that the regime in Teheran would collapse if the Supreme Leader and his colleagues were killed has been shown to be an illusion. This finding of ineffectiveness, however, has an alarming implication. Consider what happened in Gaza when the assassination of Hamas leaders proved ineffective to destroy or even to disrupt that organization. If an attacking force is determined to use decapitation tactics despite their initial ineffectiveness, it will move violently down the tiers of leadership to the point that it is targeting low-level as well as high-level leaders, then followers, and finally “collateral” bystanders. In short, “targeted” killings that continue indefinitely without destroying an organization or regime become genocidal.

This potential for genocide is in some ways inherent in the very idea of decapitation or group assassination which obliterates the distinction between irregular and conventional warfare. War is always ghastly, and industrial warfare frequently verges on genocide. But whatever rules of war stand in the way of genocidal violence are washed away by the idea that it is acceptable to target individuals, including noncombatants, because they are members of some “enemy” group. When one party to armed conflict is an empire determined to sustain its hegemony by all means necessary the threat is particularly acute, since empire-builders consider those who resist their domination to be barbarians outside the law.

Whenever empire-builders make war on some targeted group, one hears an echo of Joseph Conrad’s villainous Kurtz in the story Heart of Darkness: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Decapitation warfare will not eliminate organized opposition to U.S. imperial expansion or resolve the contradictions that have produced a crisis of the Empire. While the crisis lasts, however, the tactic of mass assassination has the potential to do a great deal of damage to a great many people.

Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

30 March 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Laala Bechetoula

“The conqueror need not be stronger than the conquered. He need only be more willing to endure.”

— Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 14th century

“No people has ever been liberated by a war it could not endure.”

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

“All human beings are members of one frame, since all, at first, from the same essence came. When time afflicts a limb with pain, the other limbs cannot at rest remain. If thou feel not for other’s misery, a human being is no name for thee.”

— Sa’adi Shirazi, Bani Adam, 13th century — inscribed on a rug offered by Iran to the United Nations, New York, 2005

Prologue: The Clock That Never Started for Washington

On the morning of February 28, 2026, the United States of America and the State of Israel launched one of the most concentrated aerial campaigns in the history of modern warfare. In twelve hours, nearly 900 strikes rained down on the Islamic Republic of Iran — on its missile sites, its air defenses, its nuclear facilities, its military command centers, and on the compound where its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was assassinated along with members of his family.

Donald Trump predicted it would be over in “two or three days.”

Twenty-four days later, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Oil is above one hundred dollars a barrel. The global economy stands at the edge of recession. The International Energy Agency has declared the situation worse than the two oil crises of the 1970s combined. The Islamic Republic of Iran — battered, wounded, its navy decimated, its leaders assassinated, its nuclear installations struck three times — is still governing, still fighting, and still dictating the terms of every international conversation.

On March 22, Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum in capital letters on Truth Social: reopen the Strait or face the obliteration of Iran’s power plants. Iran responded by threatening to mine the entire Persian Gulf and strike every energy installation in the region. Twelve hours before his own deadline expired, Trump announced that the United States and Iran had held “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” and that strikes were postponed for five days.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, responded the same hour: “No negotiations have been held with the US. Fake news is being used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry was equally unequivocal: “There is no dialogue between Tehran and Washington. We are not the party that started this war.”

The empire launched its missiles. The civilization endured. And when the empire blinked, the civilization named it for what it was.

This is the story of why.

Part One: The Deepest Asymmetry — Seven Thousand Years Against Two Hundred and Fifty

Before America Was Born, Persia Had Already Given the World Its Rights

To understand why Iran will not collapse under American and Israeli bombardment, one must first understand what Iran is — not in the geopolitical sense measured in GDP and missile inventories, but in the civilizational sense measured in millennia.

The Iranian plateau has been continuously inhabited for approximately 7,000 years. The Elamite civilization arose there around 3200 BCE, contemporaneous with the earliest Mesopotamian city-states. By the 6th century BCE, the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great had become the largest empire the world had ever seen, stretching from the Aegean Sea to the Indus Valley — encompassing modern Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — governed not by terror but, remarkably for antiquity, by a philosophy of tolerance and pluralism without parallel in the ancient world.

In 539 BCE, after conquering Babylon without a battle — the population reportedly opened the gates willingly — Cyrus issued a decree inscribed on a baked clay cylinder in Akkadian cuneiform. That cylinder, now housed in the British Museum in London — preserved in the very civilization that today bombs Tehran — was recognized by the United Nations in 1971 as the world’s first charter of human rights. A replica stands in the lobby of the United Nations headquarters in New York. Its provisions parallel the first four articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 — more than two and a half millennia after Cyrus had already enacted them.

The Cyrus Cylinder records that the King freed all slaves, declared that all people had the right to choose their own religion, established racial equality, and allowed exiled peoples to return to their homelands — including the 50,000 Jews held in Babylonian captivity, whom he freed at Persian state expense and helped fund the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Cyrus is the only non-Jewish figure in the Hebrew Bible to be called Mashiach — the Anointed One.

This is the civilization that the United States of America — founded in 1776, 2,315 years after Cyrus issued his human rights charter — is trying to destroy from the air. This is the civilization that the State of Israel — established in 1948, when the Cyrus Cylinder was already 2,487 years old — claims the right to bomb into submission in the name of its own security.

A civilization with 7,000 years of memory does not experience a 24-day aerial campaign the way a 250-year-old nation experiences it. For Iran, this is not existential rupture. It is a chapter. A painful one, but a chapter. For the United States, which has never in its history been bombed on its own soil by a foreign power, which has never had its capital struck, its president killed, its cities reduced to rubble — this kind of war is unimaginable. For Iran, in the darkest sense, it is familiar.

Alexander the Great burned Persepolis in 330 BCE. The Mongols sacked Iran’s cities in the 13th century CE with an annihilating thoroughness estimated to have killed up to three-quarters of the population of some regions. The British engineered a coup in 1953, overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh because he had dared to nationalize Iranian oil — a coup documented in detail by the CIA itself and acknowledged formally by the United States government in 2013. Iraq, armed and intelligence-supplied by the United States, invaded Iran in 1980 and fought an eight-year war that killed an estimated half-million Iranians, including through chemical weapons supplied with Western intelligence cooperation.

Iran is still here. Persia has always been still here.

The Intellectual Inheritance That No Bomb Can Touch

The civilization being bombed is the civilization of Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037 CE), whose Canon of Medicine was the primary medical textbook in European universities for six centuries. It is the civilization of Al-Biruni (973–1048 CE), whose calculation of the Earth’s circumference was accurate to within one percent. Of Khayyam, who produced algebraic solutions to cubic equations while Europe was burning books. Of Hafez and Rumi, whose poetry remains among the most widely read in the world — in Persian, Arabic, English, German, Hindi and dozens of other languages. Rumi’s Masnavi has been translated into more languages than almost any literary work in history outside of religious scripture.

When the bombs fall on Tehran, they fall on the city built by the inheritors of this tradition. That tradition does not die in an airstrike. It is, if anything, summoned by it.

Malek Bennabi — the Algerian philosopher whose thought has most profoundly shaped my own intellectual formation — argued in his concept of colonisabilité that civilizations are not conquered by superior weapons alone. They are conquered when they lose the internal will to remain themselves. No such collapse is visible in Iran. The regime may be contested internally. But the civilization it governs is not.

Part Two: The Human Cost — Voices from Under the Bombs

Before the geopolitics, before the cost-exchange ratios and the strategic analysis, there are the people.

According to the NGO Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), by March 17, 2026 — the 17th day of the war — 3,114 people had been killed in Iran by US-Israeli airstrikes, including 1,354 civilians and 1,138 military personnel. UNICEF reported that by March 12, more than 200 children had been killed in Iran alone, with hundreds of thousands displaced and millions unable to attend school. The Iranian Red Crescent reported over 6,668 civilian residential units targeted. A US strike on a girls’ school adjacent to a naval base in Minab killed approximately 170 people on the first day.

A Tehran journalist in her late twenties, keeping a diary shared with NPR under conditions of anonymity, wrote on the first day of the war, when Khamenei was killed: “People came to the roofs and watched and clapped when they hit a target we know. We chanted a lot last night.” She had been arrested twice at the IRGC base that was now bombed. She celebrated the strike.

But as the war entered its second week, her diary changed register. The bombs were no longer selective. The dead were no longer only those she had reason to hate.

A Xinhua correspondent based in Tehran wrote on March 3: “Missiles fell like falling stars, slicing through the darkness before detonating with a force that made the night flinch. The blasts were so violent that they seemed to split the sky at its seams.” In a taxi afterward, the driver shook his head: “Tehran used to be a peaceful city. Some thought the Americans would bring opportunity. Look at what they’ve brought — nothing but bombs.”

From the Iran-Turkey border, NPR’s Emily Feng reported on refugees crossing on foot. An Iranian man showed journalists oil stains on his jacket — residue from burning oil droplets that fell on Tehran’s neighborhoods when Israel struck fuel depots in early March. His 26-year-old cousin, who had risked his life protesting against the government in January, was among the civilians killed. “When he said that to me,” Feng reported, “he paused, like he almost couldn’t believe what he was saying out loud.”

A Tehran resident told Al Jazeera on March 21: “If the main power plants are bombed, it’s not going to be just a brief disruption; it could stop the flow of everything from water to gas. It would be foolish to just punish the population like that.”

These testimonies refuse simplification. They contain simultaneously opposition to the Islamic Republic and rejection of the bombardment. Grief and defiance and dark humor and the stubborn insistence on continuing to live. They are not the testimonies of a broken people. They are the testimonies of a people absorbing an enormous blow and remaining, defiantly, themselves. That is what 7,000 years of civilizational memory looks like from the inside.

Part Three: Fifty Years Under Siege — The Sanctions That Forged the Weapon

The Most Sanctioned Nation in Modern History

Before a single Tomahawk missile was fired on February 28, 2026, Iran had already been fighting the United States for nearly half a century — not with drones and missiles, but with its sheer capacity to survive.

The first American sanctions were imposed in November 1979. Executive Order 12170, signed by President Carter, froze approximately $8.1 billion in Iranian assets held abroad. That was forty-six years ago. Through eight consecutive American administrations — through Republican and Democratic presidencies alike, through periods of Iranian nuclear compliance and non-compliance — the sanctions regime has never fundamentally lifted. It has only expanded.

1979 — First sanctions. $8.1 billion in assets frozen. Trade embargo.

1987 — Reagan bans all Iranian goods and services from the US market.

1995 — Clinton prohibits all US trade with and investment in Iran.

1996 — Congress penalizes foreign firms investing more than $20 million per year in Iranian energy.

2006–2010 — Four rounds of UN Security Council sanctions targeting Iran’s nuclear program.

2012 — EU bans Iranian oil exports entirely. SWIFT disconnects all Iranian banks. The rial loses 80% of its value in months.

2018 — Trump withdraws from the JCPOA — which Iran had been complying with, as certified by the IAEA. Standard Chartered fined $1.5 billion for violating Iran sanctions. JP Morgan Chase pays $5.3 million for 87 violations.

The crowning irony came just days before the war. In February 2026, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testified before the Senate Banking Committee: “What we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country. It came to a swift and grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. The central bank had to print money. The Iranian currency went into free fall. Inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”

He said this as justification for the coming war. Three days later, his government began bombing the country whose suffering he had just catalogued.

The sanctions did not destroy Iran. They forged it.

The Weapon Born of Embargo

Because Iran could not import spare parts, it learned to manufacture them. Because it could not access Western technology, it reverse-engineered it. Because it could not purchase advanced weapons, it developed cheap, mass-producible asymmetric ones. The Shahed-136 suicide drone was born directly from the crucible of American sanctions. It is a product of necessity, of engineering ingenuity applied under conditions of enforced isolation.

The United States spent fifty years trying to economically strangle Iran into military inferiority. It instead forged the weapon that is now draining its own interceptor stockpiles at a rate no factory on earth can replenish in time.

Part Four: The Arithmetic of Empire — Dollars Against Drones

Strip away the presidential declarations and the satellite images of burning Tehran, and what this war ultimately comes down to is an equation — the most consequential military-economic equation of the 21st century.

On one side: the American Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptor missile. Unit cost: approximately $4 million per missile. On the other: the Iranian Shahed-136 loitering munition. Unit cost: approximately $20,000 to $50,000. The cost ratio is between 80:1 and 200:1.

Other systems compound the asymmetry: the THAAD interceptor costs $12 to $15 million per shot; the ship-based SM-3 costs $10 to $28 million. Kelly Grieco of the Stimson Center has calculated that for every dollar Iran spends manufacturing a Shahed drone, the UAE spends between $80 and $200 to intercept it.

Lockheed Martin produces approximately 600 Patriot interceptors per year. Iran launched more than 2,000 drones in the first week of this conflict alone. In the first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury, the United States fired approximately 170 Tomahawk cruise missiles — nearly three times the number the Pentagon had ordered from Raytheon for the entire fiscal year 2026. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated the value of interceptors expended in those first 100 hours at approximately $1.7 billion.

“The US, Israel, and Gulf countries are largely relying on US-made systems, which means they are all drawing from the same production lines.”

— Kelly Grieco, Stimson Center

The June 2025 twelve-day war had already consumed an estimated 150 THAAD interceptors and 80 SM-3s — roughly a quarter of the entire US THAAD stockpile — in under two weeks. By July 2025, Patriot stockpiles had fallen to 25 percent of the volume the Pentagon deemed necessary. The Heritage Foundation warned in January 2026 that high-end interceptor stockpiles could be exhausted within days of sustained combat. Operation Epic Fury is drawing on a reserve that was already critically depleted before the first bomb fell.

Iran’s entire 2025 defense budget was approximately $23 billion — roughly 2.5 percent of the American defense budget of $900 billion. The Shahed drone was designed specifically to exploit the fatal flaw at the heart of Western high-technology defense: the catastrophic cost ratio between precision interceptors and cheap, mass-producible swarm weapons. This is not improvisation. It is strategy.

Part Five: The Two Chokepoints — Oil and Water

The Strait of Hormuz: Where Geography Becomes a Weapon

At its narrowest, the Strait of Hormuz is 33 kilometers wide. Through this channel passes approximately 20 percent of the world’s total petroleum supply — roughly 21 million barrels of oil and liquefied natural gas per day. More than 25 percent of global LNG trade transits here.

Iran has closed it. Not with the naval fleet that American and Israeli strikes have largely destroyed — over fifty Iranian naval vessels now rest on the sea floor. But with mines, drone swarms, ballistic missile threats, and the invisible weapon of risk: no insurance underwriter will currently cover a vessel transiting a strait where Iranian weapons continue to operate.

IEA Director Fatih Birol has been explicit: the situation is “very severe — worse than the two oil crises of the 1970s and the fallout from the Ukraine war put together.” His agency counts that at least 40 energy facilities across nine countries have been severely damaged since February 28. Global oil prices surged from under $60 per barrel in January to $113 on March 22.

A third of the world’s fertilizer trade also passes through the Strait. Shipping lines have rerouted. Aviation across the Middle East has collapsed. The war sold to the world as a campaign for the “rules-based international order” is systematically destroying the supply chains that order was built to protect.

Water: The Existential Lever Not Yet Fully Pulled

The Gulf states account for roughly 60 percent of global desalination capacity. The dependency figures tell the story of existential vulnerability:

• Kuwait: 90 percent of drinking water from desalination
• Bahrain: 90 percent
• Oman: 86 percent
• Saudi Arabia: 70 percent
• UAE: 42 percent

Critically, more than 90 percent of the Gulf’s desalinated water comes from just 56 mega-complexes. On March 7, a drone caused material damage to a desalination plant in Bahrain — the first confirmed strike on Gulf water infrastructure. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated publicly: “Attacking Iran’s infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences. The US set this precedent, not Iran.”

“If attacks on desalination plants are the beginning of a military policy and not just mistakes or collateral damage, this is both illegal — a war crime — and a very concerning development, as Gulf countries have only a few weeks of water storage.”

— Laurent Lambert, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

A few weeks of water storage. That is the margin between the current situation and a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented scale — 100 million people without regular access to drinking water. And this margin is held not by American air defenses, not by Gulf state diplomacy, but by an Iranian decision not yet taken.

Part Six: The Matrix That Does Not Fall

Washington went to war with a theory. Kill the leadership, paralyze the command structure, trigger popular uprising, produce regime change in days. Trump predicted “two or three days.” His military launched 900 strikes in 12 hours. Khamenei was killed on day one. Ali Larijani was assassinated on March 17. Dozens of IRGC commanders have been eliminated.

Twenty-four days later, the Islamic Republic is governing.

“It’s not like we finally found the one leader who, once we kill that leader, the whole house of cards comes apart, because it’s not a house of cards. This is more of a matrix — a flexible matrix.”

— Robert Pape, University of Chicago

Kill the apex of a matrix, and you eliminate the layer requiring the most real-time communication between senior leadership and mid-levels. The mid-level commanders do not pause. They reorganize laterally, often with greater aggression and less political restraint than before. Pape’s structural diagnosis is damning: “The new politics triggered by the bombing work to the disadvantage of regime change. What you’re getting instead is negative regime change: leaders from the second generation who are more anti-American, more dangerous, more willing to take costs in order to punish America.”

The historical record is not ambiguous. It is overwhelming.

• Vietnam (1965–1973): The most bombed country in the history of aerial warfare did not capitulate. The government the US sought to destroy united the country in 1975. It is still there.
• Iraq (2003): The regime fell in 21 days. The state destruction produced fifteen years of insurgency, sectarian civil war, the rise of ISIS.
• Libya (2011): Seven months of NATO air campaign. Gaddafi killed. The state dissolved into permanent civil war, still ongoing fifteen years later.
• Afghanistan: Twenty years. Over $2 trillion. The Taliban returned to power within two weeks of American withdrawal.

In each case: tactical destruction, strategic failure. The assumption that the targeted society was brittle was catastrophically wrong. Every time. Without exception.

Part Seven: Faith as a Strategic Variable

Western strategic analysis has a structural blind spot. It can model military capability, economic leverage, and political will in the terms familiar to liberal democratic systems. What it cannot model — because it has no conceptual vocabulary for it — is the role of faith as a strategic variable.

Shia Islam’s foundational narrative is the Battle of Karbala, fought on October 10, 680 CE. Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, chose death rather than submission to illegitimate power. That day — Ashura — is the most important day in the Shia calendar. Not as a day of defeat. As a day of witness: the theology of the victory of principle over power, of the testimony of the righteous over the triumph of the unjust.

In the Shia eschatological framework, every Iranian soldier who dies in this war is not a casualty of a losing military campaign. He is a shahid — a martyr and witness, whose death carries divine meaning. Every bombed city block is not evidence that God has abandoned Iran. It is evidence, within this framework, that Iran stands on the side of righteousness.

No Patriot battery can intercept that. No THAAD system can neutralize it. No Tomahawk missile can destroy it.

Robert Pape identifies “strategic culture” — a population’s cohesion and tolerance for suffering — as the decisive variable when military force is sufficient to destroy but insufficient to conquer. Iran’s strategic culture of endurance is theologically produced, historically reinforced across seven thousand years, and politically mobilized by every bomb that falls on Tehran. The Shahed drone carries a $35,000 warhead. It also carries, in the consciousness of the millions who watch it launched, the weight of Karbala, the memory of fifty years of embargo, the dignity of civilizational continuity. That is not a weapon the United States knows how to defeat.

Part Eight: Sun Tzu and the Strategic Bankruptcy of Trump and Netanyahu

There is a text that every military academy in the world assigns. It was written approximately 2,500 years ago in China. Its author was a general named Sun Tzu, and its title is The Art of War. It is the most influential strategic treatise in human history. And every principle it establishes, Trump and Netanyahu have systematically violated.

First Principle: “Know your enemy and know yourself”

Sun Tzu places the knowledge of the adversary at the summit of all strategic thought. What did Trump and Netanyahu know about Iran before launching 900 strikes in 12 hours? That its economy was fragile. That its population had been in the streets protesting. What they did not understand: that a civilization of 7,000 years does not measure its will to resist in GDP per capita or inflation rates. That the ‘asabiyya of which Ibn Khaldun wrote is activated, not destroyed, by foreign bombardment. That the Iranian woman who had been arrested twice for not wearing a hijab, who celebrated the first strikes, would end her March 16 diary entry: “In the final battle I will burn every single one of these psychopathic murderers” — meaning the regime. But she was writing from a city under foreign attack. The distinction, under bombs, dissolves.

They did not know their enemy. According to Sun Tzu, they had already lost.

Second Principle: “The supreme excellence in war is to break the enemy’s resistance without fighting”

On February 27, 2026 — the eve of the attack — Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi confirmed that a diplomatic “breakthrough” had been achieved: Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, to permit full IAEA verification, and to irreversibly downgrade its existing enriched uranium to the lowest possible level. He declared peace “within reach.” Negotiations were scheduled to resume March 2.

Eighteen hours later, the bombs began to fall.

A negotiated solution — Iran denuclearized by agreement, Strait open, markets stabilized — was sacrificed. Sun Tzu names this error without hesitation: the available victory without combat was strategically superior to the available military one. They chose the inferior option.

Third Principle: The Requirement of a Defined End State

A war without a defined victory condition is a war lost before it is begun. Let us examine the official record of Trump administration war objectives, in chronological order:

• February 28, Hegseth: Ending “47 long years of war by the expansionist and Islamist regime.”
• February 28, Rubio (hours later): The US acted defensively, pre-emptively, to protect its forces.
• March 2, Trump: Regime change in “two or three days.”
• March 9, Trump: “I think the war is very complete, pretty much.”
• March 11, Hegseth: “This is only just the beginning.”
• March 21, Trump: 48-hour ultimatum to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
• March 23, Trump: Five-day delay for “very good and productive” negotiations.
• March 23, Iran: “There is no dialogue between Tehran and Washington.”

“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Fourth Principle: Appear Strong When You Are Weak

The art of strategic deception — maintaining ambiguity about one’s capabilities and intentions — is among Sun Tzu’s most elaborated teachings. Observe who practices it.

Iran practices Sun Tzu. It closes the Strait but maintains deliberate ambiguity about its capacity to keep it closed indefinitely. It denies negotiations while allowing regional intermediaries — Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt — to carry messages sufficient for Trump to construct a narrative of “productive conversations” allowing him to retreat from his ultimatum without formal capitulation. It strikes near Dimona without destroying the reactor — demonstrating existential capability while withholding its use.

Trump announces his threats in capital letters on a public social media platform. He sets deadlines in specific hours. He retreats from those deadlines publicly, before his own stated expiration time. Iranian state television broadcast the verdict without ambiguity: “Trump, fearing Iran’s response, backed down from his 48-hour ultimatum.”

Every strategist on earth — in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, Caracas — read that broadcast. Its lesson is precise: American ultimatums can be waited out. This is what deterrence theorists call credibility degradation. Each capitulation makes the next threat easier to ignore.

The Final Verdict of Sun Tzu

“In war, the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.”

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Trump and Netanyahu launched their campaign and then looked for what victory might mean. They have been looking for twenty-four days. They have not found a stable answer. Iran, by contrast, had its victory condition defined before the first American missile fell: survival. Remain standing. Keep the Strait closed. Force economic pain on the global system. Demonstrate that the most powerful military alliance in history cannot achieve its stated objectives. And let the world draw its own conclusions.

Sun Tzu would recognize the Iranian strategy immediately. He would struggle to find the American one.

Part Nine: The Third Winner — Beijing’s Silent Harvest

While Washington burns through missile interceptors, carrier group logistics, and political capital in the Persian Gulf, China is quietly consolidating the strategic architecture of the 21st century.

To sustain Operation Epic Fury, the United States has redeployed advanced missile defense systems from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East — THAAD batteries and naval interceptor platforms whose Pacific positioning most directly threatened Chinese security interests. Melanie Hart of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub states: “It is impossible to overstate the degree to which those movements are a massive win for Beijing. And if the United States ends up stuck in another Middle Eastern quagmire that cedes the Indo-Pacific to China, the wins will keep coming.”

Russia is the clearest immediate beneficiary: oil above $100 a barrel has replenished Moscow’s war chest and reduced Ukrainian leverage in any future peace negotiation. The war the Trump administration was supposed to prevent — Russia’s slow conquest of Ukraine — is being financed, in part, by the economic disruption of the war the Trump administration chose to start.

China alone entered this crisis with genuine strategic depth. It holds the world’s largest strategic petroleum reserves outside the United States. It is purchasing Iranian oil at discount prices throughout the conflict. It will dominate Gulf state reconstruction contracts when the shooting stops. And its military planners are studying, with professional interest, every data point this war generates on drone cost-exchange ratios and interceptor stockpile depletion rates.

The 2026 Iran war may be remembered as the moment the American Pacific Century began its terminal phase — not in a confrontation over Taiwan, but in a miscalculation over a nuclear facility in the Iranian desert.

Part Ten: The Global South Is Watching

This war is not only about Iran. It is about what Iran’s performance means for every non-Western state calculating its strategic options in a world still structured — for now — by American military primacy.

For seventy years, the fundamental premise underwriting that structure has been: no state that directly confronts American military power can survive the confrontation with its government intact. Vietnam cracked that premise. Afghanistan confirmed it required extended occupation to fail. Iran, in 2026, is demonstrating something new: that a non-Western state, under the most intense aerial bombardment since the Second World War, can absorb the assault, maintain its institutional functions, weaponize the global economy through geography and cheap technology, and force the aggressor into public strategic incoherence — all without nuclear weapons.

The Shahed drone that costs $35,000 and forces a $4 million Patriot intercept is not merely a weapon. It is a political statement: the technological and financial gulf between the imperial center and the periphery is no longer sufficient to guarantee compliance.

The Global South is watching from Caracas, Pyongyang, Harare, and Algiers. What it is watching — in real time, measured in the smoking debris of interceptors that cost $4 million to stop a drone that cost $20,000 — is the demonstration that the age of uncontested American military omnipotence is ending.

Malek Bennabi argued that civilizations are not defeated by superior weapons. They are defeated by the internal exhaustion of their own will to be. The civilization that forgets why it exists is already dying, regardless of its arsenal. Seven thousand years of Persian civilization have not forgotten why they exist.

Conclusion: The War That Time Cannot Win

Napoleon invaded Russia in June 1812 with 600,000 soldiers. He reached Moscow in September. The Russians burned their own capital rather than surrender it. The Grande Armée, designed for decisive engagement, had no strategic answer for a people willing to accept unlimited suffering in preference to submission. By December, fewer than 100,000 of those 600,000 men had returned.

The lesson was not about military technology. It was about will, time, and the asymmetry of what each side had to lose.

Twenty-four days of the most sophisticated aerial campaign in the history of warfare. The supreme leader, dead. The secretary of the National Security Council, assassinated. Fifty naval vessels on the ocean floor. Natanz struck three times. At least 1,354 civilians killed, 200 children among them. Billions of dollars of military infrastructure destroyed.

And yet: the Islamic Republic governs. Its drones are flying. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil is above $100. The global economy is hostage. Trump invents negotiations that Iran denies in real time. His ultimatums expire un-executed. His war has no articulated end state. And Sun Tzu, reading the record from twenty-five centuries away, would close his treatise and say: this campaign was lost before the first missile was fired.

There is a final fact that history will not overlook. On February 27, 2026 — the day before the bombs began to fall — Oman’s Foreign Minister confirmed that a diplomatic breakthrough was within reach. Iran had agreed to full nuclear transparency. Peace was available. The decision was taken to bomb rather than negotiate.

Sa’adi Shirazi wrote, in 13th-century Persia, the verse that hangs today at the entrance of the United Nations: “All human beings are members of one frame, since all, at first, from the same essence came.” Iran sent that poem to the United Nations. The United States sent it cruise missiles.

The empire has more weapons. Iran has more memory.

Memory, in the long run, wins.

Laala Bechetoula is an independent Algerian historian, journalist and geopolitical analyst.

24 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Mushtaq Ul Haq Ahmad Sikander, New Age Islam

Kashmir’s Moral Decay: Questions as Deadly Risks

Main Points:

·         Moral decay in Muslim societies replaces God-consciousness with greed and self-interest.

·         Religious trusts evolve from noble causes into family empires controlled by opportunists.

·         Experience reveals aid embezzlement by a failed lawyer during 2014 floods.

·         Questioning corruption invites violence, as in Advocate Babar Qadri’s murder.

·         Fear silences Kashmiris amid blurred lines between militants, mafia, and state allies.

When societies decay, they don’t always collapse with a bang; sometimes, they corrode quietly from within. The Muslim world — once an intellectual and moral lighthouse — today stands at a crossroads of self-inflicted decline. The decay isn’t only political or economic; it is moral, spiritual, and institutional. Nowhere is this collapse more visible than in places like Kashmir, where the noble vocabulary of faith, justice, and service has been hijacked by opportunists — the pious pretenders and clever manipulators who wear the cloak of religiosity to enrich themselves.

What began as reform gradually turned into rot. And questions — simple, honest questions — about accountability and truth have become acts of rebellion so dangerous that they can cost one’s life.

The Moral Decay Beneath the Divine Vocabulary

Across the Muslim world, we have witnessed a degeneration of moral and spiritual values. Where once taqwa (God-consciousness) shaped public life, today greed and self-interest define it. The poor remain poor, and the pious impostors grow rich in the name of the poor.

The disease lies not merely in worldly temptations but also in the loss of fear of God. The rich and powerful engineer shortcuts to prosperity — legal or illegal, halal or haram, moral or immoral — no longer matters. The language of faith has become a business model; dawah is monetized, charity is privatized, and “trusts” have mutated into family enterprises.

Every avenue of righteous service has been converted into a personal fiefdom — where the throne of the Almighty is invoked only to legitimize selfish power. Sincerity has been replaced by theater; spirituality by spectacle; integrity by slogans.

How Noble Causes Turn into Private Empires

It begins innocently enough. A group forms an Islamic trust, declaring noble missions: to educate the poor, aid orphans, or raise religious awareness. They attract support — moral, intellectual, and financial. For a moment, hope breathes again. People believe that the idealism of Islam can still produce social reform. But soon, the group mutates. The original zeal and sincerity give way to hierarchy. Power revolves around one family. Trustees gradually become mere signatories, present only to fulfill legal formalities. The real control lies elsewhere — in one man’s hands, his household, and later his descendants. Where once a collective dream existed, now a family enterprise stands. The mosque becomes an office; the pulpit, a press-conference desk.

The Story of a Failed Lawyer and a Broken Trust

I speak not merely in abstraction. I was, for more than a decade, a volunteer in one such “Islamic trust.” It began when an academic mentor urged me to join a fledgling organization led by a lawyer — a failed one, both professionally and ethically.

This man, married into a family of NGO owners and social workers, decided to own his piece of the moral market. He opened his own trust — a shop thinly covered in religious wrapping. As an idealistic college student, I poured time, intellect, and heart into this venture. For years, I worked without pay, mobilizing youth, connecting donors, helping the trust survive through its early years. During the devastating 2014 floods in Kashmir, I helped channel millions in foreign aid to this organization — aid meant for rebuilding lives, for the destitute, for the homeless.

But soon the numbers stopped adding up. The donor agency sought transparency — a simple audit, a basic moral duty. And then the mask slipped. The audit never came. The “failed lawyer” had siphoned off a large portion of the donations to buy a flat in New Delhi.

When I discovered this, my conscience screamed. I wanted to expose him. But the world of deceit is guarded by unseen daggers. Friends cautioned me: he could fabricate charges, trap me legally, even get me imprisoned. Some whispered that people who raise uncomfortable questions disappear quietly. In that moment, idealism died a quiet death in me. I resigned, disillusioned yet grateful to be alive. For in Kashmir, truth-telling can be a form of suicide.

When the Guardians Become the Gravediggers

The tragedy is broader than one man or one trust. Across Kashmir, Islamic institutions — educational, charitable, missionary have fallen prey to similar fates.

I recall another circle, founded by sincere professionals seeking to combine faith, education, and service. Yet as soon as the venture became successful, one man — an engineer by training seized control. His greed eclipsed every collective aspiration. He turned a social movement into a bloodline business. Those who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him were expelled one by one. Trustees were threatened, silenced, or bought.

When I asked some of the displaced trustees why they didn’t challenge him legally, their answer chilled me: “He has access to guns.” In a place where power and violence blur, where the boundary between militants, mafia, and manipulators is invisible, they chose silence over martyrdom. “Better to stay quiet than become a headline read with suspicion,” they said. Because in Kashmir, when someone dies at the wrong hands, rumors paint the victim darker than the murderer. Death itself becomes a defamation. The fear of “unknown gunmen” has colonized the conscience of Kashmir. Every honest person carries an invisible notice — “Speak carefully, for your grave may be listening.”

When Questions Become Crimes

If you need a living example of how dangerous dissent is, remember Advocate Babar Qadri. A sharp mind, an articulate voice, a believer in dialogue. His only sin was asking the wrong questions — questions about transparency in power structures, about the conduct of the Bar Association, about the silence of those who claim to represent justice. One evening, masked men entered his home and silenced him forever.

His killers walked calmly into the darkness. His questions still echo in it.

In Kashmir, asking questions about the misuse of religion or money, the exploitation by Moulvis and “leaders,” or the hidden alliances between religious entrepreneurs and state machinery — is equivalent to inviting death.

Take the case of a prominent religious figure — Ghulam Rasool Hami. His family enterprises swirl with whispers of fraud and manipulation. Yet who dares investigate? Only those under political protection, like Sandeep Mawa, can speak openly. Anyone else risks a jail cell — or a coffin. Because in every conflict zone, the state keeps loyal “assets” — people whose function is to maintain influence among the populace. These assets are untouchable. They manipulate faith to pacify protest, distribute aid selectively, and control narratives. And the state, in turn, shields them.

This unholy marriage between political power and religious opportunism has made accountability impossible. The masses remain silent, not because they approve, but because they wish to live.

The Anatomy of Fear

There’s a proverb in our land: “When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets crushed.” The ordinary Kashmiri — the teacher, the student, the shopkeeper, the volunteer — is the grass. Between the weight of the gun and the shadow of corruption, between the state and its surrogates, between militants and mafias, the common man learns only one lesson: survival.

We have reached a stage where silence is no longer cowardice — it’s self-preservation. Truth has no reward, only risk. The powerful fabricate charges with ease; the weak find themselves behind bars or beneath soil. To question is to betray. To expose is to invite revenge. And to resign from moral complicity is to live with perpetual suspicion.

Between Faith and Fear

It is ironic that in the land of saints, where Sufis once taught humility and truth, faith has now become a camouflage for kleptocracy. Everyone talks of Shura, consultation, and Caliphate; of justice in Islam; of freedom of expression in Khilafat. But when someone dares to actually apply these ideals — to demand audit, transparency, or explanation — that person is branded as “a troublemaker,” “a foreign agent,” or worse, “an infidel.”

Our tragedy lies in this hypocrisy: we quote verses about justice while burying those who live by them. We brag about Haqq but celebrate Makkari. We speak of Akhirat while enslaving the world. We demand democracy for ourselves but despise accountability for our idols. Thus, the disintegration isn’t only institutional; it is doctrinal. We no longer believe what we preach.

The Irony of Islamic Rhetoric

Nowhere does irony wound more sharply than in the language of faith itself. The very words that once emancipated humanity — adl (justice), amanah (trust), shura (consultation), ikhlaas (sincerity) — have been hollowed out and repainted as tools of control. Across Kashmir and much of the Muslim world, these sacred ideals are now rehearsed in speeches, embossed on trust letterheads, and woven into the rhetoric of Friday sermons, all while their spirit lies buried under layers of greed and fear.

We proclaim our attachment to the Caliphate, yet we cannot run a charity without corruption. We quote the Qur’an about accountability, yet we recoil from a simple audit. We invoke the Prophet’s humility, while competing for power, position, and photo opportunities. This duplicity insults both faith and reason. Islam was never meant to be a slogan for social climbing; it was meant to be a moral discipline. But in our hands, religion has become both a refuge for cowards and a weapon for swindlers.

The irony deepens when these exploiters portray themselves as victims — claiming to “defend Islam” even as they defile it through deceit and intimidation. They preach patience to the poor while their own children study abroad on misused relief funds. They demand accountability from the world but offer none to their own followers. When confronted, they wrap themselves in the sanctity of religion, declaring any questioner an enemy of faith. Thus, Islam — the religion of questioning, of reason, of moral interrogation — is used to silence the very act of inquiry it once commanded.

And that is the heart of the tragedy: the murder of conscience in the name of piety.

In our sermons, Islam reigns supreme; in our systems, it lies imprisoned. We boast of divine justice but live by human cunning. We fear no God but all men. Our words are sacred — our deeds profane.

Until we learn to reclaim the moral integrity of our faith — until truth becomes safer than silence — Kashmir, and indeed the Muslim world, will continue to produce martyrs of honesty and monuments of hypocrisy. For now, in our valleys, questions themselves have become crimes; and those who ask them, casualties of their own courage.

…

M.H.A.Sikander is Writer-Activist based in Srinagar, Kashmir.

13 February 2026

Source: newageislam.com

By Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolić Hughes

If we can imagine such a world, we can create it.

That the U.S. is awash in hypocrisy and mendacity should come as no surprise to the people of the world who have watched the U.S. launch one war and/or regime change operation after another over the past 80 years. As former president Jimmy Carter acknowledged in 2019, after receiving a phone call from Donald Trump bemoaning the rise of the China century, he (Carter) didn’t fear the Chinese who hadn’t been at war since 1979; it was the U.S. that had constantly been at war. The late president calculated that the U.S. had only enjoyed 16 years of peace in its then 242 year-long existence, making it “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”

But that dismal record has not deterred the U.S. from touting its moral superiority and lecturing other countries about the need to adhere to the so-called “rules-based international order” that the U.S. created but refuses to follow when its own “interests” are at stake. Former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson demonstrated this hubris best following the post-WWI settlement conference at Versailles when he said, “at last the world knows the United States as the savior of the world.” That smug refrain—the bloated and blind self-righteousness captured in the notion of “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States is not only different than all other nations, it is better than all other nations—has been echoed repeatedly by American leaders who believe it entitles them to use whatever means are necessary to maintain global hegemony. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, not long after justifying the killing of a half million Iraqi children via U.S. sanctions, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”

With leaders like Wilson, Truman, the Dulles brothers, Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Reagan, George W. Bush, the Clintons (especially Hillary), Albright, and Biden, the U.S. has long deserved the Nobel Prize for hypocrisy. Now with Trump back in office, U.S. hypocrisy and mendacity have both risen to truly unprecedented levels.

But to make matters worse, in west Asia, the U.S. has joined Bibi Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing advisors in a war of choice based, like so many previous U.S. wars, on blatant lies about the imminent threat posed, in this case, by Iran’s nuclear weapons and missile programs—lies that had been thoroughly debunked by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.S. intelligence community. That the U.S., with more than 5000 nuclear weapons and a unique responsibility for the nuclear age and some of its worst crimes, and Israel, with 90 nuclear warheads or more, an arsenal considered to be “undeclared,” feel justified in leveling much of Iran on the fabricated pretext that Iran might have the propensity to develop nuclear weapons takes hypocrisy and impunity to an entirely new level.

The C.I.A. has reported that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. That same year, Ayatollah Khamenei first issued his fatwa against Iran ever developing or attaining a nuclear weapon—a ban that was in place prior to this and last year’s attacks on Iran. Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or the Iran nuclear deal, which Obama painfully negotiated in 2015 with the help of Russia and other countries, Iran was to keep its uranium enrichment to 3.67%, far below the levels needed to develop a nuclear weapon, for 15 years. Following the deal, Iran was being subjected to the most intensive inspection regime ever instituted, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But Trump walked away from the JCPOA in 2018, setting the stage for the violent confrontations that have marked his second administration.

Last June, the U.S. and Israel subjected Iran to a 12-day bombing campaign that Trump claimed had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Now the U.S. and Israel are again bombing Iran even more mercilessly. Gone are the days of targeting mainly the nuclear sites, which had risked a catastrophe of a different proportion. Such “strategic” sites have now been replaced by a girls’ school, at least 13 hospitals, a sports complex, and many other civilian targets.

Israel had done everything it could to stop the U.S. from signing the JCPOA in the first place and encouraged Trump to withdraw from the agreement during his first term. Now Netanyahu finally helped drag the U.S. into a war with Iran—something Netanyahu has been attempting to do for decades—but other U.S. presidents had the good sense to resist. Netanyahu is the one who has been warning that Iran was “weeks” away from a nuclear weapon on a regular basis since the 1990s. Trump and Netanyahu began their bombing campaign despite the fact that the Oman foreign minister declared that the two sides had made “significant progress” and were very close to a deal. According to Minister al-Busaidi, Iran would have agreed to get rid of its highly enriched uranium that could potentially be used for a weapon and roll back all other potentially threatening aspects of its research program. Trump and Netanyahu, thinking a military victory would showcase their ferocity more than a diplomatic one, opted to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and unleashed this immoral, illegal, and absolutely unnecessary war.

No one, and especially those who like us, have advocated for nuclear disarmament and the abolition of nuclear weapons, should want to see Iran develop its own nuclear arsenal. But no one should be surprised if Iranian leaders believe that this would be their only credible means of defense against another invasion. Clearly, after being bombed twice within eight months when they were in the midst of seemingly productive negotiations, the Iranians have little appetite for being sucker-punched a third time. But given the stakes and the global risks from further escalation on top of the damage already being done, a diplomatic solution must be imposed upon all parties.

This should happen immediately. If the U.S. and Israeli regimes learn that the use of force under phony pretenses turns them into universally despised pariah states, so much the better. If the Iranian regime gives up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the world will cheer.

But we must all agree that in the nuclear age, war is not an option. We must reembrace diplomacy and find a path toward peaceful development that will serve the interests of not just those involved, but all of humanity. As wise statesmen have said, human beings created these survival-threatening crises; human beings can also choose to live together and resolve differences peacefully. If we can imagine such a world, we can create it.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University.

Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington, D.C.

21 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Tehran (QNN)- The administration of US President Donald Trump moved to ease pressure on global energy markets by temporarily lifting some sanctions on Iranian oil for 30 days. The decision came despite years of failed Iranian efforts to secure sanctions relief through diplomacy.

Iran had long pushed to remove sanctions through negotiations, but those efforts brought little progress. Now, in a shift driven by wartime conditions, Washington allowed limited oil sales without a request from Tehran.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the move, describing Iran as a “central force in global terrorism.” He claimed that Trump’s “Operation Epic Fury” was advancing faster than expected and aimed to counter Iranian influence while stabilizing energy supplies.

The US Department of the Treasury issued a narrowly tailored authorization that permits the sale of Iranian oil currently stranded at sea. Officials stressed that the measure remains temporary and does not allow new production or future purchases.

The policy unlocks an estimated 140 million barrels of oil and injects them into global markets. US officials said the move would increase supply, ease pressure on prices, and reduce the impact of disruptions linked to the US war on Iran.

Bessent said China had been stockpiling sanctioned Iranian oil at discounted prices. By releasing this supply, the United States aims to keeping global prices in check.

Despite the easing, Washington insisted it would maintain its broader “maximum pressure” campaign.

The administration has already worked to add around 440 million barrels of oil to global markets in recent weeks. These efforts seek to offset disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global energy shipments.

According to the International Energy Agency, oil flows through the strait dropped sharply from about 20 million barrels per day to minimal levels, marking one of the largest supply disruptions in history. The crisis has driven US gasoline prices up by more than 85 cents per gallon since the start of the Israeli war on Iran.

Inside the White House, officials debated whether to release even more oil. Some advisers supported adding up to 100 million barrels, while others warned that excessive releases could weaken US reserves if regional infrastructure faces further attacks.

The US Department of Energy said it has no immediate plans for additional releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve but continues to monitor the situation closely.

Trump’s administration framed the move as part of a broader pro-energy strategy. Officials claimed that record US oil and gas production has strengthened energy security and helped lower long-term costs, even as short-term disruptions continue to affect global markets.

21 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bharat Dogra

The humanitarian crisis situation has become acute in Iran, Lebanon and Cuba very quickly in recent days. In most reviews of the countries that were worst affected by humanitarian crisis at the beginning of the year, prepared by various humanitarian aid organizations, these three countries were not mentioned as the worst affected countries, and most of the nearly 239 million people estimated by the UN to need urgent humanitarian assistance were from other countries (including mainly African countries like Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, the wider Sahel region but also some Asian countries and territories like Afghanistan, Myanmar, Yemen and Gaza). While humanitarian aid needs to be maintained at high levels in all these and other countries identified earlier as leading areas of humanitarian crisis, at the same time there is also a new urgency of taking more humanitarian aid to Lebanon, Iran and Cuba.

It will be even more difficult to take humanitarian aid to these three countries, compared to the difficult conditions prevailing in many countries identified earlier, but nevertheless the challenge has to be taken up to the extent possible, keeping in view the urgency of the task. Some volunteers have already made very courageous efforts to take help to Cuba in difficult conditions and while keeping in view the needs this small help could only be symbolic, it is the spirit of these noble efforts that is really needed today.

While the UN has the main responsibility for this, other organizations like BRICS and the movement of non-aligned countries should also become more active in arranging humanitarian aid for those countries where it is more urgently needed. The cause of humanitarian aid can be a more unifying factor among several nations that are eager to make a constructive contribution.

Lebanon has a total population of six million people and out of this over a million have already been displaced after about a month of recent war and conflict in the region. In Iran, given the overall larger population, the number of people needing humanitarian assistance is much higher, and the situation must be considered keeping in view the fact that after years of severe sanctions the economic capacity of the government here has been greatly reduced.

In the context of Cuba the crisis created by many decades of highly unfair sanctions and other pressures has been aggravated increasingly by the Trump administration in recent times with increasing aggression towards the small neighbor country.

In fact in all these three countries as well as in most other countries facing humanitarian crisis, the problem has been caused to a large extent and is being aggravated greatly by entirely avoidable wars, conflicts and aggression. While the Iran war or the wider middle-east war is the most dangerous just now, there are also serious humanitarian crisis situations associated with the Ukraine war, the Sudan civil war, the Rwanda-DRC conflict and the various conflicts of the wider Sahel region which too can be aggravated during this year and in fact some of these crisis situations are already getting aggravated in serious ways. There is a danger that some of the killer crisis situations may get neglected under the shadow of the Iran crisis.

In fact the risk of a bigger regional war erupting in Africa is something about which we should be very concerned, and should do all to prevent. This can grow out of existing civil war in Sudan (increasingly also South Sudan) or various sectarian and other conflicts in the Sahel region or the tense-situation in eastern DRC along Rwanda-DRC borders. Ethiopia is increasingly desperate to regain its lost access to sea which can potentially ignite new conflicts with Eritrea and Somalia, apart from re-activating Tigray based militias. On the other hand, Ethiopia can have increasing conflict also with Egypt over its Grand Renaissance Dam and the access to Nile river waters. An aggravating problem is that there are possibilities of various African country groups being formed on two or more sides of some of these conflicts, and worse still, of more resourceful countries from West Asia providing more destructive weapons to rival sides in Africa, making the situation much more destructive.

Hence while collecting and rushing more humanitarian aid is very important, it is even more important (if anything can be more important) to strive to end or reduce various conflicts and wars.

It is also important to remember the warnings voiced right at the beginning of the year, or even earlier, by the UN and various humanitarian aid organizations that the funds available for humanitarian aid are now much lesser than in earlier years. In fact the fund shortage for this most important task has never been as acute now as in any recent times.

Keeping in view all these factors, unless immediate remedial actions are taken, the number of people affected by serious humanitarian crisis may quickly rise closer to or even beyond the previous peak of 323 million people. Keeping in view the serious funds crunch and other difficulties, if just 2 per cent of these highly vulnerable people die, then this will mean over 6 million deaths this year. Let there be no doubts about this. The life of millions of people is threatened this year, and the world should heed such timely warnings. This huge and very painful tragedy can still be averted by stopping wars and rushing humanitarian aid to highly vulnerable people before it is too late.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now.

1 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org