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By Stan Cox

Donald Trump’s illegal, increasingly unpopular war on Iran is sinking Republican prospects for winning the midterm elections, to the delight of Washington Democrats and liberal media. A couple of weeks before the US and Israel launched their blitzkrieg at the end of February, a Senate foreign-policy aide told Drop Site News that

A substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats.

Party leaders certainly have been acting as if they’re strategizing with one eye on the midterms. In a February 20 statement, titled “The Risks of Donald Trump and His Administration Dragging Us into War with Iran,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer supported the then-impending war—as long as it was done the right way. He complained only that “The administration has yet to articulate to Congress and the American people what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign.”

For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians

At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.”

On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep U.S. troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war.

Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.”

Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote.

Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like? . . . Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.”

As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party.

And so itcame to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts — the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.”

“Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner!

“This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself”

Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices.

Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran-regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to him suggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments:

If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government . . . you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you . . . proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform . . .

Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At the Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.”

By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89 percent.”

Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war,

The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences . . . They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security. . . This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself.

“A Gift to Our Country”

Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington.

More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.”

He wrote, “The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.”

Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed.

El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing I.C.E., increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare-for-all. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide — and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.”

In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan . . . None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed . . . Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good health care or good schools.”

Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past fifty years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home.

Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.

• * *

Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves.

After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble.

Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile.

Stan Cox is the author, most recently, of Anthopause: The Beauty of Degrowth.

1 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Feroze Mithiborwala

​TEHRAN / WASHINGTON — As the tyrannical Trump regime moves from punitive strikes under “Operation Epic Fury”, or rather “Operation Epstein Fury”, toward the actual seizure of Iranian islands, a consensus is emerging among military realists and veteran geopoliticians: the mission is a strategic mirage. While the Pentagon’s destructive firepower is overwhelming, the unique confluence of Iran’s asymmetric warfare, daunting fortress-like geography, “anti-navy” tactics, and the sheer persistence of Iran’s decentralized command structure suggests that any attempt to “capture and hold” Kharg, Abu Musa or the Tunb islands will likely result in a historic American quagmire.[1]

​1. THE GEOGRAPHICAL “KILL ZONE”

​The primary obstacle to a successful U.S. occupation is not just the Iranian military, which has proved to be a formidable force, but the physics of the Strait itself. Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran and former advisor to the Secretary of Defence, has been vocal about the folly of a ground engagement in this theatre. Macgregor warns that U.S. forces are being led into a “catastrophic trap,” noting that the U.S. military is currently “a force designed for a world that no longer exists,” ill-equipped for the high-intensity, localized attrition required to hold Iranian territory.[8]

• ​The “Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier” Myth: Military analysts warn that while islands like Qeshm and Abu Musa are “fixed launch pads,” they are also surrounded by thousands of “hidden teeth.” According to Mike Plunket, a senior analyst at Janes, the proximity to the Iranian mainland means U.S. forces would be “perpetually within the engagement envelope of Iranian mobile artillery.”[3]
• ​The Topographical Fortress: The Iranian coastline is composed of rugged, limestone cliffs and “moon-like” caves. Pravin Sawhney, editor of FORCE Magazine and a veteran defence analyst, argues that the U.S. fails to grasp the integration of Iranian geography with their missile doctrine. Sawhney notes that Iran’s “unmatched missile and drone capability” is purpose-built to negate U.S. carrier groups in the narrow waters of the Gulf, making any landing force a “sitting duck” for land-based saturation.[9]

​2. THE “ANTI-NAVY” AND ASYMMETRIC SATURATION

​The U.S. Navy is designed to fight “blue water” battles. In the Strait, it faces an “Anti-Navy”—a swarm of low-cost assets that can overwhelm sophisticated Aegis defence systems.

• ​The Swarm Dilemma: Iran’s IRGC Navy utilizes hundreds of fast-attack craft (FAC). George Galloway, the British politician and commentator, has frequently highlighted the disparity in the cost of war. In recent broadcasts, Galloway has pointed out the absurdity of the U.S. “spending millions on interceptor missiles to shoot down drones that cost as much as a lawnmower,” arguing that the Western public has no appetite for the “rivers of blood” that a Strait invasion would entail.[10]
• ​The Mine Menace: Experts at Stratfor estimate Iran possesses up to 8,000 naval mines.[2] Mike Plunket emphasizes that the U.S. lacks the mine countermeasure capability to sweep the Strait while under active fire from the mainland cliffs.[3]

​3. THE “MOSAIC” DEFENSE: DECAPITATED YET DEADLY

​A central tenet of the Trump strategy has been “decapitation.” However, Professor Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran argues this is a profound Western miscalculation. Marandi, a knowledgeable and leading voice for the Iranian perspective, states that the U.S. is “living in a fantasy” if it believes destroying command centres will stop the resistance. He emphasizes that Iran’s defence is “deeply rooted in the population and the geography,” and that the “Axis of Resistance” is now a self-sustaining entity and has the firepower to strike back at U.S. staging grounds.[11]

• ​Decentralized Lethality: The IRGC’s “Mosaic Defence” allows 31 independent commands to operate autonomously. Can Kasapoğlu of the Hudson Institute notes that even with “functional air supremacy,” the U.S. cannot suppress the “kill chains” of these decentralized units.[1]

​4. LOGISTICAL SUICIDE: THE COST OF THE “HOLD”

​Seizing an island is an act of hours; holding it is an ordeal of years. Pravin Sawhney observes that the U.S. military logistics chain is “overstretched and vulnerable,” particularly when facing a peer-level electronic warfare environment that Iran, bolstered by its allies, now provides.[9]

• ​Vulnerability of the “Tail”: Every cargo ship carrying resupply to an occupied island becomes a target for Iran’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBMs). As Douglas Macgregor bluntly stated, any attempt to sustain a landing force in the face of Iranian shore-based missiles would result in the “destruction of the U.S. Navy as we know it” within the confines of the Gulf.[8]

​5. THE ALLY FACTOR: THE “AXIS” BEYOND TEHRAN

​The U.S. is not fighting Iran in a vacuum. Mohammad Marandi warns that the U.S. “cannot protect its bases in the region,” and that countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia are “extremely vulnerable” to having their entire economic infrastructure dismantled if they continue to host an invasion force.[11]

• ​Global Backlash: George Galloway frames the conflict as the “final gasp of Western hegemony,” suggesting that the global South and Iran’s allies will ensure that the U.S. is diplomatically and economically isolated for its “aggression” in the Strait.[10]

​CONCLUSION: THE PYRRHIC VICTORY

​The attempt to capture the islands of the Strait of Hormuz is likely to result in what military historians call a Pyrrhic Victory. As Douglas Macgregor and Pravin Sawhney have both cautioned in different contexts, “victory” on paper means nothing if the price is the loss of a carrier strike group and the collapse of regional alliances. The islands of the Strait remain not a prize, but a trap designed to bleed a superpower dry.[5][8][9]

​References:

1. ​[1] Kasapoğlu, Can. “Examining US Military Options for Kharg Island and the Strait of Hormuz.” Hudson Institute, March 30, 2026.
2. ​[2] Stratfor Worldview. “The Obstacles Facing the U.S. Plan for Strait of Hormuz.” Stratfor, March 17, 2026.
3. ​[3] Plunket, Mike. “Iran challenges the powerful US Navy in an asymmetric naval battle.” El País, March 13, 2026.
4. ​[4] Maritime Security Forum. “Iran’s Islands and Strategic Architecture.” March 21, 2026.
5. ​[5] WANA News. “Trump’s Two Scenarios for Ending the Conflict.” West Asia News Agency, March 31, 2026.
6. ​[6] Iran Watch. “Weapon Programs One-Month Update.” Wisconsin Project, March 31, 2026.
7. ​[7] FPRI Experts. “Options in the Strait of Hormuz.” Foreign Policy Research Institute, March 20, 2026.
8. ​[8] Macgregor, Douglas. “The Coming Conflict with Iran: A Strategic Disaster.” Judging Freedom / YouTube, March 25, 2026.
9. ​[9] Sawhney, Pravin. “Why the US cannot win a war against Iran.” FORCE Magazine / YouTube, March 28, 2026.
10. ​[10] Galloway, George. “The Mother of All Talk Shows (MOATS): The Gulf War Part II?” Galloway Media, March 29, 2026.
11. ​[11] Marandi, Mohammad. “US aggression will lead to its total expulsion from West Asia.” Al Jazeera English, March 30, 2026.

Feroze Mithiborwala is an expert on West Asian & International Geostrategic issues.

1 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Paul Krugman

In normal times, about 20 percent of the world’s oil production passes through the Strait of Hormuz. That flow has been cut off except for Iranian oil and a handful of other vessels the Iranians are allowing through. This disruption has led to a large spike in oil futures prices:

[https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rGH7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ddcfe6b-b0e2-42be-8f6f-10cd650a70ab_1518x824.png]

Source: Trading Economics

But this price rise has been speculative, driven by the (justified) expectation of future shortages rather than a current lack of oil. In fact, so far deliveries to markets around the world haven’t declined, because shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to major markets takes 4-6 weeks. As a result there was a large quantity of oil already at sea, outside the Strait, when the war began.

However, this grace period is about to end. The oil crisis is about to get physical. The map at the top of this post shows J.P. Morgan’s estimates of when tankers from the Gulf will stop arriving at various destinations. Deliveries to Asian markets will end this week; deliveries to Europe will end next week.

And once the crisis gets physical, there will no longer be room for jawboning the markets. Since the war began there have been several occasions on which Donald Trump has been able to talk prices down by asserting that meaningful negotiations are underway with his invisible friends the Iranian regime, but that won’t work once the oil runs out. So prices will have to rise to whatever level destroys enough demand to match it to the available supply.

PS: The United States buys little oil from the Persian Gulf, but we can expect U.S. oil prices to rise in response to shortages around the world.

So how high will oil prices get? I’ve written about this before, but I thought it might be useful to update the analysis, emphasizing how uncertain the prospects are and the real risk of extremely high prices.

There are two big sources of uncertainty. The first is that we don’t know how much oil will manage to escape the Gulf. Right now oil supply is drastically curtailed, but not by the full 20 million barrels of oil a day that used to flow through the Strait of Hormuz. The Saudis have a pipeline that lets them ship some of their oil to the Red Sea; Oman has a pipeline that takes some oil around the Strait. And Iran has been letting millions of barrels of its own oil pass. Whether all these “leakages” will continue depends on the course of the war.

Second, how high must prices rise to choke off a given amount of demand? We know from previous oil shocks that the price elasticity of demand for crude oil is low — that is, even large price increases only cause small declines in demand. But in the current crisis it matters just how low that elasticity, a number that is impossible to estimate with any precision, really is.

So, what is a reasonable range of possibilities? I’ve considered three scenarios for the disruption to oil supply: a “low disruption” scenario in which supply is reduced “only” 8 percent from normal levels, a medium scenario in which supply falls 12 percent, and a high disruption scenario in which it falls 16 percent. I’ve also considered three alternatives for the price elasticity of oil demand: “high” at 0.2, medium at 0.15, and low at 0.1.

And I assume that in the absence of this war the Brent price would be $65 a barrel. In that case I get the following matrix:

[https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3Occ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e663eca-5da8-42d1-a02b-dc125b778ac1_1240x488.png]

Readers should know that Robin Brooks has done a conceptually similar analysis. My numbers, however, are more alarming — and I believe that you should be alarmed.

In particular, by presenting the analysis this way, I risk conveying the impression that we should assume a moderate, medium/medium outcome. That is not at all a safe assumption.

After all, what would it take to get to my “high disruption” scenario? That’s what might happen if Iranian oil exports are cut off, say by a U.S. attack on Kharg Island, and if supply via pipelines is hindered by Iranian retaliation against other Gulf oil facilities as well as attacks by the Houthis on Red Sea shipping. That is not an outlandish possibility. It is, in fact, exactly what we should expect if the Trump administration follows through on what appear to be its current war plans.

And if oil really does go to $200 or more, it’s all too easy to envisage a full-blown global economic crisis, with an inflation surge and quite likely a recession.

Ever since this war began I’ve noticed a sharp divide in sentiment among experts. Finance and macroeconomics experts have been relatively sanguine about our ability to ride out this storm. But talk to or read energy experts — people who focus on the physical side of the oil crisis — and their hair is on fire.

I’m mostly a macroeconomist. But my hair is definitely starting to smolder.

MUSICAL CODA

My apologies

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWz9VN40nCA]

Paul Krugman is an American economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

1 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

As Ramadan comes to a close, families in Minab, Iran struggle to come to terms with the scale of death, one of the deadliest single attacks on children in memory.

By MAHMOUD ASLAN

MINAB, IRAN—Families arrive at the cemetery after sunset. They come carrying rugs and cushions, food and water, and candles or lanterns that they place on the small, freshly dug graves. Parents carefully clean the tombstones of their buried children. They arrange the spaces around them and settle in for the night—a quiet vigil that will continue until dawn.

The collective grief in Minab, Iran is unfathomable. At least 168 children, most of them girls aged between seven and 12 years old, were killed in a single strike on the Shajareh Tayyiba elementary school on February 28, in the opening hours of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

As the holy month of Ramadan comes to a close this week—a time when prayers carry special weight—families have continued to gather at the cemetery after iftar, the sunset meal to break the fast, to pray beside their dead children in the dark.

Amina Karimi, 42, lost her seven-year-old daughter, Leila, in the strike. She comes to the cemetery every night.

“Ramadan this year arrived carrying a grief I have never known before,” Karimi told Drop Site News. “I read the Quran in a low voice and recite prayers I dedicated to her, and I speak to her as though she can hear me.” She pauses. “Sometimes I close my eyes and recall her laugh, her voice, how she used to run at school, laugh with her friends, and how we used to dream of her future.” Karimi stays at the graveyard through the night despite the cold that cuts through her clothes. “The night is heavy and the cold bites. But the dim candlelight gives me some warmth.”

Evidence collected by human rights groups and media outlets strongly point to the U.S. conducting the Tomahawk missile strike—one of the deadliest single attacks on children in memory. Preliminary findings of an internal U.S. military investigation determined the U.S. was responsible and the school was likely bombed based on outdated targeting data. The Trump administration has not admitted to anything.

In Minab, parents are struggling to come to terms with the scale of the loss.

Reza Zarei’s seven-year-old son, Ali, was killed in the strike. The 45-year-old comes to the cemetery to be beside Ali’s grave through the night until the predawn call to prayer. “I remember the small details of his life,” Zarei told Drop Site. “How he went to school. His friends. His games in the street.” He added, “The night here is silent except for the sounds of prayer and recitation.”

The atmosphere in the cemetery, where all the victims of the school bombing were laid to rest, is unlike anything in the city around it. Sounds disappear. Voices are muted. Families sit or lie down beside the graves, reciting verses, whispering to one another, or falling into long silences. Those who cannot sleep stare at the headstones. The candles planted at the graves create a scattered, uneven light—dozens of small flames that bend in the wind but do not go out. From a distance, the cemetery glows with dim flickering lights.

Reyhana Akbari Far, 40, who lost her eight-year-old daughter Zahra, told Drop Site that she sometimes lies down beside the grave and closes her eyes. “I try to feel her close to me,” she said. “The lit candles around the graves give me some light in the long night, but they cannot remove the pain that fills my heart.” She said the sound of other families nearby—talking, reciting, sharing memories—makes the nights less unbearable. “We exchange memories. We talk about the games our children loved, and we bring back moments of their laughter,” she said. “All of that makes the night a little less lonely, and eases the feeling of absence a little.”

Parents describe the experience of gathering at the cemetery not as mourning in isolation but as a form of continued presence, a refusal to fully accept the distance between the dead and the living. Small children, most of them presumably brothers, sisters, or cousins of the victims, move carefully between the graves. They watch how the adults hold themselves, how grief is organized into ritual, how it is possible to sit with an unbearable thing for hours without breaking apart. They are learning something they are too young to learn.

For Reza Rezaei Pour, 47, the hours in the cemetery are organized around the act of speaking. “I put my hand on the cold stone, I read prayers, and I recall my son Mohammed’s memories,” he told Drop Site about his dead seven-year-old. “His laughs. His play. The small things of his daily life that used to give us happiness.” He describes meeting other fathers in the dark, trading what they remember. “We tell each other about the moments that no longer exist,” he said. “And we learn that shared pain can lighten some of the weight.”

Suhoor—the pre-dawn meal before fasting resumes—passes quietly at the cemetery. Families bring some food but few seem to eat. The ritual of suhoor is observed more than the meal itself. Mothers pour tea from thermoses. A child falls asleep on a father’s shoulder. Someone straightens a candle tilting over in the soft earth.

Fatima Azadi Pezeshki, 43, lost her seven-year-old daughter Huda. She arrives each evening and stays as long as she can. “Sometimes I close my eyes and try to imagine her voice and her image in front of me,” she told Drop Site, “as though she is still present with me.” She said she reads the prayers she used to recite with her daughter at home, in the same order, as a way of keeping something intact. “I try to make her part of these moments despite her physical absence.”

Just before sunrise, families begin to slowly gather their belongings. They fold the blankets, collect the food they barely touched, extinguish the candles. The cemetery empties gradually, family by family, until the dawn breaks and the graves are silent and alone once again.

This story was published in collaboration with Egab.

19 March 2026

Source: dropsitenews.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the five steps in more detail.

First: End the US-Israeli Armed Aggression.

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

Second: Return to the JCPOA.

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

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

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

Fourth: The Two-State Solution.

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

Fifth: An End to Armed Belligerency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: commondreams.org

By Quds News Network

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not opposition to war.

It is the logic of war itself.

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

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kim Scipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Press Coverage of the War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Alfred W. McCoy

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

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

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

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

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

70 Years of Regime Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Iran War’s Geopolitical Consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose Boots on the Ground?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Granular to the Geopolitical

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

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

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

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

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

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

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

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

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

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

Let them eat dirt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It won’t be long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those are the only choices left.

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

16 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org