Beware of plausible but faulty justifications for war
Some people in the 41st Democrats Legislative body tried, but failed, to pass a resolution in support of the Iranian people in their struggle for liberation from their government.
The notion that America should help the Iranian people is plausible. But here are reasons why the notion is deeply flawed:
- In the current political situation, denouncing the oppressiveness of the Iranian government feeds the flames of U.S. and Israeli military aggression towards Iran.
- Neither Israel nor the Trump administration are bombing Iran for the purpose of helping the beleaguered Iranians. They’re doing it to help Israel maintain military primacy, to gain control over Iran’s oil, to maintain U.S. unipolar hegemony, and to deprive Russia and China of oil.
- It is a travesty of justice to concentrate on the suffering of the Iranian people at the hands of their leaders, while ignoring the war crimes, apartheid, and genocide of the Israeli government against the people of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. Likewise, concentrating on the Iranian people at the hands of their leaders while ignoring the suffering and deaths resulting from stupid, unnecessary U.S. wars is a travesty of justice. Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?
- If you want to help the Iranian people, the way to do so isn’t by bombing Iran, killing their children, and destroying their schools, hospitals, factories, water facilities, electricity generating plants, etc. The Iranian people are suffering horribly at the hands of Israel and the U.S.
- U.S. sanctions on Iran caused great misery and killed many people. The Lancet medical journal reported that between 1971 and 2021, US and EU sanctions killed over half a million people annually. Sanctions killed people especially in Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran.
- Indeed, the notion that we should help the Iranians by bombing them is suspiciously similar to the notion that we should help “liberate” the Vietnamese, Iraqis, Libyans, Afghanis, Venezuelans, and Cubans. In all cases, the real reasons for U.S. intervention were/are far less noble than what we were publicly told.
- In fact, in the case for bombing Iran is more transparently bogus than in previous wars. This is discussed in a New York Times essay summarized below.
In the NY Times essay
It’s Not Trump, It’s America
Lydia Polygreen, says that Trump is both an aberration and a culmination of American history. He’s an aberration because of how corrupt he is and how willing he is to break democratic norms and accumulate power. But he’s a culmination because his attack on Iran is a natural continuation of decades of U.S. imperialism. In the Forever Wars (post WWII U.S. wars), Polygreen writes, “there was at least a veneer of American idealism, as thin and self-deceiving as it may have been. Trump has dragged America into a war completely unmoored from any pretense to virtue. It is a naked exercise of power with no cloak of providence or moral superiority. In its brazenness, it is almost bracing.”
Trump lied about war most clearly in Iran, but it’s true as well for the abduction of Maduro, the unrelenting support for Israel, and the strangulation of Cuba.
Since WWII, American elites have imagined that military might can craft the world in desirable ways. It’s rarely the case. Americans also imagine that our country is immune from damage by adversaries. That’s not true, and the costs and blowbacks from endless wars and meddling are real. Now with the war in Iran, America may face its comeuppance, since Iran is successfully hitting back, destroying bases and installations, and threatening world trade. (Quite possibly, the war in Iran will destroy the Trump administration and badly damage the GOP.)
The point isn’t that the Mullahs in Iran aren’t worthy of condemnation. Likewise, Saddam Hussein, Putin, Xi,and, Maduro, or any other Hitler-du-jour are not innocent. The point is that the U.S. should mind its own fuckin business, should stop provoking wars, and should stop unfairly favoring one side in a conflict where both sides have legitimate cliams.
I think on foreign policy, Trump is the culmination of decades, or centuries of American imperialism and hubris. But domestically, Trump and the current GOP are an aberration. As the essayist said, Trump has ripped off the thin veneer of idealism in U.S. foreign policy.
The U.S. largely CREATES the enemies that it then demonizes.
For example, the U.S. armed the Mujahedeen who later became the Taliban, and the U.S. made Iran into an enemy by overthrowing the democratically-elected government in 1953, installing the brutal Shah, and then, after the 1979 Iranian revolution, arming Iraq during the decade-long brutal Iran-Iraq war, trying to overthrow it by covert CIA means, and strangling it with economic sanctions. See The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran.
And the U.S. hypocritically ignores or rationalizes its own aggressions and the evils of its allies.
