President Donald Trump seems to think he is King of the World, not just the United States. Even as he convenes his “Board of Peace” (“Board of Imperial Conquest” would be more apt) it looks like the US will soon illegally attack Iran, again, as it did last June. Congress needs to do its job representing the will of the American people, get a spine, step up to its Constitutional duty over matters of war and peace, and stop him.
The US has attacked seven countries (eight if one includes the US of A, and most people in Minneapolis and many other cities surely think so) since Trump’s recrudescence. Ongoing talks with Iran do not appear to be promising, with unrealistic US demands, especially zero nuclear energy enrichment by Tehran and the dismantling of its missile program, which would leave it vulnerable to further Israeli attacks. Trump’s “beautiful armada” including two aircraft carrier battle groups with supporting attack aircraft is the largest US military buildup in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
This massive (and expensive) deployment of forces is exactly what one does in planning for a large-scale military offensive against Iran, just as the region begins the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. This would go far beyond the more limited strikes that have taken place in the past, including last June’s attack that killed 1,000 people. “It harkens back to what I saw ahead of the 2003 Iraq war,” said retired Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a senior fellow and military expert at Defense Priorities. “You don’t assemble this kind of power to send a message. In my view, this is what you do when you’re preparing to use it. What I see on the diplomatic front is just to try to keep things rolling until it’s time to actually launch the military operation.”
Lest anyone forget, this crisis is all of Trump’s making, as he abrogated the multilateral agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, negotiated under President Barack Obama, which effectively and verifiably capped Iran’s nuclear program well short of the ability to build The Bomb.
Trump should not have the last word on whether to attack Iran again. Next week, the House of Representatives will hold a vote on H. Con. Res. 38, the Iran War Powers Resolution, according to the measure’s co-sponsor US Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA). US Rep Thomas Massie (R-KY) is the other lead sponsor, and the only Republican on the resolution at present, but a vote could be close, if mostly partisan. Just a few Republican votes could make the difference.
There is no news on a Senate vote at this time, though there is a companion resolution, S. J. Res 104, introduced by Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Rand Paul (R-KY). Should the House resolution pass, the Senate vote might ensue quickly, as time is of the essence.
In a recent Quinnipiac poll, 70% of American voters said they oppose military action against Iran. It is time for Congress to fulfill its Constitutional authority and vote to require authorization of any military action against Iran.
It is no surprise the majority of Americans oppose a war with Iran. Similarly, most Iranians oppose a military strike on their country. Now, it’s up to us to demand that Congress do its job and pull us back from the precipice of another disastrous war. Concerned individuals should call their US Representative via the Congressional switchboard at 202.224.3121, or 833-STOP-WAR.
Also, on Monday at 2:30pm ET/11:30am PT, peace and constitution-loving people can join a virtual Action Hour on Zoom, where we’ll mobilize together to demand Congress stop this unauthorized war before it starts.
The National Iranian American Council Action (NIAC) is organizing this event, co-sponsored by Peace Action & MPower Action, to equip you with immediate action you can take to urge lawmakers to oppose war and stand with the American and Iranian people. We will also be offering a brief “How to Advocate” 101 training to empower you to get face-to-face meetings with your lawmaker’s office.
Click here to sign up and join us!
It’s getting late, but it’s not yet too late, to stop another illegal war of aggression.
Jeremy Scahill: Despite Ongoing Talks, Trump Admin Is “Obsessed” with Destroying Iran
Despite chairing the first meeting of his newly formed Board of Peace on Thursday, President Donald Trump continues to threaten war against Iran as the Pentagon positions a massive fighting force in the Middle East. Trump said he would give Tehran about two weeks to reach a deal on its nuclear program, but media reports indicate that he could launch an attack within days. Iran maintains its nuclear enrichment program is for peaceful civilian purposes.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill says Trump already “used the veneer” of negotiations to attack Iran last year, and that despite ongoing talks between the two countries, he has essentially already decided to launch a new war that could quickly spiral out of control.
“I’ve been told by military experts who spent decades working in the Pentagon that there’s a spirit of delusion that has just taken hold in the administration,” says Scahill. “You have elements here who are absolutely obsessed with Iran and destroying the Islamic Revolution.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
President Trump is continuing to threaten to attack Iran as the U.S. expands its massive military presence in the Middle East. On Thursday, Trump said he would give Iran 10 to 15 days to reach a new nuclear deal.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They cannot continue to threaten the stability of the entire region. And they must make a deal. Or if that doesn’t happen—I maybe can understand; If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. But bad things will happen if it doesn’t.
AMY GOODMAN: The Pentagon has amassed an immense strike force of aircraft and warships in the largest military buildup in the region since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Earlier this week, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, passed through the Strait of Gibraltar on its way to join the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulf. The USS Gerald Ford had been stationed in the Caribbean when the U.S. attacked Venezuela and abducted its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
Trump’s threats to attack Iran came during the inaugural meeting of the so-called Board of Peace, Trump’s new initiative to create an alternative to the U.N. On Tuesday, U.S. and Iranian negotiators held indirect talks in Geneva and left without a clear resolution. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes.
To talk about all of this and more, we are joined by Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News, his latest piece, ‘This is Not a Dress Rehearsal’: U.S. Engaged in Massive Military Buildup as Threat To Bomb Iran Grows. Jeremy, lay out your findings.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Amy, what I have been hearing from sources is that Donald Trump has been running around for some time saying that he wants to be known as the American president that forever ended the Islamic revolution in Iran. He has even, I am told by sources, been saying that he wants to complete this before the midterm elections.
And so part of what we have seen is that Trump, who ripped up the original nuclear agreement with Iran that was signed in 2015 under President Obama, is that he has used the veneer of engaging in negotiations with Iran as cover to launch more strikes. That was the case last June when the United States and Israel waged a 12-day massive bombing campaign that killed more than 1,000 Iranians.
Now we are in the process of Trump saying—I was told a couple of days ago that Trump had made clear to the Iranians that they had two weeks to come back with what amounted to a pretty sweeping capitulation to his demands. The Iranian foreign minister this morning said that the U.S. has not formally demanded zero enrichment. But what I understand is that the Iranians have been told that the issue of their ballistic missile supply and reducing it dramatically has to be on the table and also their support for regional resistance movements.
Remember, Iran is the only actual nation-state—with the exception of Ansarallah, the Houthis in Yemen—that has launched any sort of attacks against Israel in response to the genocide in Gaza. The Israelis have been empowered by both President Biden, when he was in office, and Donald Trump to wage these sweeping wars across the Middle East.
And so, what we are looking at right now is the Trump strategy is either we force them into capitulation and we make a deal that is entirely on Trump’s terms, or—and if they make that kind of a deal that would eliminate a large capacity of the ballistic missile system, the Iranians basically don’t have any deterrence anymore. So I am told that part of Trump’s calculation is, look, if we get them to do that, they don’t really have a state anyway anymore and their days are numbered, because it would make them much more susceptible to Israeli attack, not to mention American attack. But if the Iranians say that their red lines are essentially their self defense, which is their ballistic missile and drone program, then the United States is poised to attack.
There’s two potential scenarios here. One could be that we see some form of initial limited-scale attack that the United States may think would quote-unquote “soften the Iranians,” and if they don’t come back with capitulation then you wage a much wider war. I am told by sources who are in direct contact with military planners and others that in the bigger picture, the U.S. is looking at two possible scenarios. One would be the Libya scenario where you have U.S. airpower that is used to enact regime change and then you allow chaos and civil war to brew on the ground.
Or, you have something that they’re comparing to a Venezuela scenario. It doesn’t mean that they would try to kidnap Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader, or senior Iranian officials. It means that they would try to decapitate the leadership and then make some sort of a deal with lower echelons within the Iranian state akin to what is happening now in Venezuela, where you have American oil companies coming in and the Venezuelan authorities doing essentially what Marco Rubio and Donald Trump order them to do.
At the same time, I have been told by military experts who spent decades working in the Pentagon that there is a spirit of delusion that has just taken hold in the administration. That a lot of the decisions being made now are not tactical decisions; They have to do with politics and Donald Trump’s ego and wanting to be known as the man who forever smashed the Islamic Revolution.
So, there’s no doubt about it, the U.S. is on the verge of some form of military action. It remains possible that the Iranians are going to try to thread the needle. The foreign minister and others say that they are working on a draft to come back with what the U.S. demanded in Geneva and in Oman before that. But it is a very dire situation.
And if the U.S. does launch a larger-scale attack, I am told that probably what they would try to do is a blitzkrieg to knock out as much of Iran’s offensive military capability as possible alongside its air defenses, hit command-and-control centers, try to blow up naval assets. Then the question becomes, what kind of response can the Iranians offer? In the past, they have calibrated their strikes. They have intentionally not tried to kill large numbers of American troops. They showed a capacity to defeat Iron Dome in Israel. Their hypersonic missile certainly are advanced and they’re very strong. They do have an ability at this moment to do significant damage to Israel if they want to and also to attack oil infrastructure, potentially close the Strait of Hormuz.
But all of that sort of assumes that the Iranian missile capability is not severely damaged in an opening massive U.S. strike, and that’s very big wild card here. The Iranians said they are not going to calibrate anymore. They’re not good to do backdoor choreography if the U.S. attacks. They view it as an existential war for the Islamic Revolution and the existence of the independence of Iran’s state.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, you talked about political reasons that could be why President Trump is ramping up against Iran right now. Could that have to do, interestingly enough, with Epstein? You have the former prince who has been arrested. Trump cannot, no matter how hard he tries, get this off the front pages of the newspapers in the United States even though co-conspirators and he himself are not being gone after by the Justice Department according to the Attorney General. But Britain is doing it. That no matter what he does, this is extremely threatening.
What we saw over New Year’s is President Trump moving that USS Gerald Ford, the largest aircraft carrier, next to Venezuela. This is when the headlines were dominated in December by Epstein, and he attacks and abducts the Venezuelan president. Now he brings the same aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, to join the USS Abraham Lincoln. The cost of maintaining this armada near Iran, are you scared that this is what is driving him?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Also, on that issue of the Gerald Ford, this is a crew that has been in a heavy rotation. Normally, there would need to be maintenance on that aircraft carrier. There would need to be troop rotation. To send them to the region is a very clear indication that the U.S. has on the table a very serious intent to strike Iran. When I saw that the Gerald Ford was getting moved from the Western Hemisphere to the Eastern Hemisphere and looked at some of the troop rotation and maintenance issues, that is a very ominous sign.
But to your broader point about Epstein, the Iranians have started referring to themselves as being at war with the “Epstein regime,” the kind of coalition of nations that are amassing alongside Trump right now in their posture in the world and with Donald Trump himself being one of the main suspects in this entire thing. Certainly, the “wag the dog” scenario is an element here. Donald Trump is at great exposure because of the Epstein files no matter how many lies he wants to tell or how often he tries to distract from it. That certainly is a factor here.
But I wouldn’t underestimate the degree to which you have elements of this administration right now—it is very different in several core ways from Trump 1. You have elements here who are absolutely obsessed with Iran and destroying the Islamic Revolution. That is not something to be understated. And Trump, I’m told, is walking around constantly bringing up that he wants to forever be the president that changed these regimes in the world. I mean, you can talk about Cuba in a different program, but that’s the vibe right now. It’s like the resurrection of the Dulles in the early stages of the CIA world view that the United States is just going to be toppling regimes around the world.
So, while I think the Epstein part of it is a convenient element for what Trump is doing, I think they are dead-set on trying to change the Iranian regime or force them into a capitulation that would forever weaken the existence of Iran as an independent state.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t President Obama work a nuclear deal with Iran that President Trump pulled out of?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah. [laughs] You know, Amy, what’s incredible too is that Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, War Secretary Hegseth all said after the June strikes that they had completely and totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. Let’s remember, though, that beginning in late 2003, according to even current U.S. intelligence assessments, Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program. There was a fatwa issued by the supreme leader decades ago that said that it was forbidden to use or possess weapons of mass destruction.
Now, you can say, oh, that’s just propaganda, that’s just lies. But the reality is, if you talk to Iranians—I recently met with a former senior Iranian diplomat who helped to negotiate that 2015 deal and he said that what the U.S. is doing right now is actually helping the camp within Iran that says it was a grave mistake that we ended that program. So, there’s that element to it.
But I think what we are looking at right now is that you have this kind of neocon ideology that despite all of Trump’s rhetoric about hating the neocons and saying the Iraq War was a catastrophic mistake, Trump seems dead-set on sort of legacy work here and regime change in Iran.
The question here, Amy, is if the United States does attack and if it’s true what the Iranians are saying—that they’re not going to calibrate strikes anymore—I was told by one well-connected Iranian that he has heard talk of wanting to kill at least 500 American service members in retaliatory strikes.
Donald Trump has never had to endure a mass-casualty incident as president, of American soldiers or American personnel. The question then becomes, what does Trump do if the Iranians are able to successfully strike military bases or other areas where there are large numbers of Americans? There are tens of thousands of Americans positioned in the Gulf right now. This is a very, very dangerous scenario that we are facing right now.
Iran Crisis Exposes the Impotence of
After some delays, the United States is dispatching a second aircraft-carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, from the Caribbean to the Middle East to join the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and threaten Iran.
This is the third Atlantic crossing for the Ford’s crew since it set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, in June 2025, and the second time its deployment has been extended, first to redeploy from the Middle East to the Caribbean, and now to redeploy back to the Middle East.
There is a grave danger that the U.S. government is preparing to exploit the genuine sympathy of people all over the world for the Iranian civilians massacred during protests in December and January as a pretext for an illegal military assault on Iran.
A new US war on Iran would be a cynical and catastrophic escalation of the crisis already swallowing its people, piling the unimaginable death and suffering of a full-scale war on top of many years of economic strangulation under US “maximum pressure” sanctions and the repression of the recent protests.
The world must act to prevent war, and the voices of Americans calling for peace and humanity may have an impact on President Trump and US politicians, in an election year when Americans are already sickened by US complicity in genocide in Gaza and the murderous paramilitaries invading US cities.
In a succession of speeches and in its National Security and Defense
But Trump is already following in the footsteps of the five US presidents before him, quickly abandoning his formal strategy goals and diverting America’s overpriced but impotent war machine back to the Middle East, to threaten or even attack Iran.
The renewed US threats against Iran have made it clear to Iran’s leaders that their symbolic strikes on Al Udeid air base in Qatar in June 2025, in retaliation for US strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran, were an insufficient deterrent to future US and Israeli attacks.
So Iran has signaled that it will respond to any new Israeli or U.S. attacks with more deadly and destructive retaliation against US forces in the region. Foad Azadi at the University of Tehran reports that Iranian leaders now believe they would need to inflict at least 500 US casualties to successfully deter future attacks.
Iran’s leaders may well be right that Trump would have a low tolerance for US casualties and the political blowback he would suffer for them, if he should make the fateful choice to launch such an unnecessary and catastrophic war.
Iran has had many years to prepare for such a war. It has modern air defenses and an arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones with which to retaliate against US targets throughout the region, which include US bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE, and the flotilla of US warships loitering near, but not yet within range of, Iran’s shores.
The US is so far showing respect for Iran’s military capabilities, keeping the Abraham Lincoln at least a thousand miles from Iran’s coast, according to retired US Colonel Larry Wilkerson of the Eisenhower Media Network.
This cautious US naval deployment is a far cry from the six US carrier battle groups the US deployed to commit aggression against Iraq in 2003. The United States still has twelve “big-deck” aircraft carriers like the Lincoln and the Ford, but nine of them are in dock or unready for deployment. The USS George Washington, based in Japan, is now the only US carrier in East Asia, since the Abraham Lincoln left the Philippines in January to threaten Iran.
Standard deployments for these warships last only six or seven months, and their lack of readiness is the result of several years of overextended deployments, after which they need longer periods of maintenance and repair than the normal six to nine month turnaround time between deployments.
For example, since the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower completed a nine month combat deployment in the Middle East in January 2025, it has spent over a year in dock at Norfolk to repair the wear and tear it sustained in the failed US campaign against Yemen’s Ansar Allah (or Houthi) forces.
The United States and its allies bombed Yemen in successive campaigns under Biden and Trump, but failed to reopen the Red Sea and Suez Canal to Israeli or allied commercial shipping. As a result of the Yemeni blockade, most Western cargo shippers diverted their ships away from the Red Sea, forcing the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy in July 2025.
Ansar Allah paused its blockade when Israel signed a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2025, but larger ships still avoid the Red Sea and insurance rates remain high, as Israel’s aggression and genocide continue to destabilize the region in unpredictable ways.
The US failure to defeat the much smaller Ansar Allah forces in Yemen is a small taste of what US forces would face in a prolonged war with Iran, which already inflicted significant damage on Israel during the twelve-day war in June 2025.
Iran used its older missiles and drones to deplete Israel’s air defenses. Then, once Israel began to exhaust its stocks of interceptors, Iran used newer, more sophisticated ballistic missiles to strike important military and intelligence headquarters in Tel Aviv and other military targets.
With Israel in trouble, the US entered the war directly, and bombed three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran, before agreeing to an Iranian ceasefire proposal on June 24, 2025. Israeli censorship has prevented a comprehensive public accounting of its losses in that war.
While overextended deployments have caused wear and tear to aircraft-carriers and other warships, US weapons transfers to its allies in Israel, Ukraine and NATO have depleted its own weapons stocks. This creates pressure on US leaders to hold off on launching a new war against a well-prepared enemy like Iran until it has replenished them, which could take a long time.
Meanwhile the war in Ukraine has exposed structural weaknesses in the US war machine. Russia has vastly out-produced the west in basic war supplies like artillery shells and drones, which has proven militarily decisive in Ukraine.
As Richard Connolly of the RUSI military think tank in London has pointed out, Russia did not privatize its weapons industry after the end of the Cold War, as the US and its allies did. It maintained and improved its existing infrastructure, which he called “economically inefficient until 2022, and then suddenly it looks like a very shrewd bit of planning.”
After the Cold War ended, on the initiative of Soviet leader and visionary peacemaker Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia’s economic weakness forced its military leaders to make honest, hard-nosed assessments of what it would take to defend their country in the post-Cold War world, and the shrewd planning that Connolly put his finger on is one result of this.
On the US side however, Eisenhower’s infamous “military-industrial complex” used its “unwarranted influence” to exploit the west’s post-Cold War triumphalism and expand its global military ambitions. Many Americans immediately recognized this as a dangerous new form of imperialism. Wiser heads among America’s political leaders and foreign policy experts predicted that the rest of the world would ultimately reject America’s new imperialism and be forced to confront it as a threat to peace.
The neoliberal privatization of US and western armament production turned it into an even more lucrative and politically powerful industry, which only reconfirmed Eisenhower’s warnings. Monopolistic military contractors have produced smaller quantities of increasibgly expensive, technologically advanced warships, warplanes and surveillance systems. Despite wreaking catastrophic destruction in country after country, these weapons have proven impotent to prevent humiliating US defeats in its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine, and will likely prove just as useless in a major war with Iran.
The simplistic, linear thinking of Trump and his advisors leads them to believe that the solution to a trillion dollar per year war machine that can’t win a war is a $1.5 trillion per year war machine.
But this is nonsense. Russia has not defeated the US and NATO by outspending them. Quite the opposite. Since 1992, the US military alone has outspent Russia by fifteen to one ($26 trillion vs $1.7 trillion in constant 2024 dollars, according to SIPRI). Russia’s military superiority is the result of taking its own defense more seriously and confronting its problems more honestly than corrupt US leaders have ever tried to do since the end of the Cold War.
At a price tag of $17.5 billion, the USS Gerald R. Ford is the largest, most expensive warship ever built, costing more than the entire annual military budgets of most other countries. Making an even bigger warship for $26 billion would not make Americans any safer, just a bit poorer.
Relying on the offensive use of military force and record military spending to try to solve America’s problems has put the United States on a collision course with the rest of the world. In 1949, long before Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1961, he offered some sage advice to politicians and pundits who were calling for a massive US attack on the USSR to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.
“Those who measure security solely in terms of offensive capacity distort its meaning and mislead those who pay them heed,” said Eisenhower. “No modern nation has ever equaled the crushing offensive power attained by the German war machine in 1939. No modern nation was broken and smashed as was Germany six years later.”
Unlike Iran today, the USSR was indeed working to develop nuclear weapons, but Eisenhower warned Americans against launching a new war that might kill millions to try to stop it.
As Eisenhower insisted, offensive military action offers no solutions to international problems. But diplomatic solutions are always possible. Diplomacy does not mean holding a gun to someone’s head and demanding that they sign an unconditional surrender. It means treating other people and countries with mutual respect and finding solutions that everybody can live with, based upon rules that we all agree on.
The UN Charter universally prohibits the threat or use of force and requires all countries to resolve disputes peacefully. So one country’s wrongdoing, real or perceived, is never a valid pretext for another country to threaten or use military force.
There is no good reason to sacrifice American soldiers and sailors in a war on Iran; no justification to kill Iranian troops for defending their country, as Americans would do if another country attacked the United States; no justice in killing Iranian civilians by turning their homes and communities into a new US war zone.
Could the stark choice our country is facing in Iran be a turning point, a moment when the American people will stand up and clearly, strongly say “No” to war, before our corrupt leaders can plunge Iran and the United States into yet another “Made in the USA” military catastrophe?
acrylic on paper © Sheep María.