DNC Approach to Israel is Political Malpractice and Moral Failure
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
When the governing body of the Democratic Party convenes next month, it will face a challenge to its support for Israel. The Democratic National Committee has evaded the fact that large majorities of Democrats oppose continuing military aid to Israel and believe it has committed genocide in Gaza. The stage is set for jarring discord when the DNC’s 450 members gather in New Orleans.
An NBC poll released this week underscores the depth of the DNC’s political folly. The results were lopsided, by a 67-17 percent margin in favor of Palestinians, when the survey asked Democrats: “Are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?”
The DNC leadership has stayed on a collision course with political realities about Israel. Last August, while a Gallup poll was showing that just 8 percent of Democrats approved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, DNC chair Ken Martin said at a meeting of delegates from across the country that “there’s a divide in our party on this issue.” He didn’t acknowledge that the crucial divide is actually between the party’s leadership and Democrats nationwide.
At that summer meeting, amid contention over U.S. policies toward Israel, Martin withdrew his party-line resolution after it won and after a pro-Palestinian rights measure lost. He called for “shared dialogue” and “shared advocacy,” announcing that he would appoint a task force “comprised of stakeholders on all sides of this to continue to have the conversation.” Martin declared that “this crisis in Gaza is urgent” and an “emergency.”
But the “emergency” lost its urgency as soon as the DNC adjourned and the media spotlight disappeared. Six months passed before the first meeting of the task force, which by then had been downgraded to a “working group.”
The working group’s convener (selected by Martin) is James Zogby, a longtime advocate for Palestinian rights. Zogby had greeted Martin’s task-force announcement with praise, calling it “politically thoughtful” and a recognition of “the reality that the status quo has become unacceptable and untenable.”
But more than six months later, the status quo remains undisturbed as the DNC’s Middle East Working Group proceeds at a snail’s pace. And the composition of the eight-member panel makes it foreseeably incapable of reaching its purported goal to “help us sort out how our party deals with America’s policies in the Middle East.”
The working group is an oil-and-water mix of fully incompatible views on Palestinian rights and Israeli power. Some on the DNC panel want an embargo on U.S. arms to Israel, while others firmly oppose any such step. One member of the working group, Andrew Lachman, has led fights inside the California Democratic Party to thwart actions or statements critical of Israel. He is currently the president of Democrats for Israel – California.
How the DNC’s appointed group is supposed to “sort out” a Democratic Party position on U.S. policy in the Middle East is inexplicable. But the project does have an evident function. The Middle East Working Group has proven itself to be a stalling mechanism. And the pretenses behind it have become even more fanciful as the U.S.-Israel military alliance persists with a war of aggression on Iran that has been setting the region on fire.
No matter how much the DNC leadership tries to shunt it aside, the burning issue of U.S. policy toward Israel will not go away. This year, it has become key in one Democratic primary race after another, putting incumbent members of Congress on the defensive for their timeworn efforts to justify support for Israel or acceptance of funding from the AIPAC lobby. Yet the DNC stance is that the party establishment is wise to seal itself off from such unpleasantness.
The DNC’s refusal to make public its autopsy of the 2024 election is tangled up in dodging the autopsy’s reported conclusion that Kamala Harris’s rigid support for arming Israel was a significant factor in her defeat. Keeping the official autopsy under wraps, supposedly in order to improve the prospects of future election victories, actually makes such victories less likely by mystifying instead of clarifying electoral history.
Martin told Fox News viewers in late February that concentrating on the future would be better than trying to “relitigate” the 2024 election. But hiding the autopsy amounts to condescension, assuming that only a small elite party circle should be privy to the results of the party’s extensive (and expensive) research. Many Democratic activists and candidates would benefit from candor instead of stonewalling.
Weeks ago, the annual convention of the California Democratic Party responded to growing pressure from grassroots activists by adopting a platform that advocates for “an immediate end to the mass civilian casualties, destruction, displacement and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.” The platform says that “Palestinians in Gaza should be able to rebuild without displacement, with international humanitarian, economic and security assistance,” and it calls for “the immediate rebuilding of Gaza with the provision of humanitarian aid, restoration of funding for an UNRWA that serves the Palestinian people.”
But the Democratic National Committee, like the bulk of Democrats in Congress, lags far behind such grassroots outlooks. The top-down culture that prevails in the national party has stultified internal debate, rendering it scarce and pro forma. Despite Martin’s reform talk, whatever the DNC chair says goes. “I’ve been more and more disappointed with him,” a progressive DNC member told me days ago. “He says he loves internal debate and small-d democracy. I think it’s a talking point. I don’t know that he really wants that.”
After a little more than a year in the job, Martin has cleared the low bar set by his immediate predecessor, Jaime Harrison, who dutifully served President Biden for four years. But the DNC is still largely paralyzed with pressure from its old guard and insistence on being unaccountable to the party’s rank-and-file. The Democratic Party is in dire need of democracy.
On no issue is that more apparent than the DNC’s insistence on treating Israel as above serious reproach. The ruse of forming and then slow-walking the Middle East Working Group may have bought some time for the Democratic Party’s status quo of complicity with genocide in Gaza and U.S.-Israeli war crimes elsewhere in the region. But party activists genuinely committed to human rights will not be fooled and will not be silent.
Is Trump a Cursed Goliath in Iran?
Image by Tianlei Wu.
There’s a very insightful formulation on page 65 of the brilliant historian Luke Kemp’s indispensable book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, a study of hierarchy and power that ranges from the first hunter-gatherer bands and cave drawings of the Ice Age to the time of capitalist climate catastrophe, nuclear proliferation, global pandemics, Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin, and Elon Musk.
“The four fundamental ways to gain power over others,” Kemp writes, “is to control valuable information (information power), to control by threat or force (violent power), to control the decision-making (political power), or to control the critical resources that others need (economic power).”
Think about that formulation in relation to the current US-imperialist Trump war on Iran.
How has the “Goliath” Trump regime been able to undertake this reckless, mass-murderous, and arch-criminal campaign of unprovoked aggression against Iran, sanity and the world? What obstacles is it facing in trying to complete his real or supposed mission(s) and/or extract itself from the dangerous and bloody mess it has created?
The parts of Kemp’s formula most clearly working on behalf of its monumental crime in the Middle East are its possession of political and violent power. The Trump fascist regime and the Trump-captive ex-republican Republifascist Party “won” – likely stole – political power atop all three branches of the US imperialist state (it already had the US Supreme Court) in November 2024-January 2025. Among the many ways it translated that dark victory into policy was placing a Christian fascist crusader, Pete “Maximum Lethality Not Tepid Legality” Hegseth, atop the Pentagon, purging those who might have put some restraints on criminal military conduct from the armed forces and filling the National Security Council with Trump toadies. Relying significantly on threat and force (violent power) to gain and retain political power in the “homeland,” the Trump regime has used its control over US decision-making to direct massive violent power, drawing on the power of its unsurpassed high-tech for -profit war industries, to attack a nation (Iran) that sitting atop a massive stock of economically strategic “critical resources” (oil and gas) with “chokepoint” capacity to close off others’ access to a broader massive regional (Middle Easters) stock of the same critical (oil and gas) resources.
The war was certainly launched with the expectation of cutting off global capitalist-imperial competitors’ (chiefly China’s) access to those critical resources (economic power). It undoubtedly was launched also with the hope of deepening the Trump regime’s domestic political power by garnering accolades for “winning” (and thereby supposedly restoring/rebirthing national “greatness”) and/or providing pretexts for deepening violent repression in the “homeland” — declaring a state of emergency to cancel upcoming elections, mass arrests of war opponents said to be “domestic terrorists,” etc..
By Kemp’s formula, Trump’s weakest points in the war are around “information power” and resource/economic power. To be sure, Herr Trump was able to launch his reckless and insane war without sparking immediate domestic protests remotely commensurate to his crime partly because the preponderant majority of US-Americans have been kept in the dark about the long and grim record of mass-murderous Western and US capitalist imperialism within and beyond the oil-rich Middle East. That informational blockade is the consequence of a national chauvinist, anti-communist, and imperialist ideological system dedicated to manufacturing domestic consent to class and imperial rule.
Probably no more than a miniscule portion of 1% of the United States’ heavily propagandized populace could tell you anything of substance about Washington’s bloody record in and against Iran, including the overthrow of that country’s democratically elected government in 1953 and the imposition of a CIA-backed dictatorship on that country for the next quarter century (leading to great revolution that was tragically captured by reactionary Islamists instead of revolutionary communists in 1979). Only a tiny slice of Americans could tell you about the brilliant and prolific historian Gabriel Kolko’s important work on how the “the roots of [Islamist] terrorism lie in America’s own cynical policies in the Middle East and Afghanistan, a half-century of realpolitik justified by crusades for oil and against communism” and on how Washington recurrently and futilely “reacts to the complexity of world affairs with its advanced technology and superior firepower, not with realistic political response and negotiation.”[1]
This vast elite-manufactured popular ignorance/amnesia means that only a tiny sliver of the US population possesses any of the historical context required to properly wrap their minds around their rulers’ longstanding provocation of Iran and the broader Middle East. Most Americans are denied the sort of information that would help them understand why Iran has long considered the US a “satanic” enemy. (And of course major US media even at its [not-so] leftmost outlets [e.g. MS[not]NOW] dutifully follows the Western-imperial doctrinal distinction between “worthy” and “unworthy victims” by paying huge mournful and humanizing attention to the relatively small number of US war casualties while telling Americans next to nothing about the lives and humanity of the much larger number of Iranians Trump and Hegseth are slaughtering with impunity.)
Economic power of a kind fuels this disabling ignorance and amnesia, since the underlying US economic system, the core facto material dictatorship of capital, the source of imperialist wars, keeps most Americans scurrying around in a maddening paycheck-to-paycheck rat race, lacking the time and energy to study the history of “their” nation’s blood-soaked “foreign policy” (imperialism) and to engage with any science-based theoretical framework to understand that imperialism.
Still, there are partisan splits within the US imperialist ruling class about the imperial wisdom, viability, consequences, and even legality and morality of the war on Iran. Trump and his war are highly unpopular with Americans even without a broad popular understanding of the war’s roots. This means that one can find considerable information contrary to Trump’s war narrative in those parts of corporate media that have not fallen under the thumb of the widely hated Trump regime. One can learn from various non-regime experts, politicos, and talking heads on various mainstream news outlets about the Trump regime’s failure to anticipate both the Teheran regime’s political and military resilience and Iran’s David-like ability to inflict massive economic damage on the world capitalist system and thus on Goliath America through its geographical position at a key critical global resource (petroleum) chokepoint – the Strait of Hormuz. We can learn from mainstream media outlets about how Trump and Hegseth’s war machine murdered 170 people, mostly children, at a girls school on day one of the war and on how the orange-brushed ogre sickeningly tried to blame this atrocity on Iran. We can also hear from critical experts and talking heads about Trump’s criminal refusal to consult Congress before launching his war of aggression and about Iran’s persistent possession and likely dispersal of dozens of canisters containing enriched uranium, the key ingredient for nuclear weapons – the capacity for building which the Iranian regime would now seem less willing to surrender than ever before, thanks to Trump’s war.
While there’s no chance of an actually radical leftist activist or intellectual getting on or into the mainstream media with a full throated properly Marxist or left anarchist critic of the war as an outcome of the Trump fascist regime’s version of the longstanding Golath that is US capitalism-imperialism, one can pick up from that media a fair bit of information on how the war is being waged incompetently, illegally, and even immorally.
This resilience and resource power of Iran and the limits of the Orange Goliath’s Trump’s power over reporting and commentary poses obvious political problems for the Trump fascist regime. While lying to the American people about the extent and duration of the economic pain, inflation (of everything, including food prices, not just gas prices) imposed by his criminal war, Mad Mein Trumpf has recently engaged in a failed attempt to enlist help from lesser Goliath European powers and even from the rising rival superpower Goliath China(!) in clearing the Strait. The almost laughable irony of this effort is remarkable: Trump has tried to shame into the Hormuz “kill box” troops from nations he regularly demeans and on whom he has imposed wild and punitive trade penalties (tariffs), this after claiming that Great Again America doesn’t need anybody’s help and that “the straits are in great shape!”
The Iranian regime, made more “hardline” by Israel and America’s murder of those Iranian leaders most likely to seek a negotiated end to the war, is in no mood now to let up on its Goliath-checking resource power resulting from its territorial and military position alongside to the great global economic chokepoint that is the Strait of Hormuz.
You can learn about all this from experts and talking heads who are not averse to mocking Trump for his transparent absurdity, seen (for one particularly insane example among many) in his call for oil tanker crews to “show some guts” by braving Iranian drones and missiles: “come on sailors, lay down your lives to help Trump help keep a lid on global oil prices and more rapidly tip the planet into irreversible climate catastrophe! Man up, global mariners!!”
Hence the orange fascist maniac’s recent tantrum saying that reporters reporting on his war are guilty of “treason,” punishable by death, fascist Federal Communications chair Brendan Carr’s threat to pull the broadcast licenses of media networks that don’t toe the White House and Pentagon line on Iran, and Hegseth denouncing “dishonest [US] media” (as well as “ungrateful” European allies while calling for a freaking $200 billion Iran War supplemental payment from Congress) this morning.
The collapse of the US and global capitalist-imperialist Goliath can’t quite come soon enough for humanity. We need to organize a revolutionary people’s alternative so that it can collapse in a way that helps emancipate humanity from five millenniums[2] of oppressive state power instead of ending the human experiment in a pile of carbon-cooked and potentially radioactive ash.
Notes
+1. How odd to realize after writing this that I penned it on the 23rd anniversary of the day that the American Goliath under the deranged messianic militarist George W Bush launched his insane, reckless, and failed invasion of Iraq, precisely the sort of violent imperial misadventure analyzed by Kolko one year earlier.
+2. Kemp finds that “the first states arose approximately 5,100 years ago,” emerging from the need of a few rulers to impose power on a broad populace – a many or multitude. Goliath’s Curse, p. 45.
Iran War Is Putting Israel First
Reagan Carney, a really fine young man with whom we go to church, told me a few days ago that the University of Tennessee Young Republicans had a board on which members could express their opinions about the war in Iran.
The board had only one question: “Is the Iran war putting America first?” At that point, 10 had signed under the Yes; 70 had signed under the No.
This confirmed a story which ABC News ran on March 7 quoting Jack Posobiec of Turning Point USA and the conservative publication, Human Events.
Posobiec said: “For the younger end of the spectrum inside MAGA, foreign intervention is just off the radar….They see it as prioritizing foreign interests….” He said MAGA is split by age with more support for the Iran war among older conservatives.
The ABC story led this way: “President Donald Trump’s decision to carry out strikes on Iran has further exposed a fracture among some of the President’s fiercest supporters inside MAGA world—one that many supporters say will only widen with every week the conflict continues.”
Like the Tennessee students, the great majority realize this war is being fought at the insistence of Israel at tremendous expense for U.S. taxpayers. This is Israel’s war. Iran’s total military budget is only a little over one percent of ours. Iran was no threat to us at all.
In 1999, Charley Reese was voted as the most popular columnist in a vote by thousands of C-Span viewers. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2013, but many things he wrote are just as true today.
In 2002, he said in a column: “The truth is this: The terrorist attacks against the United States are a direct result of our one-sided support of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.”
He added: “The big pushers for war with Iraq are the usual suspects—Americans with a long record of pretending to speak about America’s interests when in fact they are pushing an Israeli agenda.” Today, switch the word Iran for Iraq.
In 2005, Reese wrote: “Propaganda aside, our actions have created the almost universal hostility toward the United States in the Arab world. Our actions have been to support Israel 100 percent while it kills and brutalizes the Palestinians….” Think Gaza where many thousands of little children were starved and killed.
In Washington, you should always follow the money. Today, silence has been bought by massive campaign contributions either for almost every member of Congress or fear of contributions against them. If any other country had been doing all the bombing, starving and killing Israel has done over the last many years, the Congress would have been rushing to pass resolutions of condemnation.
However, members know there is an unwritten but ironclad rule: You can criticize our own government, but you cannot criticize Israel.
Today, the only national public criticism in this country is coming from people too powerful to silence, like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Ron Paul, Tom Woods, Jeffrey Sachs, Dave Smith, David Stockman and a few others. As gas prices go up and our economy goes down, opposition is growing fast among the general public.
President Trump said in his Inaugural Address: “We will measure our success not only by little battles we win, but also by the wars that end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
I think he realizes that if gas prices double or triple and he allows Netanyahu to drag us and this war into the fall, Republicans will suffer big losses in the November elections.
I also wish he would realize that our two greatest war leaders who later became President—Washington and Eisenhower—were both very antiwar.
Washington warned against “overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
His farewell address has been read on the floor of the U.S. Senate every year since 1862 near his birthday. In it, he also warned against “entangling alliances” and added these words: “A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists…betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.
Eisenhower’s farewell address is very well known, and, like Washington, he also warned against “the grave implication of our immense military establishment and large arms industry.”
Then he added these famous words: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Not as well known is his speech on April 16, 1953, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, which may be the most antiwar speech ever given by an American President. I wish everyone would read it.
Finally, in a speech broadcast from London in 1959, Eisenhower said: “I think people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”
Endless War on Iran Has Numbered Days
Re-creation of an American foreign policy tactic, “We have to kill them in order to save them,” sheds a dark light on the executive leadership that guides foreign policies and on the political commentators who inform Americans of the policies. The U.S. government released its assessment of why Iran must be pulverized into the Stone Age, and favored political reporters persuaded their readers to agree with the policy.
The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism Against American Citizens, The White House, March 2, 2026
For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — has killed and maimed American citizens and service members through its own forces and proxy militias. More Americans have been killed by Iran than any other terrorist regime on Earth.
President Donald J. Trump is doing what Presidents over the last five decades have refused to do — eliminate the threat once and for all. By destroying Iran’s missiles, annihilating their navy, and ensuring they can never obtain a nuclear weapon, the Trump Administration’s bold and decisive action is protecting American lives and advancing American interests.
According to the White House, Iran’s missiles, navy, and a potential nuclear weapon have killed American citizens. Now the threat is eliminated, and we can relax. Here is a partial record of the White House list of the “Iranian regime’s blood-soaked war on Americans.”
- November 1979: Iranian students, backed by the regime, seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran — taking 66 Americans hostage in a 444-day standoff.
- April 1983: The Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed terrorist group, carried out a suicide car bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 17 Americans.
- October 1983: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed 241 U.S. military personnel — including 220 U.S. Marines and 21 other service personnel — in a truck bombing at a Marine compound in Beirut.
I’ll stop here. The complete farcical list can be found at the farcical website of the farcical U.S. government. Read the complete list and note there is none, not even one, Iran military or intelligence agency attack on Americans. The record is couched with “Iran-backed Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Hamas “terrorists,” making it seem that these groups operate on direct orders from Tehran and do not have legitimate grievances against the United States. No proof that the specified organizations deliberately targeted Americans. No proof of a direct link of the Mullahs to any of the attacks.
Examine this notation, similar to all other notations accusing Hamas.
- August 1995: An Iran-backed Hamas suicide bomber blew up a bus in Jerusalem, killing an American and three other passengers, and wounding more than 100 others.
Because an American, who probably was an Israeli citizen and lived in Israel, was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Hamas, who has never attacked Americans, is accused of deliberately murdering an American, and Iran, who probably knew less of the attack than the United States, is accused of being an accomplice.
Here is another notation, which characterizes many of the notations linking Hezbollah to killings of Americans.
- August 2006: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed American citizen and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier Michael Levin during the Second Lebanon War — the only American to die in the conflict.
A Lebanese militant shoots an invading Israeli soldier in a war and Hezbollah is portrayed as murdering an American. Iranian officials, several hundred miles away from the battle, are in contact with the militant and steer the weapon to aim at the IDF soldier, who they knew was American. - August 1998: Al-Qaeda suicide bombers, facilitated by Iran-backed Hezbollah, simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people — including a dozen American citizens.Connecting Hezbollah, a Shia organization with al-Qaeda, a sworn enemy of the Shia, is nonsensical. Connecting Iran with al-Qaeda is equally nonsensical. Washington, D.C. Think Tank, New America, analyzed nearly 300 declassified documents in Arabic. Key Findings:
- Al-Qa’ida views Iran as a hostile entity, a hostility that is evident throughout the documents examined for this study.
- The examined documents provide no evidence of cooperation between Al-Qa’ida and Iran on planning or carrying out terrorist attacks.
- The presence of jihadis in Iran was out of necessity, not a result of strategic planning. Jihadis, including Al-Qa’ida members, and their families as well as members of bin Ladin’s family fled Afghanistan to Iran following the 9/11 attacks and the resultant fall of the Taliban regime.
- When jihadis began to set up communications with entities outside Iran, thereby violating the terms of the security measures set by the regime, Al-Qa’ida experienced a campaign of arrests and deportations.
- Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Al-Qa’ida perceived Iran’s policy as one of detention/imprisonment, refusing to allow jihadis to leave Iran. Some jihadis managed to evade arrest and adopted stringent measures to maintain a clandestine presence in Iran.
Al-Qaeda has linked Shi’ite Muslims, who are represented by Iran and Hezbollah, with Crusaders — Zionists and Americans— as its most bitter enemies. Deceased al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, Al-Zarqawi, in a speech, said: “Days go by, and events follow one after the other. The battles are many, and the names used are varied. But the goal (of the Crusaders) is one: a Crusader-Rafidite war against the Sunnis.” Who are the Rafidites? They are Shi’ite Muslims who reject (rafḍ) the caliphate of Muḥammad’s two successors Abū Bakr and ʿUmar.
A more accurate assessment of Iran’s “terrorist activities” against Americans is there has been none. Iran has been involved in assassinations of dissidents, whose groups have engaged in sabotage in Iran, and in tit-for-tat violence with Israel, whose intelligence agencies have murdered scores of Iranians. A few plots against U.S. officials that purportedly link the plotters with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were foiled, but do not indicate plans of an international terrorist organization. These were revenge actions, reprisals for the assassination of Iranian Major General, Qasem Soleimani, and others in his entourage, and to U.S. complicity in aiding Israel in several assassinations of Iranian scientists and government officials.
Trump’s post on Truth Social, “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP,” tells the story — an American president takes pleasure in murdering others. Iran has not killed innocent people, whereas the United States in wars, sanctions, starvation and helping ally, Israel, is responsible for millions of deaths.
The nation that murdered most Americans, outside of military confrontations, is Israel, which killed 34 people on board the U.S.S. Liberty and wounded 171 of its crew members during the 1967 Israel/Egypt war. The human rights organization DAWN details 14 American citizens killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank since 2003. The number of Americans killed in Gaza during the several Israeli incursions has not been available. Iran, which has not murdered any Americans, is bombed mercilessly, and Israel, which has murdered many Americans, is assisted in murdering the innocent Iranians.
Popular and influential political columnists certify the charade that describes Iran as the world’s villain.
Tom Friedman can be confusing, showing unnecessary endearment and subdued criticism of Israel, leaving it to others to determine if the slaughter in Gaza can be declared genocide. The NY Times foreign affairs columnist has a huge following and a possible restraint; he depends on his relationships with Israeli government officials to supply him with inside information. His facts and opinions on the ugly war are ugly and unreal.
First, I hope this effort to topple the clerical regime in Tehran succeeds. It is a regime that murders its people, destabilizes its neighbors and has destroyed a great civilization. There is no single event that would do more to put the whole Middle East on a more decent, inclusive trajectory than the replacement of Tehran’s Islamic regime with a leadership focused exclusively on enabling the people of Iran to realize their full potential with a real voice in their own future.
While you’d never know it if you listened to the campus left in recent years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the biggest imperialist power in the region since 1979, cultivating proxies to control four Arab states — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen — and undermining liberal reformers in all four by promoting sectarian divisions.
The highly vocal supporter for the war on Iraq changes the q in Iraq to the n in Iran and whoops it again up for the killing machines. Examine each phrase.
- It is a regime that murders its people.
We never get the complete story. Murder is not the correct word. As many nations, the Iranian government acted ruthlessly when peaceful protests spilled over into attacks on police stations, security personnel, religious institutions, and government buildings. The country has a unique security problem — the United States and Israel intelligence services clandestinely instigate the peaceful protests to violence. The recent large protests are more due to economic factors — credit denial, inflation, and currency deterioration — caused by the sanctions and embargoes imposed upon Iran. Repression is proportional to threat, and the United States and Israel, eagerly enlarge the threat and augment the repression. - Destabilizes its neighbors.
The Middle East neighbors that have been unusually unstable in the last forty years are Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and maybe Bahrain, at moments. The first six were consistently unstable before the Islamic Republic came into existence and the first four became more unstable due to Israeli and U.S. aggression. Bahrain’s troubles stem from its autocratic government and treatment of its oppressed majority. The Shia population is a slight majority and has been treated as a foreign minority under control of Sunni monarch Shaikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. Human Rights Watch says, “Bahraini authorities use the many repressive tools available to them to silence and punish anyone who criticizes the government.”Meanwhile, Israel has consistently destabilized its bordering nations and Egypt by invading them and several African nations — Libya, Sudan, and Ethiopia — by assisting opponents of their governments - Has destroyed a great civilization.
Weren’t the great civilizations destroyed a long, long, long time ago? What great civilization existed recently and how was it destroyed?Safavid dynasty rule (1501–1736) began modern Iranian history. Because Shah Ismail I established the Twelver denomination of Shia Islam as the official religion of the nation, and mingled Shia Islam with Iranian identity, we can speciously conclude the opposite to Friedman’s characterization ─ the Mullahs returned Iran to its ancient civilization roots. - No single event would do more to put the whole Middle East on a more decent, inclusive trajectory than the replacement of Tehran’s Islamic regime.What has Iran done to modify the trajectory of Middle East nations? Only Egypt, Syria, and Iraq have modified their “trajectories,” whatever they were, and those are due to U.S. and Israel interference.
- The Islamic Republic of Iran has been the biggest imperialist power in the region since 1979.
That is a whopper. Without gaining one inch of territory, never attacking any nation, not colonizing other nations, not controlling the commerce or government of other nations, and suffering from isolation and sanctions, by some invisible mechanism, known only to Tom Friedman, Iran is the “biggest imperialist power.” - Cultivating proxies to control four Arab states — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen — and undermining liberal reformers in all four by promoting sectarian divisions.
Where does or did Iran exercise one finger of control over any of these states and promote sectarian divisions that have always existed in the Middle East? According to Friedman, Iran, which, as all nations, seeks friends of mutual interests, cannot have friends, only proxies.
Former NYT columnist, David Brooks, is another popular and influential commentator who has shown no understanding of the war on Iran and has propagandized the administration’s position. On the Friday PBS Nightly News, David Brooks hallucinated Iran’s history of the last 47 years.
- Iran has been at war with us for 47 years.Brooks escalates arguments and disagreements into war and forgets that Iran assisted in freeing seven U.S. hostages held in Lebanon during the Iran-Contra affair, offered assistance in rehabilitating Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion, and signed the 2014 Joint Plan of Action” (JPOA), an interim agreement that froze parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for limited sanctions relief.
- One of worst events of 20th century began 47 years of terrorism, extremism, theocratic fascism.
As debated above, what terrorism has Iran committed?- It started with one to two million people dead in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980’s.This twist in assigning blame to Iran for the killings of its people, and demonstrating a lack of empathy for its citizens, when Iran suffered extensive casualties after being attacked by Iraq, who had assistance from U.S. intelligence, reduces David Brooks to Donald Trump’s level.
- There were 241 Americans killed by Iranian supervision in Beirut.
Another unproven statement that ties Tehran to happenings in Beirut. The suicide bombers who drove a truck into the marine barracks coordinated with suicide bombers who simultaneously performed a suicide bombing at a French base. These fanatics revenged the shelling by French and American forces of the Shouf hills that killed fellow Lebanese.- Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, they have destabilized the Middle East.
Another statement that was debated above.- They have killed people in Syria.A vague and accusatory statement. Can Brooks name one person and describe the circumstance in which Iran killed the person(s)?
- Iran recently killed 25,000 to 35,000 of its citizens, a destructive and savage regime that has destabilized the Middle East.
Official government figure of deaths in the uprising is about 3000; other agencies claim much more. As explained above, “We never get the complete story.”
How does David Brook’s fallacious commentary excuse the illegal attack on a mostly defenseless nation?
Conclusion
Israel and the United States attacked Iran for one reason — Iran is only country to contend the genocide and willing to stand up against Israel and its expansionist policies. Iran may not be the best nation but its failings, which are mostly the unequal status of women, are not much different from America’s friends — the Gulf nations and Saudi Arabia. The theocracy unnerves its citizens; the economic problems drive the populace into despair. Economic problems are due to engineered U.S. sanctions, which hinder economic expansion and job opportunities for women Denial to credit markets has caused a huge inflation. Without sanctions, Iran would be a prosperous and more obedient nation.
Why Trump does not comprehend his contradictory statements on the war and why there is nobody to make him understand is baffling.
He pleads for an end in the war in Ukraine so Ukrainian and Russians will no longer be killed and does not exhibit regret for massacring more than Iranian 100 school children in a U.S. missile attack.
He says all elements of the Iranian military have been destroyed and continues the war.
He exults over previously low oil prices, for which he claims credit, although OPEC and other producers determine production and price, and disregards the increased prices due to his war on Iran.
He poses as president of the U.S. people and gloats that the increased oil price benefits the United States, which has surplus oil. His United States is the petroleum conglomerates who will benefit from the higher oil prices paid by the U.S. people.
The corrupt and sinister warmongers that occupy executive positions in Washington, D.C. and Tel Aviv are beginning to realize that Iran will not falter. Subduing Iran implies murdering millions of its people. An endless war is being waged, in which Cyrus the Great will never die, while Trump and Netanyahu, the degrading duo, have numbered days.
