Image by Markus Spiske.
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with the Obama Administration limited Iranian efforts for 15 years; thinking he could arrange a better deal, Trump had withdrawn from that in his first term.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 .)
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.
