Washington Is Underwriting the Proliferation It Went to War To Stop

The United States is bombing one country to deny it the fuel cycle and selling the same capability to another. The war is not the contradiction. It is the reason.

by Thomas S. Karat | Sep 8, 2026 | 

The Trump administration sent Congress its civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. Asked what the deal permits, the president wrote: There will be no enrichment of material. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, has said the opposite. The agreement gives Riyadh a pathway to enrich uranium on its own soil, and in doing so the potential for a Saudi nuclear Bomb. To placate fears Wright has put enrichment years down the road but not in doubt. Wright is describing the document. Trump is describing a country he is at war with to prevent from doing exactly this.

The war is meanwhile six months old and the reader knows its shape. American and Israeli aircraft killed the Supreme Leader of Iran in February to end all Iranian enrichment and prevent Iran from ever building a weapon. It has not ended. A settlement deadline passed on 17 August with the president in no rush, and his Treasury Secretary now promises an economic D-Day, the toughest sanctions in the country’s history, on the concession that the bombing did not do what was promised. Enrichment is the thing the war is supposedly being waged for. It is also the thing the Saudi contract is for.

The agreement is a 123 agreement, the legal instrument that lets American firms build a foreign country’s nuclear program, and the Energy Department’s announcement calls it peaceful, upholding the highest standards of nonproliferation. Not so fast. Past American deals kept enrichment out of the recipient’s hands, because low-enriched fuel for a reactor and the highly enriched metal of a warhead come off the same cascades; the separative work that makes the first does most of the work of the second. The Saudi deal instead preserves the enrichment option and, on the reporting, opens a route to reprocess spent fuel, the plutonium road to a bomb that runs parallel to the uranium one. In place of international inspection it substitutes a bilateral arrangement whose terms are not public.

There is a standard for this, and it was set relatively recently and right next door. When a US firm built the Emirates’ reactors in 2009, the UAE volunteered the strictest safeguards on offer, renounced enrichment and reprocessing outright, and today draws a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power without owning a single centrifuge. Saudi Arabia has refused that bargain. It has declined to sign the Additional Protocol, the enhanced-inspection regime that 144 states accept and that lets the International Atomic Energy Agency hunt for undeclared sites, and in 2024 it rescinded even the small-quantities protocol it once held. The country being handed the fuel cycle is the one refusing the cameras. The country being bombed to give up enrichment, Iran, was under those cameras, and before the war the IAEA director general said there was no proof of a systematic Iranian move toward a weapon.

The American reassurances offered for the Saudi deal deserve scrutiny. The deal is called conditional: the president announced, the day after his own Secretary signed it, that it would proceed only if Saudi Arabia joined the Abraham Accords and normalized relations with Israel, a term absent from the agreed text. A condition attached by afterthought can be lifted by afterthought. The deal is called subject to congressional review: in practice, lawmakers have ninety days to pass a resolution killing it, the clock can be stopped and has been stopped before, and if the two chambers do nothing it takes effect. Congress must muster a veto-proof majority to halt what it never voted for. Silence is assent. Some of the members are not silent. In November a group of them wrote to the secretary of state warning that the deal could enable Saudi Arabia to produce a nuclear bomb, and reminding him that he had once, as a senator, demanded the gold standard himself.

To see why enrichment is a reason for war in Tehran and a business line in Riyadh, look at what Saudi Arabia has already bought. In September last year, days after Israel bombed Doha and Washington did nothing, the kingdom signed a mutual defense pact with Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and holds an estimated 170 weapons. Any attack on one, the pact says, is an attack on both. Asked whether it covered the arsenal, a Saudi official called it a comprehensive agreement encompassing all military means. Pakistan’s defense minister said the capabilities his country holds will be made available; once the sentence had done its work he said nuclear weapons were not on the radar. The saying and the unsaying are not a muddle to be resolved. They are the product. Riyadh takes the deterrent value of a Pakistani umbrella and the deniability of an official denial, and the world is left to guess. This is called strategic ambiguity and has been applied by Israel for decades. Three weeks ago the arrangement widened: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, extending the same all-for-one clause across three states, with Pakistani troops and aircraft already deployed on Saudi soil.

This is the government the United States has decided can be trusted with enrichment. Its crown prince has said, on the record and more than once, that if Iran gets a weapon Saudi Arabia will follow suit. Its own officials tie the nuclear question openly to Iran’s. It shelters under a foreign bomb it will not confirm and refuses the inspections Iran accepted. Nonproliferation experts read the deal for what it is, a US-blessed hedging strategy toward a bomb option, and say so.

There is one more fact, and it does not go in a footnote, because the war was sold on the memory of exactly this kind of fact. Fifteen of the nineteen men who flew airliners into American buildings on 11 September 2001 were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was born in the kingdom, a son of one of its richest families. None of the nineteen was Iranian. The state that produced the hijackers and the man who directed them is being handed a path to enrichment. The state that produced none of them is being currently bombed back into the stone age.

What connects the two decisions is money, and it runs through one family. Jared Kushner ran Middle East policy from the Trump White House and cultivated the Saudi crown prince throughout it. Six months after he left office, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund put $2 billion into his new and untested firm. The fund’s own screening panel had recommended against it, finding the operation unsatisfactory in all aspects and the fees excessive. It was overruled by the fund’s chairman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the man the CIA concluded had ordered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and cut apart, and whom Kushner had defended. The kingdom pays Kushner’s firm about 1.25 percent of $2 billion a year on that money, – do the math. The House committee that examined the arrangement called it the appearance of a quid pro quo for his foreign-policy work. The president’s son-in-law draws a continuous income from the Saudi state while the president tells the public, falsely, the Saudi state is not getting the thing it wants most, enrichment.

No investigation, if there was one, has shown the money bought the policy. What can be set down is narrower and still hard to look away from. A denial as flat as no enrichment, said over a document that permits enrichment, by a man whose Energy Secretary confirms the pathway and whose family is on the Saudi payroll, is not the language of a president who has not considered the future the document contains.

Set the pieces in a row and the shape stops looking like contradiction. The United States is bombing one country to deny it enrichment while writing enrichment into a contract for another. It invokes nonproliferation in the press release for the act that proliferates. It strikes the state that admits inspectors and sells the fuel cycle to the state that turns them away. It bombs the country that produced no hijackers and arms the country that produced fifteen. Each decision has a reason, and the reasons are not the ones on the label.

The label is where the empire now does its work. A power able to enforce nonproliferation would not need to kill a head of state to attempt it, and would not find itself six months later reaching for sanctions because the strikes had failed. Its clients are interpreting the weakness for exactly what it is. They watched Doha burn and Washington stay silent, watched their own refineries burn and the guarantor offer only more war, and concluded that the protector cannot protect. So they bought a Pakistani deterrent and widened it into a three-state pact, and they extracted an American enrichment pathway as the price of a normalization the president wanted more than they did. The order the United States built and policed for eighty years is fraying at the hands of the government that claims to enforce it, and the fraying does not stop at the Gulf. The same erosion of trust in the American umbrella is visible in Seoul and in Warsaw. What a disarmament body called a tradable security service is what the end of an order looks like from inside it. The enforcer has begun to auction the thing it once forbade, because the auction is the leverage it has left.

No enrichment, the president wrote. In a few years, when the feasibility study is filed and the centrifuges the contract allows begin to turn, the sentence will read as the first official confirmation that the enrichment was always coming.

Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.

A New Cold War for a Dying World Order

Progressive foreign policy’s imperial instincts.

by James Carden | Sep 9, 2026 | 

Reprinted from The Realist Review.

Washington is more united than is often thought. Despite the ruptures with an imagined past that have been said to have been caused by the chaos agent in the White House, the foreign policy consensus (underwritten by the national religion of American exceptionalism) has shown itself to possess a remarkable resiliency in the three and a half decades since the end of the first Cold War (1946-1988). There today exists a broad consensus across the American political spectrum that it is Washington’s duty (to say nothing of its ability – now for the first time being seriously questioned thanks to Trump’s ongoing debacle in Iran) to suit up and take the field in a global fight to defend ‘democracy’ which, as we have been incessantly informed for a decade starting in 2016, is ‘under attack’ (the starting point of the great ‘democracy panic’ is hardly a coincidence). As the progressive standard bearer Bernie Sanders put it back in 2017, “in the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win.”

The architect of the Cold War containment doctrine, George F. Kennan, once observed that “there is nothing in nature more egocentric than the embattled democracy.” And the elected (and, perhaps more importantly, unelected) leaders of our own “embattled democracy” with over 2 million men and women under arms; over 5,000 nuclear warheads; surrounded by 3,000 miles of ocean to the east and 12,000 miles of ocean to the west, is widely thought to remain vulnerable to coercion by an ‘Axis of Authoritarianism’ led by China and Russia – with a supporting (and growing) cast made up of Iran, North Korea, and occasionally, depending on the politics of the analyst, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and certain political parties in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and France.

The prevailing narrative has a shapeshifting quality to it: some days we are informed that the global authoritarian threat is driven by shadowy agents of disinformation employed by the Kremlin; at other times, the threat comes in the form of authoritarian oligarchs and authoritarian kleptocrats. But at all times, our democracy – and the right of our “allies” such as Ukraine to practice democracy – is said to be under threat by the authoritarian axis. This, then, is the narrative, and in Washington, as in America at large, it is the narrative that counts, never mind the substance. As the essayist and president of the Simone Weil Center, Paul Grenier, has elsewhere observed, to the extent that there is a debate over foreign policy in this country, “what we universally observe is the substitution of narrative for reality.” Such preferred narratives “either advance the interests of this or that segment of the power elite, or advance the careers of this or that sector of the national security bureaucracy. That these narratives typically ignore what is true and what is in touch with reality turns out to be of little concern.”

Cold Wars, New and Old

The Cold Wars, both new and old, by which I mean those wars of ’necessity’ waged by Washington on behalf of the Western democracies against, respectively, ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘communism,’ have been, from the first, a project of the American elite dating back to the administration of Harry S. Truman.

On January 31, 1968, at the very moment US troops were under furious assault half a world away in Saigon and Hue, a German academic named Hans Magnus Enzensberger was composing a letter of resignation from his position at Wesleyan University in the rather more congenial environs of Middletown, Connecticut. He had seen enough of America; it was time to move on. Enzensberger felt that “most Americans have no idea of what they and their country look like to the outside world.” And Vietnam was not, as many believed, “an unfortunate accident” made by otherwise well-intentioned men; it was, rather, “the most visible outcome… the bloodiest test case of a coherent international policy which applied to five continents.” It was a project of an American “ruling class” which he considered to be “the most dangerous body of men on earth.” “In one way or another,” wrote Enzensberger, “this class is a threat to anyone who is not part of it… its aim is to establish its political, economic, and military predominance over every other power in the world.”

Same as it ever was.

Yet the difference between 1968 and 2026 is that in decades past large—if not overwhelming – segments of the American left would have signed on to Enzensberger’s brutally frank critique. No longer. Today, progressive ‘thought leaders’ have abandoned these critiques of empire and instead have rallied around the fatuous and dangerous delusion that American democracy is under assault by the insidious forces of global authoritarianism.

As excitement (in certain quarters) grows over the possibility that the 2026 midterms will result in a ‘Blue Wave’ bringing a new generation of progressives to Washington, there is a sense that change is in the offing. It would be wise to temper that enthusiasm, particularly when it comes to matters relating to US foreign policy. Asked to explain his position on the war in Ukraine, the Democratic nominee for US Senate from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, responded that “when we’re talking about taking on Putin and his violation of international law, I do believe we have a responsibility to uphold international law and therefore to support Ukraine in its efforts.”

New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s position on Ukraine differs little from that of either El-Sayed or the late neoconservative senator Lindsey Graham. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, AOC proclaimed that an “age of authoritarianisms” beckoned thanks to the machinations of Trump and Putin. With regard to US support for Ukraine, AOC was affirmative, noting in her view that “We shouldn’t reward imperialism, and I don’t think that we should allow Russia to continue, or any nation, to continue violating a nation’s sovereignty and to continue to be rewarded.” The framing is telling because it allows progressive and liberal supporters of the war in Ukraine to let Washington (especially prior Democratic administrations) off the hook for pursuing the very policies that led to the war in the first place. Nowhere in her critique did she utter the words “NATO expansion.” In AOC’s world, a war waged to prevent a neighboring country from joining a hostile, nuclear-armed military alliance is “imperialism.” Note too her repeated use of the word “reward.” Ending a conflict that has decimated an entire generation of Ukrainian men; resulted in the loss of fully 1/5th of Ukraine’s post-Cold War territory; in the loss of perhaps over half of its population (from 52 million in 1992 to probably under 20 million today); and which continues to wreak havoc on the lives of Ukrainian civilians is spun as a “reward” for Russia.

For prior generations of American liberals and progressives – from E.L. Godkin, Mark Twain, and Jane Addams to Reinhold Niebuhr, Adlai Stevenson, Martin Luther King, Jr., George McGovern, and Paul Wellstone – preventing and ending wars was a foundational ideal. Not now. Instead, one gets the impression that progressive foreign policy “thought leaders” fear nothing so much as the prospect of peace breaking out with Russia; better, then, to keep people distracted with the threat posed by, say, money laundering, than the possibility of nuclear war

Today, AOC and her Koch-funded foreign policy adviser take the position that we must enter into “global alliances” in order “to serve as a hard stop against authoritarian consolidation of power,” which amounts to little more than a recycling of the Obama administration’s modus operandi: Multilateral wars: Good. Unilateral wars: Bad. Or, in AOC’s case, maybe not so bad. After all, AOC regurgitated one of the Trump administration’s various rationales for launching a war on Iran. “Right now,” said AOC in late February 2026, “what the Iranian regime is doing, particularly with respect to protesters, is a horrific slaughter – some estimates have tens of thousands of people now.” The number was around 6,000 at the end of January. And since we’re on the topic of the Middle East, one might as well note that as recently as 2025, AOC voted in favor of funding Israel’s Iron Dome (she reversed course only this past April) and was nowhere to be seen among the tiny handful of members of Congress who spoke out against the genocide in Gaza outside the 2024 DNC in Chicago.

What is too commonly said to be a new progressive foreign policy is neither new nor progressive. It simply seeks dominion through alternative means of coercion, through the instruments of ‘soft power’ such as sanctions, economic and military funding, and propaganda. Today’s progressive foreign policy requires, indeed demands, that other countries follow our lead – socially, politically, economically. It’s “you’re with us or against us” all over again; emulation is required.

James W. Carden is the editor of The Realist Review.  He is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.

A Vietnamese company exposes the total failure of Trump’s tariffs

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts during an executive order signing on mail ballots, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 31, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci

Terry H. Schwadron 

September 07, 2026

ALTERNET

Apparently, all is not fair in economic love or the tariff wars.

With the White House as judge, it’s perfectly appropriate – and maybe legal – for Donald Trump to set variable tariffs wholesale on nations or even on the entire globe, but it’s not okay for other countries to try to evade tariffs.

That’s the gist of a 25-page report, titled “The Great Transshipment Scam” released last week by the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, which is led by trade adviser Peter Navarro.


The name is a dead giveaway to what is presented as an anti-American plot to defraud this country of collecting tens of billions of dollars in import fees by sending products through third countries with lower tariffs than originating nations. Of course, it just as easily could be told as a story of using the existing rules to duck stupidly arbitrarily trade limits set by Donald Trump based on his personal assessment about what a “trade deficit” should look like on a nation-by-nation basis, regardless of whether we don’t grow bananas that we must import.

In short, if China sends an item for U.S. import through Mexico, it is doing so to avoid tariffs set for Chinese goods. Mexico, part of a special, if expiring trade agreement with the U.S. pays nothing. Add up cars and parts, dishwashers and appliances, and now even trombones and tubas, and Navarro argues that the U.S. is being cheated out of billions.


Of course, Navarro never acknowledges that it is U.S. importers who pay the tariffs, not the Chinese or Mexicans, and that cost is being passed on to American consumers.

Meanwhile, Trump is threatening global trade altogether if he cannot have his way with the Fed to lower U.S. interest rates, a policy that runs afoul even of what his own new Fed chair appointee, Kevin Warsh, says is needed to battle inflation that Trump is worsening by unending war and a throttled Strait of Hormuz.

How Transshipment Works


The story is better told by Navarro himself in a New York Times op-ed than in the entire report, which is written in governmental language and filled with generalities. Navarro, you will recall, is a Trump policy advisor for trade and manufacturing who went to jail for contempt of Congress.

Navarro uses a Vietnamese-made recliner as an example. Its motor is made in China, which ships it finished to Vietnam for insertion in the chair before being shipped to Norfolk, Va. It is declared a product of Vietnam, erasing 25 percentage points of U.S. tariff that would be levied– paid by the American importer, of course.

The Transshipment Scam report says a “shadow network of more than 40 countries (is) enabling sleight of hand to deceive American consumers and customs officials about where those countries’ exports really originate.” The cost is north of $40 billion a year from China alone and decreased U.S. manufacturing jobs, says Navarro.


Of course, in business terms, transshipment reflects multi-country manufacture and international supply lines, and the ever-present desire to make money – this time by exploiting the difference in a tax. “The difference becomes a profit opportunity, and even a business model in its own right,” says Navarro. “Ship $1 billion of Chinese goods straight to an American port, and the duty can run to several hundred million dollars. Send the identical goods through Vietnam, Malaysia or Thailand, and most of that bill disappears.”

Navarro notes that foreign-built motors or industrial parts and shipping to the U.S. rightly should be built in America, the underpinning logic of tariffs altogether. But for a variety of reasons, including higher U.S. wages, it is American companies that have been shipping manufacturing overseas for decades. Tariffs – again, paid by Americans, not Chinese or Vietnamese or Europeans – are only increasing the cost of supplies not grown or produced in quantity in the U.S.

Trump’s recent executive order targets the weaknesses that transshippers exploit — shell companies with no U.S. assets, opaque ownership structures, and repeat violators that dissolve and reopen under a new name, Navarro notes. And Customs and Border Protection is contracting for a new artificial intelligence-enabled inspection system, called Detective Border, to assess transshipment risk in every ship leaving every port carrying cargo bound for the United States. Hmm. I wonder how that works.

Right or Might?


Meanwhile, Trump’s declaration of global tariffs with various arbitrary rates for national trade imbalances were declared illegal by the Supreme Court. Trump has since found new justifications for some substitute tariffs that the White House will withstand legal challenge.

Of course, Trump continues to blast Supreme Court judges for resisting his desires about what the law or the Constitution should say.

Unchanged is that tariffs are contributing to higher prices in the U.S. and not producing a flood of new manufacturing. In those cases of promised return of manufacture, the workflows are based on heavy use of robotics and AI, keeping job creation to a minimum. The mass deportation campaign is eliminating labor for the most routine of manufacturing jobs.

No matter how high-minded the Navarro argument for reduced international trade barriers – an argument that runs counter to U.S. tariffs as their own barrier – he omits the most tangible effects that are driving U.S. voters to want to throw out incumbents from both parties at the earliest opportunity.

From the Trump White House, the message to both American and international audiences is the same. The rules need to say that this White House wins, or else everyone else needs to lose.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.

OPINION

The hidden face of the US working class both parties keep forgetting

Photo by Ascel Kadhem on Unsplash

Chabeli Carrazana,

 19thnews.org 

September 07, 2026 

Congressional candidate JoAnna Mendoza can quickly rattle off prices from the grocery store in the small town of Eloy, Arizona, where she grew up. A couple of months ago, a pound of ground beef was going for about $13, a tomato was $1.50 and “a freaking cucumber was like $3.”

She knows because she’s a single mom to a 10-year-old, and she’s struggled with the same things most working women are facing: finding a steady job, a good pediatrician and childcare that isn’t going to break the bank. Mendoza’s parents were farmworkers, and she spent 20 years in the military because there were few economic opportunities for her back home. Now she’s running for a seat in the U.S. House to represent Arizona’s 6th congressional district.

Working class people, and especially women, like Mendoza, have rarely had a seat at the political table, though they make up nearly half of working-class voters, the group Republicans desperately want to cling onto and that Democrats hope to draw back.

It’s a group that is more diverse now than it’s ever been. Gone are the days when the only image of a working-class voter was a blue-collar White man who works in a factory and drives a truck, though that is still who politicians often pander to.

Political messaging that speaks to the everyday needs of the diversifying working class could recapture the interest of the group, which has long been disillusioned by political candidates who don’t actually understand them.

Definitions of what makes a working-class voter differ depending on who you ask. If it’s education — those who have less than a bachelor’s degree — then nearly half of the working class is women; in parts of the country, most of them are also people of color, said Valerie Wilson, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute who has studied working-class people. If working-class voters are those working low-wage jobs, then they are already majority women, who occupy two-thirds of the 40 lowest-paid occupations.

“The sort of traditional view of ‘working class’ was a White man in a hard hat, a construction worker, maybe someone who was in manufacturing,” Wilson said. That’s gone now as those jobs have disappeared and service-sector jobs dominated by women have become the primary field for people without college degrees. Working-class people are now mostly service, retail and care workers, a group often forgotten in political and economic conversations in part because the work has been seen as gendered labor, though they have a front seat to most of the financial troubles that have plagued the country over the past several years. You don’t have to tell women, who do the majority of consumer purchases in this country, that groceries and gas are more expensive. They’ve lived it.

A fundamental misunderstanding of working-class voters — and the messages that resonate with them — caused Democrats to fumble their advantage with this group in recent years. Twenty years ago, Democrats enjoyed a 14-point advantage with voters who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. By 2024, Republicans had a 6-point advantage instead. In the 2024 presidential election, working-class voters favored President Donald Trump by 14 points.

Republicans have effectively understood that their voters want good, secure jobs that allow them to live independently and support their family. Working-class voters respect people who talk to them directly — Trump’s “straight talk” — and those who have been successful through their own hard work, social inequality expert Joan C. Williams argued in 2016.

“What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that,” Williams wrote after Trump was elected in 2016. “I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.”


A decade later, Trump indeed has not delivered on many of his economic promises. His second term has been dominated by war in Iran and aggressive tariff policies that have driven up prices rather than balanced trade, as he promised. That has eroded Trump’s advantage with his strongest working class supporters, White people, who now disapprove of his handling of the economy.

Democrats see an opening this midterm cycle. A recent poll found that adults who self-describe as working class expect progressive Democrats to best represent their interests, followed by moderate Republicans. Working-class women already tend to skew more progressive than men: Every racial subgroup of working-class women, except White women, favored Kamala Harris over Trump in 2024.

This year, Democrats, more than Republicans, have put up women working-class candidates who have both a personal background and message that could connect with voters. It’s something of a litmus test for the Democratic Party: Can working-class women candidates help them win back working-class votes?

For her part, Mendoza said she’s not a fan of the Democrats’ messaging.


“Can Democrats just be normal and not have to use $50 words to talk to people?” Mendoza said. “Spending 20 years in the military, retiring from the Marine Corps, I personally drop about 20 to 30 f-bombs a day,” she said. “Sometimes you gotta throw an f-bomb.”

She approaches conversations with voters the way she talks to the moms of the children on her son’s little league baseball team. They’re worried about the cost of child care, which is so expensive that it doesn’t even make sense to get back into the workforce even though they could use the extra income. They’re worried about school supplies and utility bills, just like Mendoza, who spent more than $100 on her son’s supplies this summer and $391 on her most recent electric bill.

“The majority of women are what I like to call the chief financial officers of their families, and they’re sitting here trying to figure out how they’re going to make ends meet,” Mendoza said.

Williams argued in her book “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back” that Democrats have focused too much on college-educated liberals and forgotten about working-class people. The messages became about policies that would help people advance in their jobs instead of policies that supported people who worked hard and just wanted to earn a living.


For working-class voters, including women, class can trump gender as the determining factor behind a vote. Look at the 2016 presidential race: White working-class women voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 27-point margin.

“Working-class women are working-class people, something upper-middle-class women often forget,” Williams said. Their preferred candidate: another working-class person.

If Democrats pay attention, future cycles may have more candidates like Kaela Berg, a flight attendant and single mom who ran for a highly contested seat representing Minnesota’s 2nd congressional district in the U.S. House. Before she lost her primary in August, she was running her campaign between flights, talking about living paycheck to paycheck, going without health insurance during the pandemic and at one point living in a friend’s basement. She never graduated college and has long been active in her union.

“I don't have to look at a white paper on affordability. I know people are struggling and that this economy is hurting people,” Berg told The 19th.


Polling by Emily’s List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, has found that women are more likely than men to be struggling financially, more likely to say they are looking for candidates who will fight for them and also more likely to blame Washington for their financial struggles.

“It was very clear based on that research that driving wins in this environment, in this economy, was really going to hinge on putting leaders in front of voters who truly get it, truly understand their struggles. And the reason for that is because the depth and breadth of people's financial struggle is really stark,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of Emily’s List.

The past couple of years have been particularly challenging for working-class women in the economy. They returned to work in high numbers after the pandemic, benefiting from a climate in which businesses were offering better benefits, more flexibility and higher pay, which allowed them to move into good jobs. But those improvements were short-lived.

“We're seeing a pretty stunning reversal of that that is impacting the real working-class jobs that are sort of manual labor, low-wage, low-education requirement jobs predominantly held by women,” said Kate Bahn, the chief economist and senior vice president of research at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank focused on gender and economic equity.

The evidence is in the gender pay gap: After years of shrinking, the gap actually widened over the past two years for the first time since the 1960s.

Working class women are facing a labor market far more unstable than in the last election cycle, and they’re looking for candidates who understand that, voters told The 19th.

Jenny Cook, a paraprofessional who works with special needs children in Oakdale, Minnesota, has been knocking on doors with her union this summer in support of candidates like Peggy Flanagan, who is running to represent Minnesota in the Senate and often talks about growing up in Section 8 housing with a single mother who relied on food stamps.

When she thinks of the candidates who have stuck out, Cook thinks of people like Omar Fateh, who ran for mayor in Minneapolis last year. The fact that he was a renter stayed with her. “That feels like someone who has a lived experience that mirrors mine and many others in a way that I don't know that every politician can really wrap their heads around what that's like,” she said.

For her, it’s not just about someone who understands that rents are high or that groceries are expensive, but about a candidate who understands how destabilizing all those things can be.

Cook often lives paycheck to paycheck and sells plasma or items on Facebook Marketplace to keep up with bills. She offers her own example: Last winter, one of her students had a bed bug situation at home. To try to avoid bringing it home with her after work, she’d toss all her clothes immediately into the dryer so the heat could kill any eggs that may have hitchhiked on her. But, because her dryer was old, the belt broke and she couldn’t afford a new one. So, in the middle of Minnesota winter, she started taking her clothes off in the entryway and throwing them on the front step. On weekends, she’d carry them to the laundromat.

“The amount of sleep I lost, and I just like, I feel like I'm still trying to recover from the financial impact of just that,” Cook said. “I always feel like one crisis away from everything falling apart.”

When she’s out doorknocking, she hears disillusionment. She hears exhaustion. So many people are so stuck in the struggle of day-to-day survival that they can barely plug into politics at all. Few candidates break through the noise.

“It almost feels like, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if I could pay attention to who my candidates are and care on that deep of a level?’” Cook said.

Roxy Hoda, a hospitality worker at Target Field in Minnesota, says affordability is her No. 1 issue. The healthcare costs for her family of four tripled in the past two years. She’s paying $2,100 a month for health insurance with an $8,000 deductible that she already blew through at the start of the year when her 4-year-old son was hospitalized with asthma.

She is also supporting Flanagan, whom she called “a breath of fresh air.”

“As a woman of color that has come from that similar background as me, I know that she understands what it is to be a woman of color in this society,” Hoda said.

It’s the one bright spot that has helped assuage some of her disillusionment with a Democratic Party that she feels has “been too scared to really get emotional.”

For Hoda, it comes down to this: “We just need to know that you understand and you relate, and you're with us and you're fighting.”

This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th. 

Meet Chabeli and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

25 Years of War Was the Exact Wrong Response to 9/11

Stop throwing money at a broken, destructive war machine. Stop threatening and blockading our neighbors. Close overseas bases and bring our troops home. Tax the wealthy and start rebuilding our country.


Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers walk toward reporters after conferring together at the President’s ranch August 23, 2004 in Crawford Texas.

(Photo by Duane A. Laverty-Pool/Getty Images)



Medea Benjamin

Nicolas J.S. Davies
Sep 09, 2026

Common Dreams

The lesson of 9/11 should be that war is not the answer to any of the problems facing the United States. After inflicting violence and chaos on country after country for twenty-five years in a “global war on terror” that has evolved into a Zionist genocide and a revived Cold War against Russia and China, the widespread public opposition to Trump’s war on Iran suggests that most Americans have finally learned that lesson.

Unfortunately, powerful sections of our corrupt business and political elites have not.

Most Americans old enough to remember September 11, 2001, can still recall the horrifying images played endlessly on our TV screens as the scale of the mass murder became clear. But we also remember something else: the sinking feeling that the hopes and dreams of billions of people, in the US and around the world, would be pushed to the back-burner for the foreseeable future, as our leaders and corporate media all too predictably embraced a new agenda of revenge, fear-mongering, jingoism and military violence.

As Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks...

We found out later that only hours after the attacks—less than six hours after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and barely five hours after the Pentagon was hit—the planning for America’s military response to the 9/11 massacre was already under way.

At 2:40 pm, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld convened a meeting at the Pentagon. Notes taken by Undersecretary Stephen Cambone, later obtained by CBS News, recorded Rumsfeld demanding the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.”—meaning Saddam Hussein—“at the same time” as Osama bin Laden. Then came the chilling instruction: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

Twenty-five years later, we can look back and see how the US government used September 11 to unleash a crusade of violence, war crimes and chaos across the world. Experts like Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz and military historian Michael Howard warned from the beginning that declaring a “war on terror” made no sense and would make matters worse.

They were right, of course. But when the State Department’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report for 2004 showed an unprecedented increase in global terrorism following the US invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice simply cancelled and discontinued the report, replacing it with a new one with different criteria to prevent comparison with previous years.

But, as Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks, and for the remilitarization of the United States after the small reduction in its military spending after the end of the Cold War.

Total US military spending for the past 25 years has exceeded $21 trillion (in 2024 dollars), surpassing the combined spending of the other 18 largest military powers in the world. During that time, China has built a whole new civilization and infrastructure, and leapfrogged the US economy to become the world leader in clean energy, high-speed rail and technological sectors in which the US was once preeminent.

Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for these counter-productive choices, and the appalling human costs of these wars on the countries the United States has attacked, bombed or invaded make this an especially atrocious way to squander our nation’s wealth.

The history of the United States during this period calls to mind an old Greek myth. Croesus, the famously wealthy king of Lydia, asked the Oracle at Delphi what would happen if he invaded Persia. The Oracle told him, “If you cross the Halys river, a great empire will fall.” Encouraged, Croesus launched the invasion. But he lost the war, and the empire that fell was his own.

In pursuing their global imperial ambitions, our leaders and ruling classes have discounted and betrayed the real sources of America’s prosperity and security: the well-being of the American people and peaceful relations with our neighbors around the world.

They have led us into war, poverty and extreme inequality, and hollowed out a system of government that was slowly becoming more democratic. At home, decades of political struggle by labor, civil rights and other social movements produced enormous advances, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, major investments in public infrastructure and education, and a highly progressive tax system—with the top income tax rate at 91% until 1963—that helped finance those public goods and narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Contrary to the “End of History” theory embraced by many policymakers after the Cold War, and Margaret Thatcher’s famous insistence that “there is no alternative” to the extreme neoliberal capitalism that she and Ronald Reagan ushered in, societies always have political and economic alternatives. It is only a transparently self-serving choice by America’s corrupt ruling classes that saddles us with a system that keeps all decision-making power in their own hands in order to build their own wealth to the detriment of the country we all share.

We can see one alternative today in New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pursuing a different set of priorities: expanding free childcare, making major investments in affordable housing, improving public transportation, and freezing rents for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. Electoral politics can be part of the solution, but only if it reflects what ordinary people really want, instead of limited choices between oligarchic “lesser evils.”

Americans are demanding a renewal of social progress, with universal healthcare, quality public education, and all the things we need but can’t afford as long as this bloated, destructive war machine remains our government’s top priority. As Martin Luther King lamented in 1967, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”

Twenty-five years is a long time to keep moving in the wrong direction, especially when that direction involves endless war and the destruction of other countries. We are a long way from where most Americans would like our country to be. But we have a pretty good idea of what is wrong and what we need to do:

Stop throwing money at a broken, destructive war machine. Stop threatening and blockading our neighbors. Close overseas bases and bring our troops home. Tax the wealthy. Start rebuilding our country, and replace war and militarism with cooperation and problem solving. Take public ownership and responsibility for things we all need and use, like education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and utilities. Abolish ICE, and other militarized institutions that waste our national resources and do not serve the public good. Insist that the military be scaled back to its legitimate role of defending the United States against a possible, but very unlikely, foreign military attack.

If we have truly learned the lesson of the past twenty-five years, then we must translate it into policies that reflect that. The real test is not whether we can finally see what went wrong after 9/11. It is whether we are able to change course.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Medea Benjamin
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She is the co-author, with Nicolas J.S. Davies, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022. Other books include, "Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran" (2018); "Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection" (2016); "Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control" (2013); "Don't Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart" (1989), and (with Jodie Evans) "Stop the Next War Now" (2005).

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Nicolas J.S. Davies
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist and a researcher with CODEPINK. He is the co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
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Revealed: The shocking reason Trump is dismantling America’s spy agencies

U.S. President Donald Trump and John Ratcliffe, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), speak as they depart after a Cabinet meeting at Camp David in Thurmont, Maryland, U.S., July 31, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard/Pool

Sarah K. Burris

September 09, 2026

ALTERNET

As the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaches, President Donald Trump has decided to overhaul the post-9/11 overhaul of the intelligence community, which he has seen as his enemy for so long.

Trump has held a notable hostility toward the intel community since his first term, when he learned that he was included in investigations around 2016 Russian meddling in the election. Trump has a belief that officials investigated him, specifically, and leaked damaging information about him. That paranoia that the "deep state" is quietly leaking things about him and his Cabinet has only deepened in his second term.

National Public Radio reported on Wednesday that Trump's attitudes toward the intelligence community are now leading to changes that don't make the U.S. safer; rather, they make Trump feel better personally.

Ex-CIA officer John Sipher told NPR that when he was working at the agency, he spent much of his time focusing on Russia, but after the U.S. was attacked in 2001, the community shifted to crafting new technologies, expanding data collection, improving communications and using drones and other tools to track terrorist networks.

He explained that all of those things helped in locating Osama bin Laden and bringing down al-Qaeda and ISIL.

"Frankly, tracking and hunting terrorists, finding people, finding a needle in a haystack was not something that we trained for," said Sipher.

When the Department of Homeland Security was created, it became one of the largest departments in the U.S. government, second only to the Pentagon.

Trump appears readying to dismantle that. He portrays national security and intelligence officials as corrupt actors working against him. Critics say that after decades of work, Trump is tearing it down without any plan to replace it. He's now installing loyalists with little experience into key positions, including Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, Kash Patel at the FBI and John Ratcliffe at the CIA. They are all more likely to tell Trump what he wants to hear rather than provide an independent assessment.

John Feeley, the former US ambassador to Panama, told The Guardian last month about an incident in which he first entered Trump's office, where the president demanded to know what Panama did for the United States. Feeley walked through all the ways that the East Coast is able to purchase affordable goods because the Panama Canal has ships that can shuttle goods from one hemisphere to the other more easily.

He recalled Trump's response was "Huh... Who knew?"

"I kid you not, man," said Feeley. "And that's one of the things that contributed to my — I mean, all joking aside, that contributed to my unease about continuing to be his personal representative. This is a man who is so fundamentally ignorant, who is surrounded by people who are not ignorant, who in their presentation toward a region that I dedicated about 30 years of my life to have such a fundamentally superficial view."

The report mentioned Steven Cash, who abandoned government employment after he said Trump turned work of career officials against Americans.

One issue is that Trump has essentially eliminated the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While someone is there, the one who briefs Trump is the CIA director. So, instead of using the person who coordinates 18 separate intelligence agencies, Trump wants his CIA guy.

"Counterterrorism is getting second fiddle to the threats from China and Russia, and the current administration's focus on the border and narco-trafficking means a shift of resources to the Americas," said former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos. "I am afraid that counter-terrorism will not be a priority until a mass casualty event, and then it very much will be once again," Sipher says one of the most damaging ideas that's taken root is that career intelligence officials actively take sides in partisan politics.

"We have allowed our partisan anger, and specifically the Trump administration, to create this narrative that there's a deep state and that the intelligence services work for one party or another. I think it's a real danger," he said.

But the damage has already been inflicted after Trump alienated the world with his trade war, tough talk and bombastic rants online.

"The CIA in particular relies or depends on intelligence sharing with friendly and not so friendly foreign intelligence services," Weiner said. "It it is still only 20,000 people, and they cannot cover the entire world. They need the British. They need the Dutch. They need the Saudis. They need help."

After Sept. 11, help was easy to come by, he said. That has changed, however.

After 9/11, the ‘War on Terror’ Was a War of Terror

The crusade that George W. Bush launched 25 years ago to “rid the world of evil” only compounded it.

A fiery blasts rocks the World Trade Center after being hit by two planes September 11, 2001 in New York City.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

LONG READ

Norman Solomon
Sep 09, 2026

Common Dreams

Three days after terrorists killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush stood behind a pulpit at the Washington National Cathedral and spoke to a nation in shock. “Our responsibility to history is already clear,” he proclaimed, “to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” The vow was, of course, preposterous. Yet the “war on terror” that followed was scarcely more realistic.

“Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic,” retired US Army General William Odom told C-SPAN viewers in 2002. “It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.” But the American military crusade became more about persisting than winning. The ultraviolent momentum became its own reason. The destructive search for enemies created more. As years went by and the “war on terror” label faded, US warfare was so normal in so many places that it no longer needed a name or much of a rationale.

But 25 years ago, the impulse to avenge the horrors of 9/11 was instant. Fear and rage blended into high octane for war machinery. Suddenly, overwhelming public emotions were fully in sync with the psychology of a military-industrial complex set for large-scale killing.

Even as the trauma of the terrible day eased for the general public, 9/11 continued to serve as a political license to kill without an expiration date.

None of the 19 hijackers were Afghan, and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s ties were much tighter with Saudi Arabia, but his presence in Afghanistan put that country in the Pentagon’s gunsights. The question in US media was not about whether, but when, to attack. The answer came on October 7 when American missiles began to explode in Afghanistan. Hours later, a Gallup poll found that “90 percent of Americans approve of the United States taking such military action, while just 5 percent are opposed, and another 5 percent are unsure.”

The air war remained quite popular in the United States. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held daily live televised briefings that catapulted him to national adulation. A pattern set in, taking for granted that American warfare was beneficent in intent and benign in meaningful impact. People dying under American bombs and less directly didn’t count for much. “The targeting capabilities, and the care that goes into targeting, to see that the precise targets are struck, and that other targets are not struck, is as impressive as anything anyone could see,” Rumsfeld asserted. And he added, “The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of.”

Rumsfeld’s style went over big. “Everyone is genuflecting before the Pentagon powerhouse,” exclaimed the Washington Post’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz, who called Rumsfeld “America’s new rock star.” That winter, after the Taliban government fell, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press program congratulated Rumsfeld on the air: “Sixty-nine years old and you’re America’s stud.”

The war in Iraq, launched with a March 2003 invasion, relied on massive air power and more than 150,000 US ground troops. The Saddam Hussein dictatorship fell quickly, but the promised “cakewalk” turned into year after year of combat and slaughter. Mainstream US media outlets were more than comfortable with above-it-all bombing that signified American air prowess. But the toll of American deaths and severe injuries gradually depleted enthusiasm as soldiers were called back for two, three or even more tours of duty. For many, the images of glory days turned into real-life nightmares.

The ongoing war effort that began in autumn 2001 had an implicit throughline in dominant media and politics: while American lives really matter, the victims of American firepower really don’t.

President Bush could not accept defeat in Iraq, and later Barack Obama could not countenance defeat in Afghanistan. Early in his presidency, Obama—in deed and word—made the “war on terror” expressly bipartisan. Less than a year after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in late 2009, the American troop level in Afghanistan reached 100,000, triple the number when he had entered the White House. During a visit to Bagram Air Base near Kabul, Obama provided the service members with star-spangled oratory that could be heard as uplifting or perhaps macabre: “I’ve been humbled by your sacrifice in the solemn homecoming of flag-draped coffins at Dover, to the headstones in section 60 at Arlington, where the fallen from this war rest in peace alongside the fellow heroes of America’s story.”

In effect, even as the trauma of the terrible day eased for the general public, 9/11 continued to serve as a political license to kill without an expiration date. Through it all, the ongoing war effort that began in autumn 2001 had an implicit throughline in dominant media and politics: while American lives really matter, the victims of American firepower really don’t.

* * *

Faraway uses of Pentagon air power had human consequences that hardly registered on political scales back home. For officialdom, tech innovations like drones were unalloyed marvels. The people who experienced terror had no voices, no faces, no names. On the rare occasions when that wasn’t the case, general interest was scant. After seven months in Taliban captivity, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from rugged terrain in Pakistan and later recounted what it was like to have US drones constantly hovering overhead: “The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”

The proclaimed war on terror had also become a war of terror.

A few days into his presidency, Obama sent Predator drones into Pakistan, killing three children and a dozen adults. A week later, a former “whiz kid” at the Pentagon during escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Pierre Sprey, appeared on the PBS program hosted by Bill Moyers. Sprey saw where US officials were headed with their air war. “I’d be astonished if one in five people they kill or wound is in fact a militant,” he said. “You can’t tell with a camera or an infrared sensor or something whether somebody’s a Taliban…. Most likely, you’re relying on some Afghani of unknown veracity and unknown motivation and who may, may very well be trying to settle a blood feud rather than give you good information.” But, Sprey added, “bombing is always politically popular, relative to sending infantry and killing our boys.”

Obama officials were enamored with the American air war, in spite of evidence that it was routinely killing many bystanders. In 2022, Phyllis Bennis at the Institute for Policy Studies offered this assessment: “The so-called ‘global war on terror’ has, from its origins, been characterized by attacks by US Special Forces, by airstrikes, by armed drones, and more, that routinely kill far more civilians than the targets identified on the ‘kill lists’ prepared by presidents and top White House officials. The routine recitation of ‘there is no military solution to terrorism’ has always been an anodyne rhetorical ploy, never an actual guide to what actions might actually work to change the conditions that give rise to terrorism.”

Ironically and tragically, the conditions giving rise to terrorism included the US war waged in the name of ending it. The process was foreseeable. In 1998, the Pakistani-American political scientist Eqbal Ahmad wrote: “A superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage terrorism in another place. It won’t work in this shrunken world.”

Killing from the skies fueled desires for retribution. “For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant,” Pakistani photographer Noor Behram said in 2011. For three years, he had been documenting the immediate aftermath of drone attacks in the mountainous Waziristan region near the Afghan border. “There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can’t find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.” As a result, Behram said, “The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack.”

Many thousands of miles away, military personnel in the US were peering at blurry images on computer screens and firing the drone missiles. “The truth is that we could not differentiate between armed fighters and farmers, women or children,” former tech sergeant Lisa Ling recalled. For several years, she had trained Air National Guard members on how to operate Air Force drones. Ling was among the drone whistleblowers who went public during the terror war’s second decade. One of them, the young intelligence analyst Daniel Hale, spent nearly three years in prison because he disclosed facts about the drone program’s human toll. “With drone warfare, sometimes nine out of ten people killed are innocent,” he said. “You have to kill part of your conscience to do your job. But what possibly could I have done to cope with the undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated? The thing I feared most was the temptation not to question it. So I contacted an investigative reporter… and told him I had something the American people needed to know.”

Hale provided The Intercept with classified documents that led to a landmark expose in October 2015. It reported, “Documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the US has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.”

Early in his second term, at the National Defense University, Obama gave a much-ballyhooed speech that addressed downsides of the terror war, then in its twelfth year. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he said. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” Unlike the men who immediately preceded and followed him in the Oval Office, Obama seemed aware that perpetual war had negative effects on US society. Yet he didn’t proceed to do much about it. During the 44 months that followed his speech, through his last year in office, Obama maintained bombing of Afghanistan at about half the rate of his first term while drastically escalating the attacks in Iraq and Syria, with 30,743 bombs and missiles dropped on those two countries in 2016 alone.

* * *

Like Obama, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden ordered air strikes on Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. In his second term, Trump has widened US bombing missions to also include Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela along with targeting nonmilitary boats and killing more than 225 civilians during the last year in international waters.

The withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan in the late summer of 2021 seemed to mark a turn away from nonstop warfare. “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war,” President Biden declared weeks later at the United Nations. He added, “We’ve turned the page.” But actually, America was bound into a high volume of war. The “war on terror” was morphing and continuing on several continents. In fact, during the same month as Biden’s UN speech, the Costs of War Project at Brown University released a new report documenting that “counterterrorism operations have become more widespread in recent years.” The project’s co-director, Catherine Lutz, said: “The war has been long and complex and horrific and unsuccessful… and the war continues in over 80 countries.”

Throughout the last 25 years, since the first missiles struck Afghanistan, a racial aspect of the terror war has been hidden in plain sight.

The day after the Hamas-led attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations stood outside the Security Council chambers and said, “This is Israel’s 9/11. This is Israel’s 9/11.” During the next six weeks, the New York Times later revealed, Israel “routinely” used 2,000-pound bombs in Gaza “in areas it designated safe for civilians.” Within nine months, Reuters reported, the large quantities of munitions supplied to Israel by the Biden administration included “more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs.” Speaking to the UN General Assembly as the war in Gaza neared the end of its second year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We’re wiping out the terror regime of Hamas and ensuring that its savagery will never threaten Israel again.” By then, the US government had provided more than $21 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli organizations Physicians for Human Rights—Israel and B’Tselem unequivocally concluded that what has happened in Gaza is genocide. It was enabled by the United States.

Throughout the last 25 years, since the first missiles struck Afghanistan, a racial aspect of the terror war has been hidden in plain sight. While institutional racism is widely understood to exist inside the United States, an unexamined assumption is that its pernicious aspects stop at the water’s edge. But public discourse about the “war on terror” has eluded a fact well worth pondering: virtually every man, woman and child killed by Pentagon firepower in this century has been a person of color. This is not to say that they were attacked because of their racial identity. But racial biases in the US, unconscious and otherwise, have made it politically easier to launch and sustain wars bringing horrors to their lives.

Current findings from the Costs of War Project include: “An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died ‘indirectly,’ as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.”

In foreign countries, the overall “reverberating effects” have crushed countless lives. However, the only casualties of the “war on terror” that have really resonated in US politics are American losses. Yet many of the casualties are far from obvious. While “over 7,053 US service members died in the post-9/11 wars,” the Costs of War Project notes, “at least four times as many US service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars died by suicide than in combat.” In addition, “An estimated 8,189 contractors for the US military died during the post-9/11 wars. Foreign workers for US contracting firms often do not have their deaths recorded or compensated.”

Such figures don’t include the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The Veterans Administration now says that 15 percent of those wars’ veterans were suffering from PTSD “in the last year” and 29 percent “at some point in life.” Meanwhile, traumatic brain injury (TBI) from the two wars often afflicts veterans who were violently jolted by explosions and other wartime events. Analyzing Pentagon data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that “more than 450,000 US service members were diagnosed with a TBI from 2000 to 2021.” Four years ago, the American Medical Association’s journal JAMA published an in-depth study of TBI among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. “Our study suggests that post-9/11 military veterans face a higher mortality burden across multiple causes of death than the total US population,” the study said. “We also found that exposure to moderate to severe TBI was associated with even higher mortality rates and excess mortality from accident, suicide, cancer, CVD [cardiovascular disease], homicide, and other causes.”

* * *

One day in mid-December 2002, three months before the “shock and awe” bombardment of the city began, I sat at a picnic table in a Baghdad park with the middle-aged Iraqi man who was my driver. There was no one around, no walls or fixtures that might conceal listening devices. He said that he wished Iraq had no oil, because then there would be no reason to fear an invasion.

Whatever people’s beliefs about the goals behind US warfare during the last quarter-century, there can be no doubt of its immense profitability.

During the last 25 years, while plenty of public discourse has faulted policymakers for tactical mistakes and dubious judgment in war policies, more nefarious motives have received little attention. The rallying cry “No blood for oil” was common among those actively opposing war in Iraq but a nonstarter in mainstream media and politics. “The slogan is neither intelligent nor honorable,” Washington Post columnist George Will said in a commentary for ABC News shortly before the Iraq invasion began. “Intelligent people can honorably differ about the wisdom and morality of war against Iraq. But we should be able to agree that oil, an economic motive, is not driving US policy.”

Four years later, General John Abizaid, former head of US Central Command and military operations in Iraq, said: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.”

In his memoir, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan wrote: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Before becoming Defense secretary, Senator Chuck Hagel said in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

Whatever people’s beliefs about the goals behind US warfare during the last quarter-century, there can be no doubt of its immense profitability. The start of the Afghanistan War in October 2001 began supercharged bonanzas for Pentagon contractors. The 20 years of that war overlapped with upward of $2 trillion in government funds going to the biggest contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman—an increase of 188 percent. “Those five firms spent over $1.1 billion on lobbying between 2001 and 2021,” Quincy Institute senior advisor Eli Clifton wrote. “That number seems like a staggering sum to spend on influencing policymakers but it may have been the most financially prudent decision these companies have made in the past 20 years.”

Investing in war stocks was likewise prudent for stock-market players. As the war in Afghanistan came to a close, journalist Jon Schwarz did the math: “If you purchased $10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defense contractors on September 18, 2001—the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295. This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613. That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.”

* * *

The “war on terror” brand has gone out of fashion, but underlying military boosterism remains intact. Midway through Trump’s first term, the Democratic Party’s leaders in the House and Senate saluted when the commander in chief proposed an 11 percent Pentagon budget increase over two years. “In our negotiations, Congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense,” Representative Nancy Pelosi boasted. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” Senator Chuck Schumer proclaimed. “US taxpayers spend far more on the military and war than most people realize,” says a recent report from the Project on Government Oversight, which documents that “there are several ways to calculate the true cost of our military” and “all add up to at least $1.5 trillion.” A two-year 11 percent military spending increase now looks almost dovish in comparison to the outlays on the near horizon. Even without enactment of Trump’s proposed half-a-trillion-dollar increase for the 2027 fiscal year military budget, the status quo is deeply mired in what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” If budgets are moral documents, America has been plunging into one moral abyss after another.

The “war on terror” brand has gone out of fashion, but underlying military boosterism remains intact.

With a very different style, Donald Trump’s basic lawless approach to international conflict is akin to Bush’s “war on terror” approach. Rhetoric aside, the actions have been clear: if the USA wants to attack another country, it will. This year’s unprovoked bombings of Iran signify how America’s foreign policy comes full spiral.

The crusade that George W. Bush launched to “rid the world of evil” only compounded it. Now, as the nation’s military juggernaut advances, the mindsets that propel it are in dire need of direct challenge.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Norman Solomon
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
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