Americans Must Oppose Trump's Iran War for Humanity and for Our Own Sake |
What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated US military adventurism in the Middle East amount to? Some of the toll is already clear. Washington has squandered billions of dollars on a reckless war of aggression against Iran. A merciless campaign of aerial bombardment has driven millions from their homes. American and Israeli airstrikes have rained destruction on 10,000 civilian sites and already killed more than 3,000 people in Iran and Lebanon. Among the dead are more than 200 children, many killed in a US strike on a girls’ school, a war crime that evokes the grim precedent of such past American atrocities as the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam or the 1991 Amiriyah shelter bombing in Iraq.
The latest war has also dealt a potentially fatal blow to our already battered democratic institutions. It’s a war neither authorized by Congress nor supported by the public. Instead, it was launched by a president who refuses to submit to the law or heed the will of the people, claiming in true authoritarian fashion that he is the law, and that he alone embodies the popular will.
Such democratic backsliding has, however, been decades in the making, a predictable result of longstanding imperial impunity. Yet we may rapidly be approaching a point of no return. Even George W. Bush, in launching his catastrophic wars of choice in the region, sought to manufacture consent and present the case before the United Nations. Today, there is neither the pretense of legality nor of legitimacy.
The costs associated with this latest criminal war, measured in human lives; the misappropriation of national resources; and the erosion of the rule of law will only continue to mount. Yet there is also a less visible, less immediate price tag for such wars. If the history of American interventions in the region offers any guide, the full bill will likely not become apparent for months, years, or even decades. When it finally arrives, however, it will carry a familiar name: blowback.
In case after case, conflicts initiated or intensified by the United States appeared to subside, only to reemerge in new, more volatile forms.
For that reason, it’s important at this moment to recall the lessons Washington appears determined to forget. From Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq to Libya, the record is unmistakable. Yet as long as the historical amnesia that grips this country’s political establishment remains unchallenged, the same cycles of escalation and reprisal will undoubtedly persist in the years to come, threatening to once again draw the United States (and much of the world) ever deeper into the abyss of forever war.
Oil and the Engine of Empire
While the post-9/11 “war on terror” is often invoked as the starting point of US militarism in the Middle East, the roots of conflict there stretch back nearly a century. The violence and instability unleashed after the attacks of September 11, 2001 represented less a rupture with the past than a continuation of long-established patterns of US policy. The seeds of the forever wars had, in fact, been planted decades earlier in the oil-rich soil of the region.
Direct American involvement began in the previous century in the years between the First and Second World Wars. By that point, petroleum had become not merely a valuable commodity but a strategic necessity for sustaining a modern industrial economy. The vast oil reserves discovered in the United States had propelled the American economy to global prominence and played a decisive role in fueling the Allied war effort during World War I. Yet policymakers in Washington understood that domestic reserves were finite. As petroleum became synonymous with power, economically, militarily, and politically, the United States increasingly turned abroad to secure new sources.
The Middle East emerged as a critical frontier in that search, drawing the region ever more tightly into the orbit of an expanding American empire. In 1933, Standard Oil of California secured an exploratory concession with the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The agreement created the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), laying the groundwork for the 1945 US-Saudi oil-for-security partnership that would become central to Washington’s future influence over the region’s geopolitical order.
Over the years, the insatiable thirst for oil only drew the United States ever deeper into the region. By 1953, American intervention assumed more overtly coercive forms. That year, in coordination with British intelligence, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s popular prime minister, who had committed a cardinal sin in the emerging Cold War years. In 1951, he presided over the nationalization of his country’s oil industry in an effort to return sovereign control of its resources to the Iranian people by wresting them from the exploitative grip of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the precursor to British Petroleum.
Despite his staunchly nationalist rather than communist credentials, a fact understood in Tehran, London, and Washington, Mossadegh would then be cast as, at worst, a dangerous proxy of the Soviet Union and, at best, a threat to regional stability (as in, American hegemony). The coup that followed ended Iran’s fragile democratic experiment, secured continued access to Iranian oil for Western companies, and restored the Shah of Iran to power. His regime would then be sustained by a steady outward flow of oil and a nearly endless influx of US weaponry. With CIA backing, his secret police, SAVAK, would terrorize and torture a generation of Iranians.
Yet Washington celebrated this new arrangement, claiming that Iran had been transformed into an “island of stability,” and a cornerstone of the “twin pillar strategy,” in which Washington would outsource regional Cold War policing to compliant authoritarian allies in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such subversion of nationalist movements and support for despotic monarchies, as well as the increasingly unequivocal backing of Israel, would generate intense backlash. Among the most visible early expressions of that was the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, demonstrating how US policy in the Middle East could reverberate domestically.
But the first unmistakable case of blowback arrived in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution. In that country, discontent had been simmering beneath the seemingly stable façade of the Shah’s rule for years. When the monarchy collapsed after months of protests and repression, the Islamic Republic would fill the political vacuum, drawing on the theological language of Shi’ism and the political rhetoric of opposition to the Shah, the United States, and Israel.
In the US, those developments were largely stripped of their historical context. Americans were instead cast as the innocent victims of irrational fanaticism. Why do they hate us? was the refrain that echoed across the Western media and the answers offered rarely confronted the long history of intervention and exploitation. Instead, they defaulted to a supposed civilizational conflict with Islam, which was portrayed as inherently antagonistic to “Western values.”
Such explanations obscured an uncomfortable reality—that the US had repeatedly undermined democracy across the region (as well as in other parts of the world) to advance its own interests. As a Pentagon commission report in 2004 acknowledged, the problem was not that people “hate our freedoms,” as President George W. Bush had reductively claimed, but that many “hate our policies.” In other words, the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001 were the ultimate, if deeply disturbing, expression of blowback.
Revolution and Counterrevolution in the Persian Gulf
Those widely resented policies from Washington were reinforced by its overreaction to the 1979 upheaval in Iran. That country’s new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, sought not only to transform Iranian society internally but........