We Have to Prevent a War with Iran

Those of us who lived through the attacks of September 11th, 2001 should remember the lies and manufactured hysteria that were used to justify the disastrous invasions (and ongoing occupations) of Afghanistan and Iraq. We should be wise enough to recognize when history threatens to repeat itself.

Imagine: Someone punches you in the face; you slap the hand that punched you; and then that person who punched you threatens to cut your head off.

Imagine: A US Secretary of Defense openly flies to Canada on a commercial flight to meet with the Canadian Prime Minister and, upon leaving the Toronto International Airport, is assassinated by a missile the launch of which was ordered from Tehran. (In the aftermath, Iran criticizes American aggression throughout the North American region.)

Imagine: That in 1953, the US toppled the democratically-elected government of Iran; that, thereafter, until the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the US propped up a brutal dictator in Iran; that, heroically, as Ben Affleck has shown us, the US opposed the Iranian Revolution in Iran; that having failed to reverse it, the US underwrote Saddam Hussein’s nearly decade-long war on Iran during which Iraq extensively employed chemical weapons and more than a million Iranians died; that shortly before the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the US shot down a civilian Iranian airliner, killing all 290 people onboard; that the US has worked for decades, employing a strategy of hybrid war – including covert operations and devastating sanctions – to undermine the Iranian government and destroy the Iranian state; that after the remarkable breakthrough embodied in the JCPOA (or Iran Nuclear Deal), the US withdrew from the Deal in barely more than two years’ time in spite of the fact that Iran had been, and continued to be, in compliance with the Deal’s terms; that the US continues to subject Iran to some of the harshest peace-time financial sanctions in modern history; and that after all that, the media in this country still has the audacity to characterize the recently-assassinated General Soleimani as a “bad guy,” as if that somehow served as a justification for extrajudicial killing via drone bombing of a senior official of a major world power.

Imagine. Then act: We have to prevent a war with Iran.

The stakes – for the Iranian people, the people of the United States, the rest of the world, and for desperately needed global climate action – could not be clearer, so I’ll simply urge you to remain critical in the face of the US corporate media’s drumbeat for war. Iran did not so much strike bases “where US troops were stationed” as target bases that were understood to be connected with the US drone war across West Asia while warning in advance that they intended to do so. There have been no casualties, and there need not be any further escalation. This is not a defense of the Iranian government, but a plea for rejection of further escalation and business-as-usual US militarism at a moment of profound global historical urgency.

We should be ashamed what has been done in our names. We should take courage from the people’s movements challenging corrupt and unjust regimes all around the world. We should reject false narrative and bald-faced lies being propagated in the media.

We have to prevent a war with Iran.