I will say that a lot of us, born in the late 70s and early 80s, thought that the US invasion of Iraq was the low point. The “bad guys” correctly diagnosed our country as having built shining monuments to war and capitalism by crushing whole countries and their people’s under our imperial boot, just as King had done a half century before:

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.

Martin Luther King Jr’s speech, “The Three Evils of Society,” 1967

In response, we bombed and invaded a country that had nothing to do with that attack, killing hundreds of thousands based on lies and fabricated evidence, and then re-elected that President. 20 years later, the Democratic candidate sought out the endorsement of the Vice President who initiated that war of choice, committing untold war crimes and crimes against humanity in the process. Crimes that were never investigated, because we had to look forward, not back. Crimes that seeded the next generation of “terrorists” which is what we call people when they enact violence on civilians, unless they’re part of a military when they do it.

We have apparently learned absolutely nothing in those intervening decades, except never to wrap ourselves in the comfy blanket that is thinking we’ve hit rock bottom. Because people like Brett McGurk are still around, giving advice on how to make every mistake you possibly can in the Middle East. Ghouls like Lindsey Graham are admitting they have red lines, they’re just oil, not genocide. Swap out a few words, and King’s speech could be given today.

The people cry for freedom and the congress attempts to legislate repression. Millions, yes billions, are appropriated for mass murder; but the most meager pittance for foreign aid for international development is crushed in the surge of reaction. Unemployment rages at a major depression level in the black ghettos, but the bi-partisan response is an anti-riot bill rather than a serious poverty program. The modest proposals for model cities, rent supplement and rat control, pitiful as they were to begin with, get caught in the maze of congressional inaction. And I submit to you tonight, that a congress that proves to be more anti-negro than anti-rat needs to be dismissed.

Martin Luther King Jr’s speech, “The Three Evils of Society,” 1967

There cannot be room in the Democratic (nor the democratic) tent for wars of aggression based on, well, nothing. Perhaps the most honest justification, that the US knew Israel wanted to attack Iran and Iran would strike back, distills these issues down to the same core arguments that King made 60 years ago.

There was no risk to the region, much less the US, from Iran. Just like there was no threat from Iraq. Arguments about despots or autocrats ring hollow when terror squads are executing people on the streets of US, and Occupied West Bank, cities. Apartheid, genocide, and fascism are now the things we support, no longer the things we’re going to war to oppose.

All we have is words, to speak out in support of everyone whose whole worlds are being murdered and destroyed.

The girls had been very alive—in every special and unique way that made them daughters, sisters, classmates, and friends. In the middle of a laugh, a squeezing of a hand, or a smile, their worlds ended, and the world around them forever changed.

Does anyone win when children are bombed? by me - 03/28/2025

Reading

Minnesota's False Spring by Taylor Carik

In Minnesota, the sun is also brilliantly shining; it is quite mild and warm. The abductions continue, the camps continue, our show goes on with resistance and a little more weariness. 

We’re still in the deep of winter until our neighbors are free and ICE is no longer. 

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/minnesotas-false-spring/

The bombing of Iranian children is an unforgivable crime by Noah Berlatsky

The initially blasé reaction to US mass murder of children was ugly; the increased concern over the past week at least shows that Trumpist amorality hasn’t yet permeated our entire society. Even now, though, the deaths of 168 civilians at US hands is, at best, a side issue in a debate about the war which is mostly focused on surging gas prices, the deaths of seven US service members, worries about Iranian terrorism on US soil, and other domestic implications of the war. Deaths of Iranian civilians, when discussed, are often framed around worries that atrocities will radicalize Iranians against the US, reducing our influence in the region and putting US lives at risk.

https://www.publicnotice.co/p/iran-elementary-school-bombing

When the bombs fall on other people’s children by Omar Suleiman

There is also a sick irony that deserves to be spoken plainly. There is almost nothing more American than school shootings — our uniquely normalized national trauma — and there is almost nothing more American and Israeli than exporting the logic of classroom slaughter beyond our borders. At home, we cannot stop bullets from entering schools. Abroad, we help deliver death from the sky and insist the world call it order.

This is where the familiar question returns, the one Americans ask with genuine bewilderment: Why do they hate us? What would you feel if your children were blown apart by American bombs, and the country that paid for it treated your grief as background noise? What would you become if your daughter’s name never made it into anyone’s mouth, never made it onto a memorial, never earned even the dignity of being remembered?

The truth is simple and devastating: Children are not collateral. They are not regrettable side effects of grand strategy. They are not footnotes in policy debates. They are amanah — a trust.

In the Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad forbade the killing of women and children, even in war. Early Muslim jurists elaborated strict prohibitions against targeting noncombatants, insisting that the sanctity of innocent life does not dissolve when borders are crossed. The Quran declares that when someone kills a single innocent soul, it is as though they have killed all of humanity.

https://religionnews.com/2026/03/05/when-the-bombs-fall-on-other-peoples-children-iran-minab-girls-school/

…now indelibly marked as the worst day of their parents' lives. A day their surviving friends may struggle to speak about ever again. For the rest of us, the world moved further off its axis.

There would never again be a world where that bomb did not murder those girls. The ramifications of that change will play out over months, years, and decades as we trace those lines back to that point in history, that detonator, that spark.

Does anyone win when children are bombed? by me - 03/28/2025

Netanyahu’s Iran Goals Are Not Necessarily Trump’s Iran Goals by Spencer Ackerman

The Iraq War also instructs us that the war will create contingencies that we cannot yet foresee that will entangle Washington even more deeply.

…

Doubtless the architects of this unfolding catastrophe, in Washington and Jerusalem, will attempt to obscure the divergences in their goals. But the longer their war goes on, killing more schoolchildren and bombing more hospitals, the less tenable that will be. No one could possibly shed any tears over Israeli and American warmongers ensnaring themselves in a trap of their choosing. It is not for their sake that people worldwide must pressure their governments for an end to this latest insane war.

https://open.substack.com/pub/zeteo/p/israel-netanyahu-iran-war-trump-endgame

Don't Forget Gaza and the Palestinians by Diana Buttu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t have appeared happier; he looked almost giddy. By launching an illegal attack on Iran with the United States, Netanyahu’s lifelong goal was achieved. He said as much. While standing on the rooftop of the Israeli military headquarters (Israel’s Pentagon), nestled among residential and commercial buildings in the heart of Tel Aviv, Netanyahu proclaimed, “This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years: smite the terror regime hip and thigh. This is what I promised – and this is what we shall do.”

Let’s leave aside the “40 years” comment for the moment – though it is clear that Israel has posed a threat to Iran for at least that time, given its years of attacks on the country and its allies. It’s the rest of the sentence that is equally disturbing. Just as Netanyahu made a Biblical reference to the tribe of Amalek – an enemy that must be completely wiped out – as a justification to slaughter Palestinians in Gaza, including children and infants, he is now invoking a phrase from the Old Testament’s Book of Judges in which Samson “smote them [the Philistines] hip and thigh,” to justify the war with Iran.

…

By the way, unlike Iran, Israel has never submitted to international inspections, and Israel has refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that 191 countries (including Iran) have signed.

This out-and-proud combination of unchecked military aggression, coupled with deranged Zionist biblical references, foretells what’s to come, but it also underscores what we’re already witnessing in Palestine, making it all the more important that we don’t look away from what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank as the war in Iran rages on.

…

Now, instead of fast-paced live-streamed killing, Israel’s death policies include monitoring virtually every morsel of food that enters Gaza. And despite (hesitatingly) agreeing to allow aid trucks into Gaza (as an aside, why does a genocidal regime have a say in this anyway?), Israel continues to turn away needed goods. For days, Israel prevented any supplies from entering Gaza – including food and medicine – before allowing a mere trickle of supplies last week.

…

In the West Bank, Israel has imposed a blanket ban on Palestinian movement while Israeli settler-militias, emboldened by their leaders and an army that thinks it is cool to stand by and watch Israelis terrorize Palestinians, carry out their attacks on Palestinians in an attempt to ethnically cleanse the West Bank.

https://zeteo.com/p/dont-forget-gaza-and-palestinians-iran-war

A Call to Conscience by Cardinal Blase J. Cupich

Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. But, in the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military. We become addicted to the “spectacle” of explosions. And the price of this habit is almost unnoticeable, as we become desensitized to the true costs of war. But the longer we remain blind to the terrible consequences of war, the more we are risking the most precious gift God gave us: our humanity.

Why now is the time to be loudly anti-war by Marisa Kabas

If you draw a moral line mere days into this war, you won’t have to do years of soul-searching to figure out what was obvious from the start. You won’t have to a years-long mea culpa campaign explaining how, as a “policy wonk,” you were so sure war was the right choice at the time, but you were indeed wrong. As nice as it is to see someone like Bill Kristol pivot late in life to policies more progressive than most of Congress and vocally opposing war in Iran, he can’t takesies backsies cheerleading a war that destroyed untold lives. Hindsight is not required for 20/20 vision; we need only pay attention to history.

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/be-anti-war-iran

Why Is There No Anti-War Movement in the US? by Eric Blanc

Now the biggest obstacle we face in our country is a pervasive sense of powerlessness. SDS leader Bernardine Dohrn was right to underscore the difference between that era and our current moment: “The issue holding us back today, to me, is the idea that what you do won’t make a difference.”

To overcome this feeling of resignation, we need more inspiring examples of successful struggles. Minnesota’s successful mass resistance against ICE, for example, has begun to energize activism nationwide. The challenge now is to find and scale up winnable bottom-up campaigns, like getting our schools to break with ICE or getting millions of consumers to leave companies like OpenAI that are enabling Trump’s war machine. Proving in practice that we have power in smaller battles can inspire millions to join the fight against this administration’s worst horrors at home and abroad.

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/why-is-there-no-anti-war-movement

Florence ICE detainee dead after untreated tooth infection, official says by Emily Bregel

They are fucking concentration camps, next question.

Damas first told Florence staff about his toothache Feb. 12 and was given only ibuprofen, said Ellis, who is also vice mayor of Chandler.

"He was complaining for almost two weeks straight, until he collapsed and got septic from the infection," Ellis told the Star. He was transferred to a Scottsdale hospital sometime last week, she said.

…

Damas' family members said another detainee reported hearing Florence staff "laughing and saying he was faking," as Damas cried for help, Ellis recounted to the Star.

https://tucson.com/news/local/border/article_a5053df1-4ade-4424-972f-e9f5270829bb.html

‘We’re in it’: Democrats won’t rule out giving Trump more money for Middle East war by Katherine Tully-McManus, Joe Gould, Jennifer Scholtes

Reminder: Congress is a co-equal branch. Which is why Democrats will fold and fund the attacks on Iran because we elect the worst fucking people.

“Clearly, there’s going to be a cost to this war that we haven’t budgeted for. So there is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the appropriations panel overseeing Pentagon spending, is also keeping open the option of supporting an emergency military funding package but said like Shaheen that administration officials need to testify publicly about “the failures in planning” in the conflict so far.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/04/democrats-iran-supplemental-funding-00813547

The dry and the wet burn together by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

The war launched against Iran by the United States and Israel is a war of choice and of hubris. There is scarcely even the pretence that it was compelled by evidence of an Iranian dash for a bomb or an imminent attack. Such claims do not survive scrutiny; they barely withstand repetition. We are witnessing the realisation of a long-cherished ambition, a neoconservative fever dream that Benjamin Netanyahu has lobbied for, in one form or another, for decades. What sanctions could not achieve, what covert action, assassinations and cyber-warfare failed to deliver, direct military force would now accomplish, with the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as its centrepiece.

…

In a farcical re-enactment of the Iraq War script, we were told that the Islamic Republic would collapse like a house of cards. But unlike in 2003, there has been little attempt to persuade the wider world, or even the US Congress. The rhetorical labour that accompanied the invasion of Iraq, however flawed or dishonest, has largely been abandoned. Even senior US military officials have struggled to explain how the campaign’s objectives would be achieved swiftly or decisively. The assumption of inevitability has replaced the burden of argument.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/march/the-dry-and-the-wet-burn-together

Why a Democratic Congressman Is Supporting Trump’s War with Iran by Isaac Chotiner

It’s unfortunate that Isaac Chotiner is seen as a dangerous interviewer because he does basic interviewing tasks like, researching ahead of time and asking subjects to explain what they say. Every interview could be this tough, if we hadn’t devolved journalism into clickbait softball questions to preserve access.

It’s widely reported that Netanyahu has spent decades trying to talk US Presidents into attacking Iran, along side his public statements to the same effect. He finally found his useful idiot in Trump’s second term.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-a-democratic-congressman-is-supporting-trumps-war-with-iran