By Jeff Klein
Originally published in the Dorchester Reporter.
As the Trump administration and Israel continue their attacks on Iran, opinion polls show that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to yet another US war in the Middle East. Trump does not care. He says that the war will continue, and he doesn’t rule out the deployment of US ground troops in Iran.
Our country has been mired in Middle East wars for a generation, mostly based on lies. The price has been thousands of US military personnel dead and trillions of dollars wasted. For the people of the Middle East, the cost has been much higher – perhaps a million or more dead and many millions forced to become refugees in the region or beyond.
When will this end? When the American people finally say, “NO” and elect representatives who will listen to them?
Already, at least four US service members have died, an unknown number have been wounded, and three US aircraft have been shot down. These destroyed F-15 fighter bombers cost American taxpayers approximately $100 million each, while the price of maintaining the US forces in the region would likely cost more than one billion every day.
None of the justifications for this war make any sense. The claim that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons has been repeated for decades, but the only nuclear weapons in the Middle East belong to the US and Israel. Iran, like every other nation in the region except Israel, is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guarantees the right of every nation to pursue the peaceful development of nuclear technology. There is no evidence either that Iran does not have nuclear weapons, or that it is developing any. Iranian leaders have stated for years that they oppose nuclear weapons on religious grounds.
In 2015 the United States negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran that allowed strict inspections and prevented any steps toward nuclear weaponization. Three years later, Donald Trump tore up that agreement. Current negotiations were making progress toward an even stricter nuclear agreement.
Admittedly, Iran’s government is not one most of us would choose, but this regime change war is fated to result in something far worse. The United States has failed to learn the lessons from their military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.
The most strident calls to bomb Iran have come from Israel and those within its American echo chamber, led by AIPAC. These plutocrats donated more than $100 million to Trump’s 2024 election campaign. Somewhat predictably, they got their wish.
To imagine that the United States is making war on Iran to promote democracy beggars belief. None of the US allies in the region are remotely democratic, including Israel, which denies millions of Palestinians without any civil or political rights at all, and is only becoming more and more authoritarian.
This Iran war is also illegal. As stated by retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rachel Van Landingham, who previously served as chief of international law at U.S. Central Command, “Not only does this violate international law in numerous respects, it clearly violates the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolution.”
Many voters cast their ballots for Trump because they believed he would oppose new wars. Trump was right when he said in 2020: “We’ve spent $8 trillion in the Middle East and we’re not fixing our roads in this country? How stupid. How stupid is it? And we’re not fixing our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals, our schools? It’s crazy.”
We can be grateful that many Massachusetts public officials have voiced their opposition to Trump’s war on Iran, even if some of their statements have been too mild and narrowly focused on “the failure to consult Congress.” Our elected representatives must offer an alternative vision to the forever wars. Most Americans seek a just and lasting peace and a government that responds to their problems, not one which constantly seeks out regimes to change or enemies to crush.
