President Trump recently ordered an air strike that killed a top Iranian commander, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, as well as others in Iraq. This followed an attack on the U.S. embassy by Iranian-backed militia in Iraq.
The architects of the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq are bellowing for all-out war with Iran on Fox News and wherever else they can get a forum.
Have we learned nothing from the disastrous eight-year war in Iraq, based on a lie, that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people, 2,400 U.S. soldiers and left tens of thousands of U.S. war veterans suicidal, homeless, with post traumatic stress disorder and against that war?
Have we learned nothing from the recent revelation that our nearly 20-year unhinged war in Afghanistan lacked purpose, lacked “progress,” lacked a moral compass and placed that country in the hands of the Taliban?
We had a carefully monitored agreement with Iran in which they agreed to eliminate their capacity to make nuclear weapons in exchange for our dropping economic sanctions that were strangling their economy. Renouncing that agreement and baiting Iran to war — at a point in which we are given 10 years to pull the world back from climate catastrophe, as Australia is experiencing — manifests the truth of the poet John Milton’s lines: “For what can war but endless war still breed.”
Pat Hynes
Traprock Center for Peace and Justice