President Donald Trump’s war on Iran offers a golden opportunity for the Democratic Party and for the people of the United States.
There could not be a clearer case of a mistaken American war than Trump’s decision to use the United States’ superpower military to go to war on Iran. Nor could there be a clearer example of the Republican Party’s willingness to let an unqualified leader act out of self-interest, in their name, with their power to kill thousands of human beings and destroy another nation’s critical infrastructure, against all democratic precedence and procedure, than the war the president started against Iran.
This is what a foreign policy based on military intimidation offers us: heavy profits for our wealthy investors and an increasing military budget for the rest of us to fund. And a serious dislocation of food, communications and daily life for all but the wealthy all around the world.
Because this ill-considered war is such a clear example of what our nation has been planning for and repeating over the years since 1948, when it renamed our “War Department” as the “Defense Department,” there can be no clearer example of the failure of the United States’ military domination of the world as a means to a more peaceful world or a safer America.
Those who were following the news in 2007 may remember that Barak Obama entered the lists of presidential competition under the promise of starting no rash or unnecessary wars: what Trump has called “stupid wars.” And that is certainly what we have in Trump’s Republican-enabled, misconceived war on Iran. Were the Democratic Party’s initiated war on Vietnam or Republican Party’s initiated war on Afghanistan any wiser? These were wars of superpower choice, to enforce superpower interests on countries whose governments couldn’t accept our demands on our terms.
President Obama didn’t have to be a genius to offer us a look at the established worldwide alternative to military domination as a means ending our disagreement with Iran over its seeking of nuclear weapons. His administration used diplomacy and negotiations, was successful and established a verifiable process that stopped Iran from manufacture of weapon-grade uranium.
And we, and the world, had that agreement, until Trump unilaterally, without any democratic involvement, personally broke that agreement, because he didn’t like it.
Israel has proved over and over that you can’t kill your way to peace, though it has kept trying without letting up since it conquered Palestine in 1947-48, by driving half of the Palestinians who lived in the parts of Palestine Israel wanted into an exile. Israel has fought war after war with its American and European backing, winning every one, but refusing to abide by international law and allowing the Palestinians it drove out of their lands back to their homes and farms and businesses. It left them no choice but to accept the theft of their land and the killing of their families, and to live in refugee camps on Israel’s borders.
What Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing now, assaulting the people of Iran with U.S. weapons and U.S. military intelligence, to crush even further an Iran that refuses to accept Israel’s unending war on the Palestinians, is proof of this impossibility. Israel’s commitment to killing their way into safety in the homeland they conquered in Palestine can’t work. And it cannot be done unless it accomplishes the Hitlerian task of a final solution to the Palestinians who it have driven from their homes and livelihoods. Doesn’t Israel’s continuing assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon demonstrate this?
Obama’s government took years to work out a verifiable end to Iran’s search for nuclear weapons and by all accounts it was working. It included safeguards that would have gone into effect the minute Iran broke it.
What they couldn’t foresee is that a Republican Party enabled Trump to throw it away.
It was the rejection of that process by the Republicans and Trump that cost us that security, and sent Iran back into enriching uranium. Both our war on the Palestinians (as Israel’s chief backer) and our war on Iran are proof of what military power of the greatest militaries on earth cannot do.
At the same time they are demonstrations of what negotiations can do. The superpower U.S. couldn’t defeat the Vietnamese. It couldn’t even defeat one of the most technologically backward and impoverished nations on earth in the Taliban’s Afghanistan.
What we have before us now is the opportunity for the Democrats to become not just the anti-Trump and anti-Republican party, but the “No Stupid War Party.”
Democratic Party leaders like U.S. Rep. James McGovern, have already raised the possibility of using our own democratically conceived laws against supplying arms to a nation persecuting its population, to slow Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The Democrats could use the incredible foolishness of the Republican-enabled Trump war on Iran, to become the party of “No Stupid Wars.”
And that would fit very well with the Democrats’ recent rediscovery of an economic policy of affordability for the working class to improve the future for all Americans.
The Trump Republicans are already looking for money to pay for the incredible amount of rockets and bombs it has used up enabling the Israeli assault on the people of Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon and allying with Israel against Iran. They are seeking a $1.5 trillion military budget to continue its wars in the next budget.
This moment of spectacular superpower failure presents us with a golden opportunity for the Democrats to become the “No Stupid War Party,” and begin to slow the superpower war budgets strangling of our domestic needs for healthcare, food and shelter for our own citizens.
Gary Michael Tartakov lives in Amherst.