The F-Bomb dropped on Easter Sunday by the “very stable genius” in the White House was not the first worrisome sign. Donald Trump had already sworn he’d bomb Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong.” Soon he was proposing to destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran, and threatening that “[a] whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” This is the language of war crimes, even genocide.
From the start, Trump’s and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Feb. 28 “preemptive” war on Iran, was illegal under international law, breached our UN Charter obligations, and, violated our Constitution because no congressional authorization was given. To the extent it was actually aimed at halting all of Iran’s nuclear enrichment, it trampled on Iran’s rights under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to develop peaceful nuclear technology, like uranium enrichment used for nuclear power plant fuel.
The human and economic cost of Trump’s Iran war is already staggering. At least 365 U.S. service members have been wounded, some seriously, and at least 13 killed. Thousands of Iranians, Israelis, Lebanese, Iraqis, Gulf residents and others have also been killed or wounded, many of them civilians, with critical infrastructure and irreplaceable historic treasures also damaged or destroyed. In the U.S., the war has already raised gas costs, mortgage costs, fertilizer costs (which will soon affect food costs), to name a few, and roiled the financial markets.
For what? I won’t say that certain presidents might start a war in part to distract from plummeting polling or political problems at home. I’ll let Trump say that.
“In order to get [re-]elected, … Obama will start a war with Iran,” Trump posted in November 2011. Trump again warned in October 2012: “Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin — watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.” Trump’s now in his own tailspin, just months before midterms that could prove disastrous for him and congressional Republicans. I hope his flailing desperation doesn’t condemn us all to months of disastrous war.
But even a renewed, larger war may not distract the voting public from Trump’s own recent reminder of the federal trade-offs between domestic needs and ill-conceived “wars of choice.” “We’re fighting wars,” Trump said, “ …It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things… We have to take care of one thing. Military protection…” That trade-off’s especially corrosive when Trump now wants to spend a half trillion dollars more on what is already the world’s most expensive military, plus a $200 billion Supplemental for the Iran war.
Like others, I wonder daily how our 250-year-old democracy could have such feeble levers for halting a dictatorial madman.
Corroded as they sometimes seem, our democracy does have such levers, if we can only get a few more hands to pull them. On March 24, the Senate came within four votes of moving forward on Senate Joint Resolution 116 (S.J. Res. 116), a resolution to direct the removal of U.S armed forces from hostilities against Iran that have not been authorized by Congress.
Reprehensibly, 53 Senators, nearly all Republican, voted to keep S.J. Res. 116 bottled up in Committee, effectively blocking further action on it. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican voting to move the resolution forward.
We need to work now to defeat as many of the war-backing members of the Senate (and House!) as we can in November’s midterms.
At least four of these war-backing Republican senators will, or might, be in competitive races this fall: Collins of Maine, Husted of Ohio, Cornyn of Texas, and Sullivan of Alaska. There are also two competitive open Senate seats — Michigan and North Carolina — that might help with an anti-war bloc in the Senate. Not all Democratic challengers for these seats are guaranteed anti-war votes, but they hopefully will be at least a little more responsive to anti-war pressure, and possibly to calls for impeachment, too. It’s nearly certain that any Republicans in those seats will back Trump’s forever wars.
New Englanders have a particular responsibility to help defeat Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the only New England senator voting to roadblock S.J. Res. 116. So, demonstrate, write letters, make calls, but also donate and volunteer for critical congressional campaigns, to bring a halt to Trump’s forever wars.
Rudy Perkins of Amherst took part in an interfaith peace delegation to Iran led by an American rabbi in 2008, getting to speak with Muslim, Jewish and Christian religious leaders there, and visiting historic Isfahan, Tehran and other Iranian cities.