By Jeff Klein, Special to the 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 – with an unknown number wounded –and three US aircraft have been shot down. The lost F-15 fighter bombers cost around $100 million each. The price of maintaining the US forces in the region to support this war likely costs a $billion or more each 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 peaceful development of nuclear technology. Iran does not have nuclear weapons, and there is no evidence that it is developing any. Its leaders have stated for many years that they oppose nuclear weapons on religious grounds.
In 2015 US negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran that prevented – with strict inspections –any steps toward nuclear weaponization. Donald Trump tore up the agreement in 2018 and he launched the current war while negotiations were making progress toward an even stricter nuclear agreement.
It is true, that Iran’s government is not the kind most of us would choose, but a regime change war – which this clearly is – would likely to result in something worse. We should have learned this from our military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.
The most strident calls to bomb Iran have come from Israel and its US echo chamber, led by AIPAC. Pro-Israel plutocrats donated more than $100 million to Trump’s 2024 election campaign. They got their wish.
To imagine that the US is making war on Iran to promote democracy beggars belief. None of the US allies in the region are remotely democratic – and this includes Israel, which is becoming increasingly authoritarian and rules over millions of Palestinians without any civil or political rights altogether.
This Iran war is 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 US 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 should offer an alternative vision to the forever wars. Most Americans seek a just and lasting peace and a government that responds to their problems, rather than constantly looking for regimes to change or enemies to crush.
Jeff Klein lives in Dorchester.
