President Trump recently ordered an airstrike that killed a top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani as well as others in Iraq. This followed an attack on the US Embassy by Iranian-backed militia in Iraq. The architects of the 2003 US 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 8 year war in Iraq, based on a lie, that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people, 2,400 US soldiers and left tens of thousands of US war veterans suicidal, homeless, with PTSD and the 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 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
January 4, 2020