Something Wrong in Their Hearts...

How the US Ruling Class Learned (Again) to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs

Trees can bring a lot of joy

Proponents of the US-Israeli war against Iran seem to feel no obligation to offer coherence, logical consistency, or historical context in their justifications for the unprovoked aggression. Hearteningly, the attacks seem to be very unpopular with the US population at large, with February polling showing ~80% of US Americans opposed to attacking Iran. All the same, corporate politicians, corporate media, and the broader US ruling class are falling all over themselves to celebrate the war (one imagines Franco’s Spain felt something like this in 1936), even as the Democratic Party keeps secret its recent “autopsy” (a more apt word never found) of Kamala Harris’s failed 2024 presidential campaign; evidently, it concluded that the Biden Administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza cost Harris votes, and perhaps the election. Oops!

Alone among “Western” heads of state, Pedro Sanchez of Spain has spoken with common sense and humanity:

It is possible to be against a hateful regime, as Spanish society as a whole is against the Iranian regime, and at the same time be against an unjustified, dangerous military intervention that’s outside international law. One must be against a war that was started without the authorization of the United States Congress or the United Nations Security Council.

The war is illegal, of course! A violation of our own domestic democratic norms in the US, and yet apologists for the aggression claim that it is meant to support the aspirations of the Iranian people for secularism and democracy. Strange, then, that the US and Israel waited to launch these attacks until the Iranian government had brutally crushed the recent popular uprising…

To quote Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi “a fierce critic of the government who was once imprisoned on death row in Iran but who nevertheless opposes the war”:

I think one of the most important lessons that we are learning here is that these attacks are causing much suffering for Iranian people, and it’s destroying the space in which Iranians were struggling for social justice and civil liberties. This is exactly the opposite of what Iranians wished, and this destruction is causing tremendous harm to Iranian people.

Meanwhile, the US and Israel are striking schools and hospitals within Iran, and – true to form – engaging in “double tap” missile strikes, for example, on crowded, popular cafes:

“The worst thing that can happen in your life is this. You’re sitting here in peace, relaxing for an hour, and something like this destroys your whole life,” said Shahin, who survived the attack on Cafe Ahla. “You tried to hit the police and you killed average people. If this is how you want to kill, then kill us all. Every night we are seeing killings. We can’t sleep at night because we’re worried something will happen to our kids.”

The New York Times can be counted on to imply that Iran and its allies bear most of the responsibility for the violence with headlines this morning like “Iran Escalates Retaliatory Strikes as U.S. Signals Long Battle” and “Despite Its Weakness, Hezbollah Plunges Lebanon Back Into War” – I’m not linking intentionally! Though it is the best of our corporate media…

Apologists for the war suggest that it is predicated on Iran’s Islamism, ignoring the fact that, save Israel, Saudi Arabia is the US’s closest ally in the region. They suggest that Iran cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith, even when the UN and all major European powers decried the US withdrawal from the JCPOA (aka, “the Iran nuclear deal”) in 2018, and when Iran was, in fact, at the proverbial negotiating table when the US and Israel launched this latest surprise attack on Saturday. They suggest that Iran had to have been secretly pursuing a nuclear weapon’s program – why else would they have buried a key nuclear facility deep inside a mountain? Though, of course, the path of history suggests an alternative explanation… They accept credulously that this war was necessary to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, which was suddenly mere days away, after months of assurances that the Iranian nuclear program had been set back a generation by the above-linked strikes in June of 2025. And why wouldn’t Iran want a nuclear bomb at this point? If the lessons of the last nearly 50 years have shown anything, it’s that the Iranian government could only truly hope to protect itself through nuclear deterrence, but then, apologists for the war seem convinced that history doesn’t matter in understanding how we arrived at this point, so they feel no compulsion to grapple with these messy realities.

In Iran, and around the world, many people remember that the US and the UK – at the behest of their respective oil majors – toppled a democratically-elected Iranian government in 1953. That those imperialist powers proceeded to install the Shah (whose Wikipedia page has been wonderfully scrubbed by Shah nostalgists, but who sits with Augusto Pinochet and others like him in the annals of history), who ruled in the interest of his own and corporate enrichment, and with the support of a notoriously brutal secret police. That the popular uprising that led to the Iranian Revolution was coopted by Islamist factions is, in my assessment, a tragedy, but when we think about subsequent Iranian history, it is impossible to understand the evolution of their political system without recognizing the constant US (and Israeli) attempts to topple the Iranian government, through sanctions, proxy wars, military strikes, assassinations, etc, etc. Iran is not a passive or blameless player in any of these dynamics, and I am not a scholar of West Asian geopolitics, but a failure to even engage with the history seems unforgivable. Yet just such a failure is what we’re witnessing from most of the US ruling class while in the background the military-industrial contractors profit and Big Oil licks its lips.

The divergent development/modernization paths of the Gulf Arab States and Iran certainly have a lot to do with that history – the willing subsumption of the former into a US-led world order, and the alienation of the latter from the same. Might a different path have been possible, and more space have opened up for the Iranian population at large if the US had not waged steady economic (and other) warfare on Iran for multiple generations? As with Cuba, Iran has not been forgiven for overthrowing a US puppet. The Iranian people are now paying a heavy price, which US elites happily celebrate in the spirit of a fake commitment to democracy, and yet some apologists for the war point to these differential development pathways as a reason to support these atrocities: How many of their schools and hospitals do we have to bomb before they can finally commit to modernize?!

Meanwhile, as Bill Bishop observes:

The US-Israel attack on Iran of course is dominating the news. So far the PRC response has been predictable, with condemnations of the US and calls between Wang Yi and the Foreign Ministers of Russia, Iran, Oman and France. We should not expect anything more than diplomatic and rhetorical responses. The US getting bogged down in another Middle East quagmire, while depleting weapons supplies that need rare earths to be replenished, could have benefits for the PRC, but the risks to oil and gas supplies and prices could be quite negative for China.

It is easy enough to imagine a moment in the not-so-far-distant future where this Rope-a-Dope strategy eventually runs its course, and the “That all you got, George?” moment arrives. And the US is Foreman. And China is Ali.

It is also easy enough to imagine a scenario where the US succeeds – in plunging Iran into chaos, implosion, fragmentation, failed state-type dynamics – where the reassertion of US imperial prerogatives succeeds in checking China’s rise (to clarify: also not something about which I’m terribly enthusiastic politically) and that’s just the world we live in, and that like it was once existentially important, for a nonce, that the US topple the government of Iraq – which most people in the US still couldn’t find on a map; which they have totally forgotten about; of which, the contemporary realities, they have no concept – currently, the Eye of Sauron of our system has settled on its neighbor and will remain focused there until the state breaks.

What is hard for me to imagine is this brutal aggression leading to a democratic breakthrough in Iran, but I will hope to be surprised. Even if I am, this is a criminal way to go about conducting policy, and the very premise that the US ought go be guiding the path of the Iranian people (heirs to a great, ancient, and ongoing civilizational project of their own) is profoundly wrong.

What is easy for me to imagine is that the Gulf Arab States are currently second-guessing their whole-hearted embrace of the US President, at least! But even that investment might yet prove a winning one for them in the long term. Let’s see.

For now, it is very hard to know what to do as an individual in this moment, but opposing the atrocities, not believing the lies and nonsense, and continuing to work towards an actually democratic, post-Fossil future, and a version of the US economy not predicated on military-industrial Keynesian strike me as good North Stars.

Note: I don’t foresee writing more about this war, but also didn’t foresee writing about it in the first place. Hoping readers will feel inclined to stay with me.