By Norman Solomon, World BEYOND War, June 22, 2025
Twenty years ago, one day in June 2005, I talked with an Iranian man who was selling underwear at the Tehran Grand Bazaar. People all over the world want peace, he said, but governments won’t let them have it.
I thought of that conversation on Saturday night after the U.S. government attacked nuclear sites in Iran. For many days before that, polling clearly showed that most Americans did not want the United States to attack Iran. “Only 16 percent of Americans think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran,” YouGov pollsters reported, while “60 percent say it should not and 24 percent are not sure.”
But as a practical matter, democracy has nothing to do with the chokehold that the warfare state has on the body politic. That reality has everything to do with why the United States can’t kick the war habit. And that’s why the profound quests for peace and genuine democracy are so tightly intertwined.
On Saturday evening, President Trump delivered a speech exuding might-makes-right thuggery on a global scale: “There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days.”
More than ever, the United States and Israel are overt partners in what the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946 called “the supreme international crime” – “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression.”
Naturally, the perpetrators of the supreme international crime are eager to festoon themselves in mutual praise. As Trump put it in his speech, “I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before.” And Trump added: “I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they’ve done.”
A grisly and nefarious truth is that, in effect, the Israeli military functions as part of the overall U.S. military machine. The armed forces of each country have different command structures and sometimes have tactical disagreements. But in the Middle East, from Gaza and Iran to Lebanon and Syria, “cooperation” does not begin to describe how closely and with common purpose they work together.
More than 20 months into Israel’s U.S.-armed siege of Gaza, the genocide there continues as a joint American-Israeli project. It is a project that would have been literally impossible to sustain without the weapons and bombs that the U.S. government has continued to provide to the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces.
The same U.S.-Israel alliance that has been committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has also enabled the escalation of KKK-like terrorizing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people in the West Bank. The ethnocentric arrogance and racism involved in U.S. support for these crimes have been longstanding, and worsening along with the terrible events.
The same alliance is now also terrorizing Iranian society from the air.
As we have seen yet again in recent hours, the political and media culture of the United States is heavily inclined toward glorifying the use of the USA’s second-to-none destructive air power. As if above it all. The conceit of American exceptionalism assumes that “we” have the sanctified moral ground to proceed in the world with a basic de facto message powered by military might: Do as we say, not as we do.
While all this is going on, the word “surreal” is apt to be heard. But a much more fitting word is “real.”
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” James Baldwin wrote, “and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” Now, people in the United States have real-time historic opportunities – to do everything we can to take nonviolent action demanding that the U.S. government end its monstrous role in the Middle East.
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Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.
5 Responses
I’ve heard news of missiles strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities… What Trump did was so wrong bet it’s gonna haunt him in the foreseeable future.
Sorry to say you are wrong on that idea, nothing Trump does will haunt him later. Trump is a man that has no heart, no soul and no morals.
America and Israel has Iran the mirror image of their play for Iraq, and it will fail as Iraq did for them. The 2 characters trying to cancel Iran, were both middle aged business/politics when Iraq began, did they seriously learn nothing when watching it play out to the disaster of troops and Iraqi civilians??!! Plus West played the card in Afghanistan when not winning there ie getting the land, minerals, etc of need to help the women from their oppression, – did that work out either? NO!
Yes, Israel’s ruling class and the U.S. ruling class are aligned. But let’s not ignore something else. The U.S. has been attempting regime change in Iran since 1979, when the Iranian people kicked out the dictator Shah, who in turn the U.S. had imposed on them in a coup in 1953. the U.S. endorsed and weaponized Saddam Hussein’s war on Iran in the 1980s. U.S. policy, explained to General William Westmoreland in 2001, was to overthrow seven governments of countries of the MidEast and East Africa, all of which refused to submit to the demands of the U.S. empire. Iran is the last one standing. It’s not hard to see that the oligopoly corporations want control of this resource-rich region and its central position in international trade. And such control will be used to try to manipulate major powers, like China that depend on oil and trade. It’s also not hard to see that the U.S. is losing its global supremacy, held since the end of WWII, on many fronts. The rulers of the U.S. are unable, or refuse, to cooperate and compete in economics, politics and actual diplomacy. All that’s left is the war machine, intimidation and global thuggery. On these there is no comparable competition.
All of these criminal attacks are forms of ethnic cleansing in order to access resources.
It reminds me of those “Mad Max” films, where nothing is left of humanity but a
bunch of “Proud Boys,” armed to the teeth, riding in armoured vehicles over what
is now mostly desert land, still killing, raping and robbing, even as the planet is
obviously dying.