This is the first sentence of a column I cannot write... of a “war” I cannot win. There’s just no way to condense the psycho-spiritual devastation of an unleashed nuclear bomb into words. All I can do is ask a question that has no answer: What is the opposite of Armageddon?

Can a collective human embrace be larger, more intense and powerful than collective suicide? Is “peace” a force in its own right, or just a brief moment of quiet while humanity reloads?

OK, no answers, just a bit of context with which to ponder the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran (and throughout the Middle East). Lawrence Wilkerson—retired US Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell—put it this way in a recent interview with Democracy Now: “This is a war with long legs and I think Trump has completely misinterpreted it. The only one who has interpreted it correctly is Bibi Netanyahu and I think he’s ready to use a nuclear weapon, should it become as bad as it looks right now.”

One alleged reason why we’re waging a war on Iran is because it has nuclear “capability,” which we need to obliterate for our own safety. Apparently, only the boss countries—the world leaders, the conquerors and colonizers—can be trusted to have nukes. USA! USA! This club also includes Israel, which in fact possesses a large number of nuclear warheads and may actually use one if the war it started comes back at it with too much ferocity. In other words, if Iran’s retaliation is too successful: “...winning against such insatiable enemies could provoke a cornered Israel to turn the war nuclear,” according to the publication Jacobin. “A Trump adviser recently warned that Israel might use a nuclear weapon against Iran.”

I don’t believe it’s possible to turn a nuclear assault into a verbal abstraction: “Gosh, Iran was just nuked.” If that happens, we’ve just inflicted hell on all of humanity. We’ve........

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