CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Roaming Charges: Muscle For Brains

Pete Hegeth seeking divine authority for US airstrikes on Iran.

For reasons that are not mysterious The weak are sent to the wall They have reservations in heaven Down here, they’re not so fashionable Save me from the people who would save me from my sin They got muscle for brains – Gang of Four, “Muscle for Brains”

For reasons that are not mysterious The weak are sent to the wall They have reservations in heaven Down here, they’re not so fashionable Save me from the people who would save me from my sin They got muscle for brains

– Gang of Four, “Muscle for Brains”

The Iran war is a war of choice. But that doesn’t tell us much, does it? All wars are wars of choice. The questions are: was it a necessary choice? Was it a good choice? Was it a rational choice? Were the consequences considered? Who made the choice and why? We still don’t know the answers to these questions.

The Iran war is a war of aggression, launched by two nuclear powers against a non-nuclear nation that has been weakened by years of economic sanctions, targeted assassinations, industrial sabotage and cyber-attacks. This is a war of aggression that was initiated during bad-faith negotiations by the US, where diplomacy was used as a cover for a looming bombardment. The gloating over the ease with which US and Israeli airstrikes decimated Iran’s leadership was appalling, given the circumstances under which it occurred. Wars of aggression are crimes. But who is left to enforce international laws? If you can get away with a genocide, as the US’s war partner has done, every conceivable atrocity is fair game. Israel turned Gaza into rubble and still the bombs fall.

What is the objective? To destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities? To kill the Ayatollah? To topple the Islamic Republic? To emasculate the Republican Guard? To de-industrialize Iran? To wreck the Iranian economy? To “liberate” Iranian women? To spark a revolution? Who knows. Probably not Donald Trump. He claims he’ll “feel it in his bones,” though surely he meant his bone spurs.

The US generals don’t seem to have much of an idea, even though nearly 40% of the US military is now zeroed in on Iran, burning through billions of dollars of weapons every week. If we take the bombastic Pete Hegseth at his word, it’s to “rain death and destruction” on Iran and Iranians without much, if any, discretion on who is being killed or what is being destroyed. That sounds about right to me.

The timid Democrats have criticized Trump for not having a “plan,” as if having a plan would legitimize his criminal war. But they do have a plan and the plan is maximum destruction. The plan is for a spectacle of bomb-blast light shows and mass death. One of the first kill shots was an attack on an Iranian girls’ school that murdered 200 people, including teachers and students. Helluva way to liberate women.

Trump tried to blame the girls’ school strike on the Iranians, saying they’d somehow acquired a US-made Tomahawk cruise missile. Even the Pentagon wouldn’t back up this murderous lie. The school was on the target list. Bad intelligence? Not if the intelligence came from the Israelis, as it likely did. As we know from Gaza, the Israelis targeted schools as if they were ballistic missile batteries.

US airstrikes destroyed Iran’s Russian-supplied air defenses within the first couple of days of the war. Since then, the US and the Israelis can bomb at will, the only risk being an F-35 encountering a little rain or wind that might send it into a........

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