On September 28, Brent crude climbed more than 2 percent after President Donald Trump rejected an Iranian proposal to end the conflict and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Six days earlier, speaking before the United Nations, Trump had presented two possibilities: a deal with Tehran or the “annihilation of the Islamic Republic”. Even after rejecting the proposal, he said negotiations could continue. One president retained the power to bargain, refuse or escalate; millions of people were left to live with the consequences. That gap between who decides and who pays is the subject of the Iran war. It has a name: war livestock.

War livestock is meant to be unsettling. It does not describe the people sent to fight, pay and suffer. It describes a political order that treats them as raw material: soldiers as bodies available for deployment, taxpayers as a renewable source of financing, civilians as acceptable collateral, and the young and poor as populations expected to absorb risks that officials and contractors rarely share. They are fed stories of duty, herded by fear, shorn of money and opportunity, and placed in danger when policy demands it. The metaphor does not strip people of their humanity. It accuses the state of doing so—of treating citizens whose consent must be earned as inventory for national ambition.

Trump did not invent this relationship. Presidents of both parties have asked Americans to accept distant wars whose missions expanded and whose costs arrived long after the speeches announcing them. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates roughly $8 trillion in expenditures and at least 940,000 deaths from direct violence across the major post-9/11 war zones. The figures span many countries, combatants and administrations.........

© CounterPunch