In reporting on the Iran War as ‘the ultimate war of choice,’ the New York Times spoke, as usual in the language of political realism, which is the lingua franca of the foreign policy elite in the Atlanticist alliance consisting of the self-anointed ‘liberal democracies.’ It is definitely a more refined and less objectionable manner of labeling an unprovoked ‘war of aggression’ than the utterances of the U.S. president, Donald Trump, who has even had the audacity to trivialize the bloodshed and devastation traumatizing Iran’s innocent population as ‘an excursion.’ His language is so ill-suited to wartime by the political leadership of a sovereign country putting its own citizens, including members of the armed service, at uncertain risk. It not only demeans whatever policies are being advocated, such formulations bordering on the jovial convey an impression of unstable pathology, an attitude of extreme insensitivity to human suffering or ecological disruption in an adversary sovereign state.

If there had been lofty goals of the Iran War they would be discredited by these words: “We took a little excursion because we had to, to get rid of some evil, and I think it is going to be in a short-term excursion.” Even if the U.S. stops attacking today, there is no assurance that Israel will not persist, but even if both countries were to stop immediately, the aftermath of this war will leave many burning embers afflicting the lives of  the Iranian people, and even their Middle East neighbors. Such a partial discrediting of this constitutionally unauthorized and internationally unlawful war that due its secondary effects on the poor and vulnerable has already spread lethal harm far beyond the borders of Iran, indeed, throughout the world.

Trump initially rationalized the unprovoked war against Iran as justified by the alleged repression of the Iranian people by the governing theocracy, using missiles and bombs while urging the Iranian people to take the country back as if he cared.

He secondarily cited Iran’s engagement in arming and funding Islamic terrorism, which public opinion even in the West increasingly regards not as terrorism but as legally justified collective resistance to the violent encroachment of the U.S. and Israel upon the sovereignty of Middle Eastern countries, and especially of partnering with Israel, aborting the rights of the Palestinian people while championing Israel’s project of territorial expansion and state terrorism. sustained by apartheid rule and recourse to genocidal tactics, and additional aggressive moves against such helpless adversaries as Lebanon and Syria. Thirdly he voiced concern about Iran’s nuclear program that was supposedly obliterated in the US/Israeli war a year earlier but somehow in the short interim not only revived but was augmented by sophisticated missile capabilities.

In essence, Trump........

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