The US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has been hammered on the true costs of the Iran war during a Senate hearing and dubbed a war criminal by anti-war activists.

“The greatest obstacle to peace is the incompetence of the secretary of defense and of the president of the United States”, declared Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Pete Hegseth, you’re a war criminal. You should be arrested!” an anti-war activist shouted at the US secretary of defense, who was on Capitol Hill Thursday to testify at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing about the administration’s unprecedented Pentagon budget request, President Donald Trump’s illegal war on Iran, and more.

“What you’re doing is despicable”, the CodePink activist, Gus, told Hegseth as he was escorted out of the hearing and arrested. “The American people do not want to go into this war. We don’t want to fight a war with Israel!”

As civilian casualties across the Middle East and gasoline prices across the United States have soared, so has the US public’s disapproval of Trump and Israel’s war on Iran. There are ceasefire agreements in place for both that assault and Israel’s related attacks supposedly targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon but, as Amnesty International noted in a Wednesday statement demanding international action to promote sustainable peace in the region, those deals are ‘fragile, temporary, and in danger of collapse at any moment’.

Hegseth – whose controversial Senate confirmation required a tiebreaking vote from Vice President JD Vance – last appeared before the Senate committee in June. As the panel’s ranking member, Senator Jack Reed (Democrat (D)-Rhode Island) pointed out to the Pentagon chief in his opening remarks Thursday, since then, “you and President Trump have unwisely taken the United States to war with Iran”.

That war has killed at least 3,375 Iranians and injured another 25,000, while recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed more than 2,200........

© Pearls and Irritations