By Norman Solomon
Twenty years ago, one day in June 2005, I talked with an Iranian man who was selling underwear at the Tehran Grand Bazaar. People all over the world want peace, he said, but governments won’t let them have it.
I thought of that conversation on Saturday night after the U.S. government attacked nuclear sites in Iran. For many days before that, polling clearly showed that most Americans did not want the United States to attack Iran. “Only 16 percent of Americans think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran,” YouGov pollsters reported, while “60 percent say it should not and 24 percent are not sure.”
But as a practical matter, democracy has nothing to do with the chokehold that the warfare state has on the body politic. That reality has everything to do with why the United States can’t kick the war habit. And that’s why the profound quests for peace and genuine democracy are so tightly intertwined.
On Saturday evening, President Trump delivered a speech exuding might-makes-right thuggery on a global scale: “There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days.”
More than ever, the United States and Israel are overt partners in what the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946 called “the supreme international crime” – “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression.”
Naturally, the perpetrators of the supreme international crime are eager to festoon themselves in mutual praise. As Trump put it in his speech, “I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before.” And Trump added: “I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they’ve done.”
A grisly and nefarious truth is that, in effect, the Israeli military functions as part of the overall U.S. military machine. The armed forces of each country have different command structures and sometimes have tactical disagreements. But in the Middle East, from Gaza and Iran to Lebanon and Syria, “cooperation” does not begin to describe how closely and with common purpose they work together.
More than 20 months into Israel’s U.S.-armed siege of Gaza, the genocide there continues as a joint American-Israeli project. It is a project that would have been literally impossible to sustain without the weapons and bombs that the U.S. government has continued to provide to the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces.
The same U.S.-Israel alliance that has been committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has also enabled the escalation of KKK-like terrorizing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people in the West Bank. The ethnocentric arrogance and racism involved in U.S. support for these crimes have been longstanding, and worsening along with the terrible events.
The same alliance is now also terrorizing Iranian society from the air.
As we have seen yet again in recent hours, the political and media culture of the United States is heavily inclined toward glorifying the use of the USA’s second-to-none destructive air power. As if above it all. The conceit of American exceptionalism assumes that “we” have the sanctified moral ground to proceed in the world with a basic de facto message powered by military might: Do as we say, not as we do.
While all this is going on, the word “surreal” is apt to be heard. But a much more fitting word is “real.”
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” James Baldwin wrote, “and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” Now, people in the United States have real-time historic opportunities – to do everything we can to take nonviolent action demanding that the U.S. government end its monstrous role in the Middle East.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," includes an afterword about the Gaza war.