Opinion: The Golden Opportunity of President Trump’s War on Iran

President Trump’s war on Iran offers a golden opportunity for both the Democratic Party and all of US.

There could not be a clearer case of a mistaken American war than President Trump’s decision to use the United States’ superpower military (designed by both of our pro-war parties) to go to war on Iran. Nor could there be a clearer example of the Republican Party’s willingness to let an unqualified leader act out of self-interest, in our name, with the power to kill thousands of human beings and destroy vast amounts of another nation’s critical infrastructure, against all democratic precedent and procedure.

This is what a foreign policy based on military intimidation has to offer us: heavy profits for our wealthy investors and an increasing military budget for the rest of us to fund.  And a serious dislocation of food, communications and daily life for all but the wealthy all around the world. 

Because this ill-considered war is such a clear example of what our nation has been planning for and repeating over the years since 1948, when it renamed the “War Department” as the “Defense Department,” there can be no clearer example of the failure of the United States’ military domination to create a more peaceful world or a safer America. 

Those who were following the news in 2007 may remember that Barak Obama entered the lists of Presidential competition under the promise of starting no rash or unnecessary wars: what President Trump has called “stupid wars.”  And that is certainly what we have in President Trump’s Republican-enabled, incredibly misconceived war on Iran. 

Was the Democratic-Party-initiated war on Vietnam or the Republican-Party-initiated war on Afghanistan any wiser?  They were wars of superpower choice, to enforce superpower interests on countries whose governments wouldn’t accept our superpower’s demands on our superpower terms.

President Obama didn’t have to be a genius to offer us a look at the long-established worldwide alternative to military domination as a means to ending our disagreement with Iran over its pursuit of nuclear weapons.  His administration used diplomacy and negotiations. And his administration was successful. They established a verifiable process that stopped Iran from manufacture of weapons-grade uranium. 

And we, and the world, had that agreement, until President Trump unilaterally, without any democratic involvement at all, broke that agreement, because he didn’t like it.

Israel has proved over and over that you can’t kill your way to peace, though it has kept trying without letup since it conquered Palestine in 1947/48, by driving half of the Palestinians who lived there from the parts of Palestine Israel wanted.  Israel has fought war after war with its American and European backing, winning every one. Starting just about every one and winning every one.  But, refusing to abide by international law and allowing the Palestinians it drove out of their homes and farms and businesses, back to their homes and farms and businesses, it left them no choice but accept the theft of their land and the killing of their families,  and to living in refugee camps on Israel’s borders. 

What Prime Minister Netanyahu is doing now, assaulting the people of Iran with US weapons and US military intelligence, to crush even further the Iran that refuses to accept Israel’s unending war on the Palestinians, is proof of this impossibility. Israel’s commitment to killing its way into safety in the homeland it conquered in Palestine can’t work. And it cannot be done unless they accomplish the Hitlerian task of a final solution for the Palestinians. Doesn’t their continuing assault on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon demonstrate this?

Obama’s government took years to work out a verifiable end to Iran’s search for nuclear weapons. And by all accounts, it was working, and included safeguards that would have gone into effect if Iran had broken it. 

What they couldn’t foresee was that a Republican party enabled by Trump would throw it away.  

It was the rejection of that process by the Republicans and their President that cost us that security, and sent Iran back into enriching uranium.  Both our war on the Palestinians (as Israel’s chief backer) and our war on Iran are proof of what military power of the greatest militaries on earth cannot do.

And at the same time they are demonstrations of what negotiations can do. The superpower U.S. couldn’t defeat the Vietnamese. It couldn’t even defeat the most technologically backward and impoverished nation on earth in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. 

What we have before us now, in President Trump’s Republican-enabled war on Iran, is a golden opportunity for the Democrats to become not just the anti-Trump and anti-Republican party, but the “No Stupid War” Party.” 

Democratic Party leaders like Jim McGovern, have already raised the possibility of using our own democratically conceived laws against supplying arms to a nation persecuting a population under its control, to interrupt Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. The Democrats could use the incredible foolishness of the Republican-enabled Trump war on Iran to become the party of “No Stupid Wars.” 

And that would fit very well with the Democrats’ recent re-discovery of affordability for  working class people to improve the future for all Americans.

The Trump Republicans are already looking for money to pay for the incredible amount of rockets and bombs it has used-up enabling the Israeli assault on the people of Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon and joining with Israel against Iran. And the Trump enabling Republicans are seeking  a 1.5 trillion dollar military budget to continue its wars in the next budget.

This moment of spectacular superpower failure presents us with a golden opportunity for the Democrats to become the “No Stupid War Party,”  and begin to interrupt the superpower war budgets strangling of our domestic needs for healthcare, food and shelter for our own people.

Gary Michael Tartakov is a resident of Amherst