The slaughter in Palestine, the bombings of Iran, the hardening of the blockade against Cuba, the invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its president, these are the harshest facts announcing a new phase of capital accumulation, one that has crowned Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.

This class war is a real war, and global in scope. No corner of the world can remain uninvolved in it. Without end, with unlimited objectives, it doesn't seek to make the enemy submit to one's own will, as classic war theory says it should, but rather, seeks to utterly annihilate it, although this turns out to be nearly impossible to accomplish. 

The most dramatic hostilities are occurring in West Asia. So that the plans for 

 

Operation Epic Folly

"If America attacks . . . Iranians will unite, forgetting their differences with their government, and they will fiercely and tenaciously defend their country."

-----Shirin Ebadi, Iran's 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate

 

The only thing truly epic about the current U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is the chasm between the facts on the ground and the media spectacle put forth by President Trump and his fawning aides. 

Folly is the best term to capture the reality of a president who until very recently presented himself as uniquely qualified to bring peace to the world via his "Art of the Deal" genius, then turned on a dime to endlessly repeat that the U.S. would inflict maximum damage and suffering on Iran, a country he had said would be a particularly bad place to try and carry out regime change, not to mention a policy he claimed to have rejected no matter where it might be recommended, wisdom he allegedly learned from the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

After steady coaching from Benjamin Netanyahu, however, he changed his mind, becoming convinced that a quick decapitation of Iran's leadership would lead Iran's suffering masses to topple the mullahs and install an American-friendly government. He claimed that Iran's clerical regime would fall in 48 hours. 

That prediction failed so fast it didn't even allow time for a G.W. Bush style "Mission Accomplished" declaration to whet the appetite for the inevitable anti-climax of disintegration and civil war a few months later. In this as in so many other areas Trump is a prodigy, failing almost as fast as he can dream up fresh lunacies to aggravate the world with. As the Ugly American, he's way overqualified.

Since February 28 we have been treated to desperate, ever-changing, and contradictory attempts to justify the unjustifiable initiation of war, and an equally desperate, ever-changing, and contradictory attempt to define its objectives and limits, something that has proven impossible for an administration that was counting on ending the war with a single massive blow. Hence the ever-lengthening list of childish inventions: "bring the Iranians back to the negotiating table," "obliterate the Iran nuclear program," "liberate the people," "strike a deal Venezuelan style," "complete regime change," etc. etc. None of it has anything to do with reality.

For Trump and his henchmen, where reality is not merely tinged with fantasy but subsumed by it, "nothing is impossible" is a necessary watchword. For them, thoughtlessness is a virtue, as shown by Trump's nonchalance in admitting that they hadn't found a replacement yet for the murdered Iranian head of state because the U.S.-Israeli attacks were so successful that all the potential replacements had also been killed. No need for woke nonsense like knowing what you're doing.

With gas prices soaring and Americans already coming home in body bags, an obviously desperate Trump yearns to declare victory and withdraw, but he cannot do so, because the Iranian government is still very much in place. Lacking an exit strategy, his war doctrine is "flexible," by necessity, since he has no idea how he fell into the current trap, let alone how to get out of it. Ever the narcissist, however, he gives himself an "A" for effort, assessing the initial phase of the U.S. war as a 15 on a scale of 10.  

In other words, we're watching another reality TV episode, full of kitsch and cliches, with Pete Hegseth comparing the mass killing to a football game. Iranian leaders knew the first few "plays," said the war secretary, because they had been scripted before the war started, but once the "game" was underway they didn't "know what plays to call, let alone how to get in the huddle." Filled with adolescent pride at unleashing massive waves of lethality, he claimed the U.S. was "fighting to win," even as Trump showed eagerness to negotiate a way out, an option that Teheran flatly rejected.

Badly conceived, sloppily improvised, and based on the repetition of past errors and disasters, the Trump and Bibi war moves from tragedy to farce and back again, only this time on a vaster scale and with potentially far graver consequences. 

It's difficult to recall a greater folly. 

 

Sources:

Shirin Ebadi quoted from David Barsamian (with Noam Chomsky, Ervand Abrahamian, Nahid Mozaffari), Targeting Iran, (City Lights, 2007)

Maciek Wisniewski, "Operation Epic Farce," La Jornada (Spanish), March 7, 2026

 

 

The Delusion of Safety "Here"

"It's not meant to be happening here." 

Louise Starkey, an Australian influencer in Dubai posted those words to the internet in response to Iranian missiles hitting the United Arab Emirates. The adverb says everything. Life is forever nice "here" because all the crimes we commit "there" are denied a response and whitewashed out of the news "here."

The phrase, which Starkey erased in response to a tsunami of indignant criticism, aptly sums up the dominant attitude in the Global North, where misfortune is happenstance and the organized brutality undergirding economic life merely makes for an "interesting proposition" in an academic seminar, if even that.

The "here" makes clear that there are places that can be bombarded, like Palestine and Venezuela, and other places no, like the United Arab Emirates, an oil and gas tax shelter for the fabulously wealthy. The fact that a missile can explode "here" shows that the rules are changing. The new reality to which all of us have fallen heir is that everywhere is subject to bombardment at a moment's notice. Not just "there," but everywhere.

What the influencer demonstrated was not ignorance but a sense of reality and a "common sense" grasped intuitively by everyone, but rarely articulated, and virtually never with such directness. But they are the same ingredients at work in the odd reaction of the majority of European governments to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, though each one has its particular nuance. German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz questioned international law and said "now is not the time to teach a lesson" to the United States. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed doubts and declined to join in the U.S.-Israeli attacks. French President Emmanuel Macron suggested extending the French nuclear umbrella over Europe. But all three speak with one voice in saying that they would take "measures to defend our interests and those of our allies" in the face of Iran's "reckless attacks." 

Amazing. The problem is "there" rather than "here." One would never guess that Israel and the U.S. started the current war; that the secular state the U.S. periodically claims Iran needs was already created by the Iranian people, but then overthrown by U.S. coup in 1953 after Iran had the nerve to nationalize its own oil; or that Iran was extremely accommodating in negotiations with the U.S. up to the final minute in February, making every effort to avoid war. 

And what to make of president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, who demanded of Teheran a credible transition, a definitive termination of nuclear and ballistic programs, and an end to destabilizing activities in the region, just hours after the Iranian head of state had been assassinated by U.S.-Israeli air strikes? 

Incredible. 

Let's review some facts. Without provocation, and with complete contempt for Iranian sovereignty, the U.S. and Israel bombed the country, blaming Teheran for the attacks and denying it had any right to retaliate. This kind of framing makes Orwellian double-think seem quite rational, and it's certainly understandable that even the regime's critics are uniting behind the government's war effort. No matter how much Iranian women may need to be liberated, they can't sign on to an effort that blew up dozens of little girls attending elementary school in Minab on the first day of war.

In any case, much as we like to blame Trump for everything, we've seen this movie before. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 by the neo-cons Trump has so criticized had nothing to do with liberating the Iraqi people (Operation Iraqi Liberation was considered as a name for U.S. invasion policy, but the acronym OIL threatened insurmountable public relations problems), nor was it the done in a jiffy operation it was advertised as being. Weapons of mass destruction never turned up because they had never existed, which was obvious at the time.

Iraq was devastated almost beyond repair, which ended up enhancing Iranian influence in the region, ironically enough, given unrelenting U.S. hostility towards Iran since its revolution in 1979.

Unlike Trump today, President George W. Bush at least felt the need to send Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Council to make a case for war, because obtaining UN approval was considered important. Though Bush ended up settling for support from the likes of Tony Blair, Jose Maria Aznar, and Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, he looked hard for more. He ran into a dignified "No" in Berlin, Paris, and other capitals. 

Flash forward a quarter century and Trump, without seeking any European support, has garnered quite a bit in spite of himself. Only Spain has refused the U.S. use of its airbases to attack Iran, which appears to be strengthening Prime Minister Sanchez with the electorate. He can use the help, as there are still plenty of Spanish "patriots" who support Trump. Meanwhile, the Danish social democrats, who rebounded in the polls after standing firm in the face of U.S. threats to Greenland, will vote soon. Let's hope they create some momentum for sanity in Europe, where it's in short supply.

After all, though it has dropped from the radar, the threat to Greenland has not gone away. The only reason it hasn't been attacked already is that Israel doesn't really care about it. But that could change, which Copenhagen seems to recognize, but not Brussels or Berlin. The latter still think that being "here" affords protection from the consequences of our actions "there." It doesn't.

In today's world, there is no more "here" and "there," only a shared everywhere. In that universal space economic relations are fragile, everyone is vulnerable, and mastering the technology of violence is not difficult.

We're all at risk here.

 

Source:

Beñat Zaldua, It Can Also Happen "Here", La Jornada (Spanish), March 7, 2026