If The U.S. Couldn't Beat Sandino 100 Years Ago, How Can It Defeat Iran Today?

They never learn. 

In 1912, the United States extracted a huge indemnity from Nicaragua for having the nerve to request that U.S. companies pay taxes. American bankers generously loaned the cost of the indemnity, and Washington dispatched the Marines to compensate for a lack of collateral. Taking over the customs houses, national banks, and railroads, they never got around to leaving.

Fourteen years later General Augusto Cesar Sandino decided to serve an eviction notice, forming Nicaragua's first army of national liberation with twenty-nine illiterate San Albino miners. The men were working fifteen hours a day hacking gold out of the earth for a U.S. company and sleeping jammed together in a shed. When Sandino gave the word they dynamited the mines and followed him into the mountains. 

The patriotic prostitutes of Puerto Cabezas divulged the location of a Marine stash of rifles and cartridges they had learned from pillow talk, and soon the army of liberation had its first arms and ammunition. 

Sandino's men also grabbed rifles from fallen enemies and carved bullets out of tree bark where they had become embedded. Machetes proved useful for chopping off heads, and sardine-can grenades filled with glass, nails, screws and dynamite scattered the enemy efficiently. The State Department accused Sandino of using "the stealthy and ruthless tactics which characterized the savages who fell upon American settlers in our country 150 years ago." 

In short, Washington complained that "the General of Free Men," as Sandino was known in Nicaragua, wasn't conducting his killing in a civilized manner. Sandino's reply indicated he was not one to be easily trolled: "Liberty is not conquered with flowers," he said.

Enjoying overwhelming superiority of force, U.S. bombers blew apart cattle and horses, wrecked crops, and destroyed villages, but Nicaragua's "crazy little army" (Gabriela Mistral) avoided toe-to-toe engagement, biding its time until attack was least expected. Then Sandino and his men would ambush from behind or strike the enemy along its flanks, before vanishing into the jungle unscathed. 

With Nicaragua's army of national liberation growing and winning, thousands of Marines and dozens of warships arrived to bolster Washington's puppet president, Adolfo Diaz, and hunt down the "bandit" Sandino. Yet, of dozens of battles, large and small, the U.S. lost nearly all of them.

For all their firepower, the Marines proved to be no better than sitting ducks. Loaded down with heavy equipment, they stomped wearily through the jungle, baked by the sun, drenched by the rain, choking on dust, wilted by humidity, easy targets for repeated attacks by Sandino's men, who popped out of the brush to slit their throats with alarming regularity. 

Eventually, Washington resorted to a bribe, and let Captain Hatfield hint of surrender.

From his mountain hideout Sandino declined the offer with exquisite courtesy: "I don't sell out or surrender," he wrote, followed by his signature: "Your obedient servant, who desires to put you in a handsome coffin with beautiful bouquets of flowers."   

After years of occupation, U.S. officials dominated Nicaragua from top to bottom and did not want to leave. Clifford D. Ham was comptroller of customs and general tax collector, and also the Nicaraguan correspondent for United Press. Another U.S. official, Irving Lindberg, was the correspondent for the Associated Press. A U.S. colonel headed up the "Nicaraguan" army, a U.S. captain directed the police force, and U.S. Brigadier General Frank McCoy - dubbed by one U.S. newspaper "the Mussolini of Nicaragua" - was in charge of the National Electoral Junta. The elections of 1928 were organized by General Logan Feland, commander of U.S. occupation forces, who had 432 Marines and a dozen U.S. planes on hand to guarantee "security" at the voting tables. 

The year before the elections, President Coolidge requested Colonel Henry L. Stimson visit Nicaragua to see if he could pacify the country behind the puppet Diaz. Stimson spoke no Spanish and regarded Nicaraguans as "like children and unable to maintain the obligations which go with independence." In his view Nicaragua could only escape civil war through revolution, which he discounted, or else "a concentration of practically all the powers of government in presidential dictators," which he regarded as the more reasonable option.

Stimson managed to get all warring Nicaraguan factions to lay down their arms - except Sandino - who he made the mistake of ignoring. Sharing the racist view that whites occupied the top rung on the world's racial ladder, he failed to take the proper measure of his adversary and the people who overwhelmingly supported him. 

"Sandino is a man of the people, and therefore nothing better than a bandit," he said simply.

By 1928, Sandino was big news in the United States. The Washington Herald devoted pages to covering his "outlaw band." With the U.S. suffering high troop losses and the war costing taxpayers millions, the U.S. faced increasing criticism at home. Montana Senator Burton Wheeler suggested that Chicago was a more appropriate location for fighting bandits than Nicaragua was. Another critic wrote that if Washington thought it could establish democratic elections so easily it might try its hand in corrupt Philadelphia. A U.S. businessman complained that U.S. policy "has proved a calamity for the American coffee planters . . . Today we are hated and despised" because the Marines were sent "to hunt down and kill Nicaraguans in their own country."

Four years later Sandino triumphantly entered the capital Managua, causing the U.S. occupation forces to fall back in disarray. On the first day of 1933, the U.S. packed up its ships and planes and left Nicaragua. 

That's what happened when Washington tried to occupy and govern a small republic with virtually no military in the U.S.'s "backyard." What are the chances it can now successfully govern a large West Asian nation of ninety-three million people armed with tens or hundreds of thousands of missiles and drones?

Sources:

Hodgson, The Colonel - The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson 1867-1950 (Knopf, 1990) pps. 108-10, 119, 172; David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side - The United States & Right Wing Dictatorships (University of North Carolina, 1999), pps. 50-55; Walter LaFeber, The American Age, (W. W. Norton, 1989) pps. 246, 342-4 Peter Davis, Where Is Nicaragua?, (Simon and Schuster, 1987) p. 27 Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, vol 3, (Pantheon, 1988) pps. 19, 62, 68-71

 

 

Rape and Mass Hysteria

 "The hysteria that has developed about the abuse of women . . . has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder."

----Noam Chomsky, e-mail to Jeffrey Epstein, February 23, 2019

 

The critique of feminist hysteria below was written by Janice Fiamengo, a retired professor of literature who worked at the University of Ottawa until cancel culture made the career she had eagerly sought and long loved no longer enjoyable. Before she entered academia she was a radical feminist (1990s) and animal rights crusader who dreamed of  heroic "resistance" actions to set tortured animals free. She had a sea change after 911, deeply troubled by the complete lack of sympathy for the American victims she witnessed among her colleagues, many of whom could think only of how to immediately use the tragedy to promote favored political ideologies in the classroom. Since then, Fiamengo has become a full-blown anti-feminist crusader. For over ten years now she has published The Fiamengo File (with Steve Brule), a prolonged but very dispassionate debunking of feminist actions and ideology going back to the very founding of modern feminism in Seneca Falls (1848).

The piece that follows is from 2016, a year after Noam Chomsky became friends with Jeffrey Epstein, so it offers good background for Chomsky's comment (quoted above) about hysteria and sexual abuse. One could certainly quibble with the claim of Clarence Thomas's alleged brilliance or the "generosity" of men in general, but the general thrust of the piece shows considerable insight.

Feminist Mass Hysteria, The Fiamengo File, Episode 42, September 8, 2016

by Janice Fiamengo

Reading news stories about our culture of rape, misogyny, objectification and sexual harassment I often feel that either I am crazy or some significant portion of our society is. Is it possible that feminism is actually a form of mass hysteria? That's my subject on today's Fiamengo File. 

I'm Janice Fiamengo of the University of Ottawa, and welcome to Season 3 of the Fiamengo File, where we'll continue to explore our current bizarre and often horrifying cultural moment, in which the very foundations of our civilization are in peril. This is a time when the National Organization For Women, which bills itself as the largest grassroots women's organization in America can give its woman of courage award to Emma Sulcowicz,* a messed-up young woman who has made rape claims, rape falsehoods, and rape fantasies her life's work. This is a time when thousands of women and men in Canada can claim to know that media personality Jian Ghomeshi, accused of sexual assault, deserved to rot in prison despite irrefutable evidence that his three accusers had lied repeatedly in court and to the police. It's a time when over a million people in the United States signed a petition to recall the supposedly too lenient Stanford rape trial judge in a case about which most commentators knew nothing beside a few inaccurate headlines. It's a time when a wealthy British actress (Souad Faress) can accuse a commuter of sexually assaulting her in a busy London underground station in the split second in which he walked past, not even breaking stride, a literally unimaginable crime, but the police and prosecutors pursued the case to the bitter end. Thank God Mark Pearson was at last acquitted.

Meanwhile, sexual harassment, now a major concern of university and workplace policy has been defined so broadly by the American Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that it can literally include anything a man says or does if the woman claims it made her feel uncomfortable. Surely this is far more than a rational political movement that is occasionally taken too far, as some say. Surely this movement is irrational to its core. Such will be our subject over the next episodes with a special focus on university campuses, because we know that what happens at the university doesn't stay at the university.

Recently, I was re-reading Jessica Valenti's New York Times article titled, "What Does A Lifetime of Leers Do To Us?" And I was trying to figure out, "What is wrong with a woman as successful and influential as Valenti that she views her entire life through a lens of undeserved sexualized suffering? Valenti acknowledges in the article that feminism has made many gains for women, but she rejects the possibility or even the desirability of moving past what sexism has, as she says, done to us. In her opinion, feminists need to dwell a lot longer on the misery of being female.

Valenti claims to be speaking for all women, not just herself, in a characterization that's not at all unusual in contemporary feminism. To be female is to be dehumanized, she asserts. She describes how she used to take the subway to school in Queens, New York, when she was growing up, and was frequently groped and saw men exposing themselves. But it didn't end then, she assures us. It goes on and on, and it's never just one incident or one threatening man, it's a continuous panorama of full-on misogyny, decades of what she calls, "gendered trauma," constantly chipping away at her "sense of safety and sense of self."

Merely to exist as a full human being in such a hateful culture is a perilous struggle. It's typical that none of the experiences that Valenti names, even the explicit ones, can ever be verified. We are simply to accept her word that she was groped at least a dozen times, that her high school teacher tried to date her, that an ex-boyfriend wrote "whore" on her dorm room door, that she is daily threatened with rape on Twitter, and so on. And we are to accept that such are other women's experiences, too. If this is a con job, it's a successful one, for these stories of victimhood leave most critics speechless with discomfort. How dare we question a woman's experience.

Every time I've given a talk at a university, I've been assailed afterwards by university-age girls telling me of the intolerable reality of their trauma, how they can't walk from their front door to the bus stop without being catcalled, their constant exposure to male sexual attention.

Such stories are as predictable as they are, frankly, completely unbelievable. I've looked for it, believe me, and I can't find it. I have never witnessed the behavior described on anything like the scale asserted. I've never had a friend who had to run a gauntlet of male leers. And the account bears no relation to my own experience from the time I was a young girl until now. Walking down the street, riding public transit, attending school, working at various secretarial jobs, I knew there was no generalized sexual threat. If I felt someone looking at me, it didn't feel like a violation. If I was complimented it didn't feel demeaning. Yeah, I was sometimes embarrassed or irritated by certain comments, but I didn't feel diminished in my very soul.

And I hasten to say that I didn't lead a particularly sheltered life. I went to an ordinary public school in a working class area. I hung out for years at a roller skating rink frequented by rebellious kids, and I got into more than my share of trouble and took way too many risks, so I had some bad experiences, as most people do, but none of them determined who I am, in a society where women have never been so free or so protected. So why do so many girls and women feel compelled to tell sad stories like Valenti's and to make that the definitive reality of their lives?

There are a few possible explanations. One, perhaps my experience was unusual. Maybe it just happened that men exempted me and all my friends from their catcalling and their harassment. They took out their sexual aggression on others and always when I was out of range. This is a possibility, but it seems highly unlikely. 

Two, perhaps the women who tell their victim stories are simply exaggerating, overplaying a few minor incidents in order to reap the rewards that come to victims in our culture, all that sympathy. This may account for some of the victim obsession that I've encountered, but it doesn't seem to account for it all. So many of these women, Valenti included, don't seem to be enjoying themselves, despite living lives that, by any measure, are incredibly safe and prosperous, thanks largely to the brilliance and generosity of men, of course. But these women's pain and their anger, especially their anger, they seem too genuine to be a mere conscious exaggeraton.

Which brings me to the third explanation. Which is the possibility that a significant portion of these women, especially those who obsess over their injuries so unrelentingly, are actually experiencing a form of low level hysteria spread across the Western world through social media. I'm not a psychologist, obviously, but it seems that our current preoccupation with all manner of sexual abuse shares some characteristics with other episodes of mass hysteria.

Except that feminist hysteria is longer-lasting and much more diffuse in its effects. Historically, in mass hysteria we see a relatively short-lived collective delusion characterized by anxiety, irrational behavior and beliefs, and by baseless symptoms of illness, as in, for example, Le Roy, New York, where fourteen teenage girls and one boy suddenly began exhibiting Tourette-like symptoms in 2012. Or a 1994 case in a small Illinois town, in which female residents thought they were being poisoned by a gas that caused their throat and lips to burn, though no gas was ever found, and their symptoms went away when they talked to police. Or a case in Martensville, Saskatchewan, in which dozens of children claimed to have been abused in satanic rituals at a day care center, resulting in over a hundred charges made against more than a dozen people, including a number of police officers, all of it ultimately found to be groundless.

Any google search will turn up many fascinating historical examples. Medical doctor Andrew Wilner has put together an overview of episodes of hysteria on a website called Medscape. He makes clear that although much remains unknown about the causes, mass hysteria is a phenomenon in which the power of suggestion is key. Witnessing others, even a single other, can cause the behavior to spread. Now think of Anita Hill's accusations.

In 1991, against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, in which a brilliant lawyer, Thomas, was nearly denied a place on the Supreme Court because a single woman alleged that he had – many years before – spoken of an interest in pornography to her, and said, famously now: “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” This alleged harassment was flat-out difficult to believe, not least because Hill kept in close contact with Thomas for years after the incidents were supposed to have taken place.

But even if true, they were remarkably trivial issues, entirely unworthy to have held the attention of the whole nation  during the confirmation hearings. Yet they did, and the impact of that scandal on North American culture is, I believe, incalculable.

According to a university website reporting on this incident, in the five years that followed Hill's accusation against Thomas sexual harassment cases more than doubled in the United States, from 6,127 in 1991 to 15,342 in 1996. And over that same period awards to victims under federal law nearly quadrupled, from $7.7 million to $27.8 million. Now, feminists would say, of course, that Anita Hill's courage inspired other women, who were previously suffering in silence. Another explanation, of course, would be that the affair inspired women to see what had formerly been understood as innocuous banter, or normal expressions of sexual interest, as intolerable harassment. And this is how it goes. One case leads to many others, all manifesting the same irrational symptoms, the tearful accusations – he touched me, he propositioned me, he said things, I couldn't sleep, I was never comfortable in that office again. I could feel him watching me. He made me so afraid.

As the National Organization of Women knows in giving its award to Emma Sulcowicz, the more alleged victims are celebrated for their supposed courage in dwelling on the alleged abuse, the more other women will be inclined to view their experiences through that lens of sexual trauma, for which they will require a long, long, perhaps lifelong period of healing.

It is surely significant that girls and women are especially vulnerable to mass hysteria. Historical episodes have often included only, or predominantly, female hysterics. Like most hysterics, of course, feminist hysterics are true believers. No matter what evidence is presented to contradict their irrational fear the evidence can't shake their bedrock belief and they experience depressive or anxious behavior such as weeping, trouble getting out of bed, fear of public spaces, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

I've noticed this in news reports of harassment cases, in which the woman reports being unable to get out of bed for months in response to what to any reasonable person would be only the most minor of incidents, such as a university teacher allegedly expressing some kind of sexual or romantic interest. The utter lack of resiliency, the prolonged indulgence in the probing of imagined wounds; it betrays a severely disordered mindset, yet in our time feminist hysteria has gained so many adherents that attempts to point out its irrationality are considered further evidence of the so-called threat. Denial of rape culture is proof of rape culture, and so on.

Just recently, Ms. Magazine, a mainstream women's magazine with millions of readers, tweeted out a claim about the moral equivalence between the actions of ISIS and those of American college administrations. It said, “While ISIS endorses rape, American college administrators similarly facilitate the rape of women on campuses.” That word - “similarly” - is a breathtaking admission of insanity. The suggestion that there is any kind of moral, or any other parallel between a U.S. college administration and a barbaric death cult that uses sexual torture to terrorize whole populations, is crazy, especially given the extent to which college administrations are actually under the thumb of government-mandated feminist policy. But Ms. can make the allegation with no appreciable blowback, and many women will believe that there is an essential truth to the comparison. Even as those women are living lives of unprecedented security.

One of the great unknowns about hysteria is how it is cured. I'm not aware that there has ever been a case where the cure involved validating the delusion. You don't tell a person who's worried about gremlins releasing poisonous gas into their home that the government is going to outlaw such gremlin activity. That just confirms the hysteric in her delusion.

Wilner suggests that the most effective treatment involves separating hysterics from others who have the same symptoms and rationally persuading them out of their delusion. But we're now in a situation where that form of cure is nearly impossible because entire media organizations and government bodies exist to support and affirm feminist delusions about rape culture, patriarchy, and women's oppression. And naysayer voices, no matter how evidence-based, are either drowned-out or completely silenced. Feminist hysterics actually want to change the law, so that it's easier to convict men of sexual assault on a woman's word. They want every school and workplace to have a vast punitive machinery to punish men for anything a woman doesn't like. And generally authorities are inclined to give in to their insane demands. So this is where we are. Don't expect the hysteria to go away any time soon. But don't stay silent while it spreads.

 

*A former Columbia student, also known as "the mattress girl," she "found out" she had been raped long after the sexual contact occurred. See "Dumb Means Dumb: Fighting Rape By Expanding its Definition," Legalienate, October 26, 2017.

Clueless Trump Going Down Bragging

Just short of three weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, western media have started to examine the string of blunders Donald Trump has committed while launching his lunatic venture, carried out without a defined strategy, in total ignorance of his opponent and even of his own available resources, against all geopolitical sense, and from an egocentric posture built on boundless delusion.

All this has become clear from ridiculous and contradictory daily statements, a bad definition of means and ends, and an incompetent decision-making process. Taking in this entire picture, we can safely say that the president will inevitably lead us into further disaster.

It's downright jarring to see a war carried out with an obvious and profound lack of planning on the part of the most powerful military in the world, whose commander-in-chief openly admits he was surprised that Iran decided to defend itself. According to one press account, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine warned the president that Teheran would probably respond with attacks on ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz, a maritime passage between Iran and Oman, through which passes a fifth of world oil and gas exports. Trump replied that the Iranian government would collapse before the Strait could be closed, and if that wasn't the case, the United States would keep it open. When the Revolutionary Guard then closed the Strait, Trump bragged that it would be easy to open it again, then solicited help from allies he had insulted for a year, including China, against which he had launched a trade war eight years ago. 

Once he saw that no one responded to his appeal for help, he went back to bragging that Washington didn't need any help. He later added that the U.S. didn't need any oil from the region either, and announced that he might leave it to those who do to fix the disastrous mess he has made (i.e., open the Strait), unless they want to do without the oil they need to survive.

For the umpteenth time we see the misinformation, irresponsibility, and downright foolishness with which Trump attempts to govern, in this case refusing responsibility for the fire that he himself ignited in the Middle East, one that has already reached disastrous dimensions. 

It's a geopolitical catastrophe, in fact, one that has shown his Arab allies that Washington won't lift a finger to protect them, in spite of the fact that they've ceded the U.S. territory to build naval and air force bases on, while also abruptly threatening the supply of hydrocarbons traditional U.S. allies in Asia and Europe heavily depend on, without offering any advance warning that this was coming. This is also a military debacle because it offers no credible definition of success. It's strengthened rather than weakened the Iranian government and exposed vulnerabilities to an infinitely weaker opponent. Finally, it's an economic calamity that has produced a predictable surge of inflation, with an ever increasing likelihood of exploding into full-blown crisis with each day hostilities are prolonged. 

Above all else, Trump's war on Iran is a disaster on the home front; the costs of the war will send the federal deficit soaring out of control; the American people don't support a new war on the part of a president who campaigned on ending precisely this kind of military idiocy; then also Trump has gifted his political adversaries - as much in the Democratic Party as in Republican ranks  - a winning issue for the mid-term elections in November (assuming there are such), and, to top it off, he's betrayed the yearning of his base for smaller government.

In a nutshell, aside from being a flagrant violation of international law, the invasion of Trump and Netanyahu against Iran could be the political tomb for the reality T.V. star this November, and pave the way for a bitter second half of Trump's term without Congressional complicity. If it turns out that way Trump will have nothing to blame but his own arrogance in hurling himself into a venture as horrible as it was unnecessary.

 

Source: "Iran and the Self-Destruction of Trump," La Jornada, March 18, 2026

Top Trump Counterterrorism Official Resigns In Protest Over Iran War

• Director of National Intelligence
• National Counterterrorism Center
•  

President Trump,

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term. Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealthy and prosperity of our nation.

In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars. You demonstrated this by killing Qasam Solamani and by defeating ISIS.

Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.

As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.

I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for. The time for bold action is now. You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.

It was an honor to serve in your administration and to serve our great nation.

 

Joseph Kent

Director, National Counterterrorism Center

 

Source: "U.S. counterterrorism director Joe Kent resigns over war: 'Iran posed no imminent threat'
March 17, 2026, www.cnbc.com

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

 

 

 

 

 

Trump Gives Netanyahu The Regime Change War He's Wanted For Over Four Decades

"This war is not just about revenge for whatever happened on October 7, which increasingly looks like something that was allowed to happen by the Israelis. This is really about establishing Jewish supremacy (emphasis added) across the entire region . . . .They want to view Israel as a beachhead for power and influence that we can exert. We can use Israel to extend our own power and influence. The Israelis, of course, they see this as an exercise in reciprocity because our military power exists to eliminate, in their minds, anyone who challenges them . . . 

"All of this is bad news over the long haul because it's causing everyone in the Islamic world to recognize, number one, we're all at risk. In other words, all of us are potential opponents, adversaries, enemies of Israel, that could be targeted for destruction. And the United States is now effectively in military terms, diplomatic terms, strategic terms, a vassal of Greater Israel (emphasis added) that we exist to do whatever it is that the Israeli government and people and their advocates at home, principally the Zionist billionaires, want us to do. And capturing control of Congress and the White House financially is a stroke of genius because people rapidly become accustomed, they develop an appetite for money, and what money can do for them. 

"And this Israeli money, we call it Israeli, it's not, it's American money, from Zionist billionaires that support Israel. It's now seen as something that nobody really wants to live without. Because they also know that if you contradict them, in terms of policy towards Israel, there's a very high probability they will not only stop supporting you, they will support whomever your future opponent is. So it's a, it's a very dangerous situation. And I think we have to admit that President Trump would probably not be in the White House today without the substantial financial support of these Zionist billionaires. . .. 

"There's something else that we shouldn't lose sight of. I think the Democrats are also on the same team when it comes to Israel, let there be no mistake about it. But I think everybody in Washington is sort of ignoring what most Americans think or want, because most Americans I don't think are paying a lot of attention to what's happening in the Middle East . . . Americans are not looking at this as something that could become a serious threat to them, their way of life and so forth, and they're wrong (emphasis in original).

"Iran is not just another backward Middle Eastern country that has no chance, whatsoever, of fighting effectively against us. They do. They are certainly not in the same category of military power as we are. They're several rungs below that. But they can defend themselves and they will fight . . . . 

"I think it would be a mistake to assume that after a few days, a week, or two weeks the Iranians are going to hoist the white flag and surrender. I don't think that's going to happen. And so then the question is, 'What happens to us economically?' 

"Because inevitably, this is going to disrupt traffic through the Straits of Hormuz. And that traffic is not only going to disrupt the flow of oil to China, it's going to disrupt the flow of oil to Japan, to Vietnam, to all of the countries in Asia, to people in Europe, even to us. And it's going to send the price of oil through the roof. I would expect the price to rise somewhere north of $100 a barrel. Easily. That's going to have a big impact here at home. 

"We haven't even talked about the fragility of our finance system. You know, we're piling up debt at a horrendous rate. And there's a real danger that - financially we could collapse . . . We could actually face an internal financial crisis far, far, worse than anything we saw in 2008. And this time I would not expect any bailouts."

 

------- Retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, senior adviser (briefly) to President Trump's acting Secretary of Defense in his first term

 

Source: "This War Could Crush America"/Col. Douglas Macgregor. You Tube, February 28, 2026