Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Assassination Nation

We’ve heard these arguments before. Many times before. nnIran poses an existential threat. Iran is a bad actor. The attack on the US embassy in Iraq was an act of war. The general is a singularly bad man. Take him out and we safeguard our nation, the Middle East, and the world.

It’s as if we’ve been transported back to 2002-2003, or even to the Vietnam era, when the focus was on dominoes falling, containment, and the projection of American military might. The enemies have changed, but the rationales — mostly — remain the same, and the damage we are doing to other nations, other nations’ citizens, and our own fragile moral standing has a familiar echo. And so has the bloodlust among the American foreign policy establishment, which reacted to the Jan. 2 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, with familiar zeal.

Soleimani was killed in a targeted rocket attack described by President Donald Trump as justified by the Iranian’s role in the deaths of Americans in the Middle East — or the imminent threat he posed, or a series of shifting rationales that should call the legitimacy of the attack into question. Instead, and as if upon cue, cable and network news drafted the usual suspects — a cadre of retired American generals and security experts — to explain why this was a bold and presidential move by the commander in Chief.

Iran responded with a rocket attack on an American military installation in Iraq — and the inadvertent and deadly downing of a passenger airline, which has led to mass protests in Iran. Tensions remain high, but as of this writing, we have avoided further escalation. But make no mistake, we have entered a new phase in what has been a decades-long war in the region, one that blows hot and cold, but is still a war, nevertheless.

The history of our meddling in Iran dates back nearly 70 years, to when a US-led coup ousted the Prime Minister and democratic reformer Mohammad Mossadegh, which enhanced the power of the Shah. For the next two and a half decades, the Shah engaged in a vicious and aggressive campaign of control, jailing and killing dissidents while remaining a US ally.

Then came the 1979 embassy take over and the Iranian hostage crisis, Iran’s war with a US-backed Iraq, and more than 30 years of tensions between Iran and the West. Those tensions were tamped down some by the Iran Nuclear Deal, but they continued to simmer, thanks to the Republican Party, a slew of hawkish Democrats, and the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s election turned up the flame until those tensions boiled over.

We’re lucky that, as of this writing, both sides have stepped back from the brink of a hot war. But we would be foolish to view this as anything more than a momentary thaw. We remain on the same war footing we have been on since 9/11 — driven by capital and self-interest. It is evident in our acceptance of the national security state, the erosion of civil liberties, the deification of our leaders, and the xenophobia of our politics.

Srećko Horvat, the European philosopher, in an interview with Allie Bown that became the book “Advancing Conversations,” describes what we are living under as a state of constant war — not just in the United States, but across the globe. It is a world war and, while many may describe our circumstances as “just ‘normal’ geo-political conditions” that “have occurred many times throughout history,” they are not. The widespread environmental degradation, the refugee crisis, terrorism, civil war — all of these are driven by our addiction to capitalism, which drives a deadly competition for resources. “(T)hese conditions,” he says, “develop into stasis. Why? Because the war, as a boomerang, returns home – precisely where it started.”

As Horvat says, “no one calls it a Third World War,” but “the refugee crisis, wars, austerity measures, rise of fascism all over Europe, what are all these but symptoms of a permanent war? The symptoms are everywhere, but the war is not declared and probably it is not going to be declared, which makes it particularly difficult to create a kind of resistance movement.”

But resist we must — and not just by having our elected leaders in Congress reassert their war-making authority. And not just by changing the approach in the United States. American imperialism is not the disease, but a symptom of a larger disease that has infected mankind for much of its existence. American imperialism is just a modern form of tribal power struggles, of petty rivalries and battles over influence.

Horvat says our resistance must take an international form. He’s right. The disease is an international one that infects all nations, and the only way to cure the disease is to bring all people together.

No war with Iran can be the short-term goal, but the long-term effort must be an international fight to end all imperialisms, starting with an end to the kind of corporate capitalism that continues to drive our conflicts.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2020

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