“The missile hit during the school’s morning session. In Iran, the school week runs from Saturday to Thursday, so when US and Israeli bombs began falling at around 10:00 am on Saturday, classes were under way. At a point between 10:00 am and 10:45 am, a missile directly hit Shajareh Tayyebeh school, in Minab, southern Iran, demolishing its concrete building and killing dozens of seven to 12-year-old girls.” —The Guardian

War is not an abstraction. It’s living hell... or dying hell. When the United States and Israel (President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) started bombing Iran, I felt the collective human soul begin to vibrate once again, and I began screaming to myself: This is not who we are!

Even though it is.

Our “interests” are what matter, right? Individual human lives are far less important—just read the news. And the larger the death toll, the more abstract those lives get. What isn’t abstract, apparently—what really matters—are the nation’s interests, whatever the hell those are. And interests grow increasingly simplistic as a war goes on, ultimately amounting to winning... not losing.

Every new war reopens an enormous question: How do we evolve beyond this?

I must stand up to this lie and its missiles. I must join the millions—billions?—of others around the globe and stare this lie in its face. We are fully human, not half-human or 10% human or whatever, Mr. President. I am connected to all of humanity, all of life. And so are you. When someone is murdered, part of all of us is murdered.

So I refuse to look at this latest war with abstraction or indifference. As I write, the estimated total of Iranian deaths by US and Israeli bombs is over 1,000 (and the number may well have gone up since I began this sentence). A total of 153 cities across Iran have been damaged by the bombing, according to NBC News, and at this point there have been over 1,000 attacks on the country.

And yes, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the “supreme leader,” has been killed. He was a brutal leader. But his murder does not justify all the others, let alone does it justify the possibility of another US “war without end” and the shattering and slaughter of an entire country.

I return to The Guardian words quoted above, which, as far as I’m concerned, get at the true nature of war. They refer to the US-Israeli bombing of a girls’ school in Minab, a coastal city in southeastern Iran on Saturday morning, just as “Operation Epic Fury” began—and just after school started.

The Guardian story continues:

Photographs and verified videos from the site, which the Guardian has not published due to their graphic nature, show children’s bodies lying partly buried under the debris. In one video, a very small child’s severed arm is pulled from the rubble. Colorful backpacks covered with blood and concrete dust sit among the ruins. One girl wears a green dress with gingham patches on her pockets and the collar, her form partly obscured by a black body bag. Screams can be heard in the background.

One distraught man stands in the ruins of the school, waving textbooks and worksheets as rescuers dig by hand through the debris. "These are the schoolbooks of the children who are under these ruins, under this rubble here," he shouts. "You can see the blood of these children on these books. These are civilians, who are not in the military. This was a school and they came to study."

Iranian state media reported that 168 people were killed in the school’s bombing—mostly young girls, but also teachers and staff. And 95 others were injured. And the hellish nature of this story doesn’t necessarily end here. According to research by Al Jazeera, the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school may have been deliberate, not simply an accident, but there’s no definite proof of this. In any case, whether deliberate or “collateral,” the bombing happened. And it was not an abstraction.

When a new war begins, humanity’s cancer continues. As the Cabinet of the Progressive International put it:

These strikes did not begin today. They are an extension of a longer project to redraw the map of West Asia by force. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, Yemen to Iran, each escalation is a stepping stone in a broader project to suffocate regional sovereignty in the service of US and Israeli interests. Each has left behind shattered states, displaced populations, and the wreckage of societies that dared to assert independence.

Imperialist war does not liberate peoples—it subjugates them.

Every new war reopens an enormous question: How do we evolve beyond this? There will always be conflict—not to mention fear, greed, the complexity of getting along—but I know... and so do many others... that we can scrape and crawl and find our way beyond turning conflict into war. We can and we must. Extinction also looms.

The United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on February 28, propelling the entire region into a predictable cataclysm of unprecedented proportions.

This puts paid to the alleged “peacemaking” project of US President Donald Trump, who was supposed to be keeping the country out of international wars rather than actively seeking to expedite the end of the world.

The attacks put an abrupt end to the negotiations underway between the US and Iran—to the delight of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has always viewed as anathema anything remotely resembling diplomacy or the pursuit of peace.

‘Trigger Iran to Retaliate’

Three days before the joint strikes, a Politico exclusive (2/25/26) reported that “senior advisers” to Trump “would prefer Israel strike Iran before the United States launches an assault on the country.” As per the report, administration officials were “privately arguing that an Israeli attack would trigger Iran to retaliate, helping muster support from American voters for a US strike.”

Nor has much attention been paid to the hundreds of other casualties of the US-Israeli strikes, which is unsurprising given the media’s tendency to humanize Iranians only when they can be portrayed as victims of their own government.

So much for subsequent US-Israeli attempts to cast the assault as “preemptive” in nature. Indeed, there is nothing at all “preemptive” about forcing Iran to retaliate; this is instead what you would call a deliberate provocation.

Unfortunately for the “senior advisers,” Trump and Netanyahu ultimately opted to pull the trigger simultaneously, thus depriving the US administration of its fabricated casus belli.

‘A Clear Explanation of the Strategy’

In the aftermath of the strikes, certain US corporate media outlets unleashed ostensible critiques of the war—having apparently spontaneously forgotten their own fundamental role in paving the warpath by devoting the past several decades to demonizing the Iranian government (or “regime,” as we are required to refer to imperial foes).The New York Times editorial board (2/28/26), for example, immediately penned an intervention titled “Why Have You Started This War, Mr. President?”—the headline of which was later amended to “Trump’s Attack on Iran Is Reckless.”

This is the same New York Times, of course, that has been known to publish such masterpieces as “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran” (3/25/15), a 2015 call to arms by former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

Now, after calling out Trump’s “reckless” attack, the Times editorial board proceeds to undertake its own rationalization of war on Iran—provided it is overseen by “a responsible American president” who takes the time to offer “a clear explanation of the strategy, as well as the justification for attacking now, even though Iran does not appear close to having a nuclear weapon.”

Because Trump could give fuck all about being “responsible,” however, the US newspaper of record assumes the duty of laying out the litany of Iranian transgressions for its readers, such as the killing of “hundreds of US service members in the region”—decisive proof that “Iran’s government presents a distinct threat because it combines this murderous ideology with nuclear ambitions.”

Never mind the hundreds of thousands of regional deaths wrought in recent years by the (already nuclear-equipped) US military, including on account of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which the Times and like-minded media did their best to shove down the throats of the American public.

‘Few Recent Parallels’

Following the weekend’s strikes on Iran, many US media were quick to mention the Iranian government’s response to protests that erupted in December against high inflation. The Washington Post (2/28/26), for instance, specified that the “strikes come in the wake of a violent crackdown by Iran’s security forces… on anti-government demonstrations.”

Citing reports of “more than 7,000 people dead,” the Post went on to lament that “the level of violence against protesters has few recent parallels, human rights groups say.”

Not mentioned in such reports is the key role devastating US sanctions on Iran—a form of lethal violence in themselves—played in fomenting the protests in the first place. Ditto for Israel’s own admitted interference; Mossad’s Farsi-language X account urged Iranians to “go out together into the streets. The time has come.” The Jerusalem Post (12/29/25) reported that the intelligence agency continued: “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”

“Foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed,” Tamir Morag of Israel’s right-wing Channel 14 remarked (Times of Israel, 1/16/26). “Everyone is free to guess who is behind it,” he winked.

But by repeatedly bringing up Iranian state brutality, US corporate media effectively distract from the brutality of the strikes on Iran, which happen to be perpetrated by two states that have zero “parallels” in terms of “levels of violence.” The ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip has officially killed more than 72,000 Palestinians since October 2023, though household surveys indicate the true toll could be substantially higher (Lancet, 2/18/26).

In its own anti-war-but-not-really dispatch, the Times editorial board also took care to reference how Iran “massacred” protesters, as well as the fact that the government “oppresses women”—forever a favorite talking point of the same media outlets that advocated for bombing Afghan women to save them from the Taliban.

Unuseful Victims

It can be safely filed under the “can’t make this shit up” category that among the first casualties of the current war on Iran were the at least 175 people confirmed dead in a missile strike on a girls’ elementary school in the city of Minab.

While the establishment media initially treated this particular atrocity as a brief aside (Washington Post, 12/28/26; Wall Street Journal, 12/28/26)—leaving the job of actual reporting to independent outlets like Middle East Eye (2/28/26) and Drop Site News (2/28/26)—it eventually became unavoidable. As the corpses of young children are of no use to the imperial narrative when they are killed by the US and Israel rather than by Iran, however, the requisite moral condemnation has been in short supply.

Nor has much attention been paid to the hundreds of other casualties of the US-Israeli strikes, which is unsurprising given the media’s tendency to humanize Iranians only when they can be portrayed as victims of their own government. While the death toll made headlines in outlets like Al Jazeera (3/2/26) and Truthout (3/2/26), in major US media like the New York Times (3/2/26) and Washington Post (3/2/26), it was basically a footnote.

Three US troops killed in Iran’s retaliatory strikes, on the other hand, have received considerable airtime, with the Associated Press (3/1/26) noting that these were “the first American casualties in a major offensive that President Donald Trump said could likely lead to more losses in the coming weeks.”

And as the entire region rapidly goes up in flames, it seems those senior US advisers may have gotten their casus belli, after all.

Cynicism, illusions, and imperialist ambitions are accompanying the bombs raining down on Iran in this war between gangster states. Public feuding between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had seemingly brought relations between their two countries to an all-time low over Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. But the differences between them were grossly exaggerated by liberal media. This second and far more intense bombing of Iran, which followed the attacks of June 2025, was planned well in advance. The United States and its regional proxy, Israel, share a common desire to assert the latter’s hegemony over the Middle East.

Why did the bombing of Iran happen now? Yes: Trump wished to deflect attention from the Epstein files, the fascist tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the “affordability crisis,” a host of diplomatic setbacks, and a sinking approval rating that stands at 43%; indeed, Netanyahu’s numbers have fallen to 30%. Both leaders need a win. Attacking the retrograde Iranian regime should appeal to independent voters and Trump’s base. It should do the same for Netanyahu, who will only gain support from the orthodox religious-settlement parties on which his coalition rests. And the risk seemed worth taking: Iran looked weak in light of lingering effects from the June 2025 bombings, the collapse of its national currency, and the massive early 2026 protests that swept the country. All of this made Iran appear weak—just how weak it is remains to be seen.

Geopolitics and crude realism are driving events: Trump and Netanyahu both assume that the strong can act as they wish and that the weak will suffer what they must. Only Iran has been left standing among Israel’s regional rivals: Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco have either tacitly or formally recognized the “Zionist entity.” Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are doing brisk business with it. Syria has been torn apart by the civil war that culminated in the fall of its murderous president, Bashar al-Assad. Iraq is still plagued by the legacy of internal strife following the American invasion of 2001. Lebanon is a mess. As for Palestine, it is plagued by ever-expanding Israeli settlements, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and a crisis of sovereignty. It was not now or never when it came to attacking Israel’s most dangerous enemy, but now seemed a particularly opportune time.

Neither American nor Israeli foreign policy is unique. At different points in history, all “great powers”—England, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia—pursued policies that simultaneously strengthened their regional hegemony, expanded their “living space,” secured their spheres of influence, and used horrific tactics to achieve their aims. The justifications remain roughly the same: the national interest is being served; its security requires proactive measures; the victims will benefit from defeat; and, of course, imperialism is realizing the nation’s “destiny.”

Opportunities exist for progressive forces to act decisively. However, most Democrats remain fixed on formal rather than substantive criticisms.

Not some biblically ordained mission of the Jewish people regarding the conquest of Judea and Samaria, not the non-existent Jewish world conspiracy described in the fabricated “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” not American fears of a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapon, and not the desire to spread democracy, inspired the war. Far better reasons can be found. There are material and psycho-political gains that the United States and Israel would gain with respect to oil (prices), real estate, annexation projects, inflation of group narcissism, and the celebration of an unpopular president for conquering a hated enemy seem too obvious to require further elaboration.

Iran is the most vocal enemy of the United States. Defeating it would nicely complement attempts to reaffirm the United States’ regional hegemony over Latin America and the Caribbean called for by the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and new versions of what was once known as its “manifest destiny.” National security is the lame justification for attacking “narco-terrorist” states, but also for acquiring Greenland, and the desire for more living space, which has led to demands that Canada become the 51st state. The United States is intent on asserting itself as the independent world hegemon that is accountable only to itself. This helps explain its growing separation from Europe and NATO, its withdrawal from international treaties and organizations, and its abandonment of the multilateral approach to crisis situations.

Justifications for the bombing of Iran have shifted from the need to defend the protesters to being “proactive” in the face of an “imminent threat” to the dangers attendant on the regime building a nuclear weapon and its unwillingness to "make a
deal.” But the bombing didn’t take place until the protesters were slaughtered, the CIA itself denied that an attack on the United States was imminent, and President Barack Obama had already sealed a complicated deal with Iran that prevented it from developing a nuclear device for military purposes. Insisting that he could get a better deal, however, President Trump tore up the existing agreement on May 8, 2018.

Of course, that attempt failed. Monitoring Iran became impossible as new opportunities emerged to rekindle its suspended nuclear enterprise. Given American-Israeli views and prejudices about Iran, it mattered little that Iran just recently claimed (as it had while negotiating with Obama) that it was only interested in developing nuclear energy for domestic purposes. Following the bombing of Iran in June 2025 by the United States and Israel, their leaders insisted that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been destroyed. But this was a lie: Its nuclear facilities survived. Trump and Netanyahu are now trying to turn the falsehood into truth.

There should be no misunderstanding: Iran’s theocracy is corrupt, self-righteous, dictatorial, and incompetent in its administration of economic affairs. The country was experiencing a downward economic spiral, and near collapse, when its government cracked down on protesters; its criminal inhumane actions resulted in 10,000 deaths and 50,000 arrests. However, these courageous revolts in the name of democracy are intertwined with the cynical reality that we are experiencing now. The cunning of history is in effect as Trump calls upon Iranians to overthrow their regime now, because they will “never get a better chance,” and thereby heightens the prospect for further reprisals and perhaps even civil war.

What will happen once the regime falls is apparently of secondary concern just as it was before the American invasion of Iraq. Belief that the Iraqi people would celebrate the arrival of American troops was naïve at best and though opposition to its leader, Saddam Hussein, was widespread, internal divisions existed between various tribal-religious militias often with very different political aims. It was the same following the fall of Bashir al-Assad in Syria and any number of uprisings in Africa. Arguably the greatest of all political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, warned that to topple a sovereign without having another ready to step in is a recipe for chaos; it is a lesson that the United States has yet to learn.

The stakes have only grown with the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader the Ayatollah Khamenei and various important officers of the noxious Revolutionary Guard. Unsurprisingly, the announcement of Khamenei’s death was not only greeted by joyful celebrations, but by outbreaks of public mourning. Iran is divided, and the consequences appear ominous. Some members of the Supreme Council, which will choose Khamenei’s successor, have popularly based military followings. Clashing ambitions and other contentious concerns could lead them to turn against one another or, as a religious combine, against a democratic opposition whose leadership and goals remain unclear.

Meanwhile, the war is expanding as Israel sends troops into Lebanon in order to eliminate Hezbollah and Iran strikes the Gulf States and the US embassy in Riyad, Saudi Arabia. There is hardly a state in the region that that has not been subject to missile hits or worse, and President Trump has said that he might employ ground troops, which can only mean invasion. Nor should Iran count on its neighbors for support. Iran is Shiite and Sunni Muslims in other Middle East countries are unlikely to engage in a show of solidarity; indeed, the Arab League has been notably cautious in its response to the crisis. There is also little likelihood that criticisms and condemnations will translate into serious consequences for the aggressors. The regional balance of power is secure, and the religious zealots and xenophobic settlers, whose parties are keeping Netanyahu afloat, are surely happy.

Meanwhile, Iran and its citizenry are already paying an inordinate price for this Western escapade, suffering over 1,000 dead in the first few days of the conflict and devastating attacks on the infrastructure. It is likely to get worse. American and Israeli aims remain unclear; “mission creep” is taking place as the goal shifts from forcing Iran to the negotiating table to assuring “zero” capacity for Iran to build a bomb to regime change to regional reordering. But, then, there is time to decide. The president who once constantly complained about American involvement in foreign wars has stated that citizens should prepare for a long conflict. Hopefully not too long, of course, since Americans tend to celebrate foreign wars when they start, but quickly become impatient when the body bags start coming home—and they will.

Opportunities exist for progressive forces to act decisively. However, most Democrats remain fixed on formal rather than substantive criticisms. They are primarily engaged in legalistic attacks on President Trump for not consulting Congress before declaring war, acting unilaterally, and ignoring the Constitution. That is insufficient. Judgments must be made should Trump’s attack on the Iranian theocracy prove successful—and regarding the new circumstances that this might create. The Democratic Party has not offered its own version of what policies will serve the national interest when it comes to the Middle East. It has not explicitly condemned American imperialism, and it has not punished Israel for its outrageous behavior in Gaza and the West Bank. of Israel. In short, the party has not presented even the rough outlines of an alternative foreign policy. Unless Democrats rise to the occasion, their prospects for changing America’s standing in the world and recapturing its promise are bleak as the midterm elections approach in 2026.

The Trump administration has joined Israel in launching large-scale attacks across Iran. The strikes mark the beginning of “major combat operations,” according to President Donald Trump, and in response Tehran has reportedly launched retaliatory attacks in Middle Eastern countries that host US military bases.

With hundreds of Iranians already killed and the war threatening to spiral out of control, here are five things Americans need to know.

1: Trump says he’s trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But it’s the United States and its allies that are the greatest nuclear threat.

The United States, not Iran, is the country setting the worst example in promoting nuclear weapons in the world today.

It was Trump who pulled out of the US-Iran nuclear deal during his first term—even though the United Nations certified that Iran was in compliance—and resumed harsh sanctions, deployed more troops to the region, and even assassinated an Iranian general.

How could Iran—or any country—now take the US seriously at the negotiating table after Trump blew up the Iran nuclear deal?

Trump’s hostility despite Iran’s earlier compliance only bolsters the claim of Iranian leaders who believe the country needs nuclear weapons as a deterrent against aggression.

Meanwhile, Trump just let the last existing nuclear agreement between the US and Russia, the two countries with the most warheads, expire. Trump is also giving unconditional backing to Israel—the only country in the Middle East that actually has nuclear weapons—and is now supporting the launch of a nuclear program in Saudi Arabia.

2: Trump is contributing to the suffering of ordinary Iranians, not rescuing them.

The Iranian government recently carried out a brutal crackdown on protesters and critics. Trump has claimed that the US is “coming to the rescue” of Iranians who’ve challenged their government.

But in reality, his actions have put countless Iranians in harm’s way. Hundreds of civilians have already been killed in the strikes so far—including 165 in an appalling strike on a girl’s school.

Even before the latest violence, US sanctions had devastated Iran’s population—especially women, children, the sick, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable people—leading to countless preventable deaths.

3: The United States is an unreliable negotiator.

How could Iran—or any country—now take the US seriously at the negotiating table after Trump blew up the Iran nuclear deal?

Attacking Iran is not popular, and Trump definitely does not have a mandate to do it.

Moreover, US demands keep changing. In recent negotiations, the US kept moving the goal posts, going from the demand that Iran not develop nuclear weapons to saying that the country’s civilian nuclear program, its treatment of dissidents, its relationship with regional allies, and its ballistic missile arsenal would all be on the negotiating table.

As Trump put it bizarrely on Fox News, the deal he wants should have “no nuclear weapons, no missiles, no this, no that, all the different things that you want.”

4: The United States has been threatening Iran, not the other way around.

Even before the war, US military bases across the region surrounded Iran with troops and weapons. But there are no Iranian troops or military assets anywhere near the United States.

There is also no question that the most aggressive Middle Eastern power at the moment is Washington’s ally Israel—which continues its genocide in Gaza and attacked six other countries in the last year alone—all enabled through military assistance, arms transfers, and political protection by the United States.

5: Trump’s war with Iran—and his aggressive foreign policy generally—are unpopular with Americans.

The majority of Americans—61%—disapprove of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy in general. And in a recent Reuters poll, just one-quarter said they approved of Trump’s decision to strike Iran—and that was before the announcement that US servicemembers had been killed.

Attacking Iran is not popular, and Trump definitely does not have a mandate to do it. Whatever criticisms one may have of Iran’s government, they do not justify this illegal war.

President Donald Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional war on Iran is not only a moral and humanitarian disaster, but also the latest assault on our way of life. Trump and his enablers count on us to endure their ever escalating egregious abuses of power that imperil our democracy, potentially fatally. We must prove them wrong. We can and must overcome these clear and present threats to our lives, liberty, and way of life.

Our Constitution cannot defend or protect itself. Not when Trump and his administration keep violating their oath to defend and protect it. It’s up to us to do that. We the People must not fail to meet this crisis. We must not let these abuses of power go unchecked. The Congress and the American people must hold Trump and all those complicit in the Trump administration accountable for their escalating attacks on the rule of law.

These intertwined crises require us to act! We must pressure all members of Congress, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, to uphold their oath of office to defend and protect our Constitution. Contact your representative and both of your senators now. Call the US Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121, and ask the operator to connect you directly to the office of your senators and representative.

Ask to speak to the chief of staff or another staffer. Leave a message if they’re not available. Be firm but calm. Identify yourself as their constituent, and tell them:

Trump and his administration have repeatedly broken the law and arrogantly refuse to abide by the limits on the power clearly laid out in the Constitution. The Constitution offers one and only one remedy: impeachment, followed by removal from office. I demand that [official’s name] take immediate action to impeach and remove Trump and all complicit Administration officials.

We must do much more than that, however. Contacting Congress is necessary but not sufficient. While the House may vote to impeach Trump for a third time, the Constitution requires two-thirds of the Senate to vote to convict and remove Trump and complicit officials. This is highly unlikely, at least for now. We have to change the arithmetic through concerted, decisive action.

Several Republicans must put our republic above partisanship. For that to happen, we must relentlessly demand action. Every American who cares about our constitutional democratic republic must pressure their senators and representative by phone, email, social media, and in‑person visits.

We must demand that Congress impeach Trump again, but this time also vote to remove Trump and all complicit administration officials from power. We must do this, even though we have little confidence that enough Senate Republicans will act honorably. We must make them do so, or else replace them with people who will. That means getting active in the primary elections, already underway.

Support independent media like Common Dreams. Volunteer with Progressive Democrats of America to help lead on the effort to replace feckless politicians with strong leaders.

To increase pressure on the current Congress, organizations and individuals across the country must initiate and maintain ongoing nonviolent protests and civil disobedience.

Act now! Contact everyone who will listen. Work with decision-makers and members of any organization you know and persuade them to join the struggle.

Start or join boycotts targeting Trump-friendly corporations. Delay purchase of any non‑essential goods and services. Organize walk outs, sick outs, and other intentional non-participation. Urge everyone you know to do the same.

We need mass participation by individuals amplified by unions, as well as civic, religious, labor, social, and other organizations. We the People must stand up now in concerted, courageous, continuous opposition to oppression and tyranny. Nothing less will ensure the survival of our constitutional republic.

On International Working Women’s Day in 2025, Cilia Flores, the wife of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, read a poem she wrote highlighting the historic role played by Latin American women in the fight against imperialism:

We’re not flowers the wind can pluck,
we’re roots of rebel and loyal land,
we’re grandmothers, mothers, daughters, granddaughters;
we are woman.
Our blood pulses with the Manuelas,
Luisas, Josefas, Juanas, Cecilias,
Apacuanas, Bartolinas, Eulalias,
Martas, Anas Marías, Barbaritas
and so many others who legacy inspires,
commits, and strengthens us
to continue walking and traveling our path.
And in our hands and chests
a light is on that nobody will ever turn off:
love, peace and liberty.
—Cilia Flores, International Working Women’s Day 2025

One year later, she languishes in a cell in New York City, having been dragged out of her room and kidnapped by US forces on the January 3 attack on Venezuela. The first images after her abduction showed her face bruised. We later learned she had broken ribs, 23 stitches in her forehead, and deteriorating health inside US custody.

Flores is no ordinary first lady. She first rose to prominence in 1992 as a defense lawyer for a group of Venezuelan military officers who rose up against the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, which had massacred thousands of people in the Caracazo of 1989–nationwide riots following the imposition of neoliberal austerity measures. Key among those officers was Hugo Chávez, the founder of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Out of solidarity with Cilia, with Venezuelan women in general, we must make it our cause to fight for her freedom.

In 1993, Cilia founded the Bolivarian Circle of Human Rights and aligned herself with Chávez’s revolutionary movement. In 2000, having helped Chávez win consecutive presidential elections, she was elected to the legislature. By 2006, she became the president of the National Assembly, the first woman in Venezuela’s history to occupy the post. Flores held important positions in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and became the country’s solicitor general in 2012, a post she left to run Nicolás Maduro’s presidential campaign after President Chávez’s passing.

Cilia married Nicolás, her longtime partner, following the election. Feeling that the title of “first lady” could not capture her importance to the Bolivarian Revolution, her husband dubbed her the primera combatiente, or first combatant.

After working behind the scenes as a key adviser to President Maduro, she ran for election to the National Assembly and won in 2015, 2020, and 2025.

Today, she faces charges of conspiracy to import cocaine, along with possession of machine guns and destructive devices. The charges are absurd.

In the early 1990s, back when Venezuela was a key ally of the United States, over 50% of the world’s cocaine was trafficked through the country. By 2025, as Venezuela was considered an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States, that number was down to 5%. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric of Venezuela flooding the US with cocaine, and his constant conflation of cocaine with fentanyl (which is neither trafficked through nor produced in Venezuela), has no basis in reality.

Now that the Trump administration controls Venezuela’s oil trade, the rhetoric on drugs has flipped. Following a visit to Venezuela, the head of US Southern Command touted a new counternarcotics cooperation agreement. Was the abduction of Nicolás and Cilia sufficient to end whatever alleged narcotics operation the Venezuelan government was accused of running? It’s more likely that such operations never existed in the first place. The allegations of drug trafficking served not only to discredit the Venezuelan government and its leaders but also paved the way for the January 3 attack.

Cilia Flores is one of the most prominent political prisoners in the world, yet most women’s rights organizations have not said a word in her defense. She is a sitting member of Venezuela’s National Assembly and played an instrumental role in the movement that greatly expanded democratic, economic, and social rights in the country.

Cilia stands with Palestine. In a November 2023 conference in Turkey, she said: “We are witnessing a genocide… We see the victims in Gaza. We see the death of children, women, the elderly, and civilians. We see civilian victims coming out of their destroyed homes, but unable to leave the city because they are in an open-air prison.”

Cilia brought feminism to the Bolivarian Revolution. On International Working Women’s Day in 2023, she helped launch a social mission aimed at protecting women from the worst of the economic war. At the time, she said: “Venezuelan women have shown they are the vanguard. Women make up more than half the population, but we are also mothers of the other half, so we form a whole. And in this war that Venezuela has endured, we achieved victory and are standing firm thanks to the participation of Venezuelan women, who did not just stay home taking care of children, building their families, but also took to the streets to defend the nation. Our women are patriots... and in the next scenario, whatever it may be, we will be victorious because women will be at the forefront of any battle."

Little did she know that the next scenario would be a prison cell in the United States. Out of solidarity with Cilia, with Venezuelan women in general, we must make it our cause to fight for her freedom.

Recalling her beautiful poem above, today our blood pulses with Cilia.

On February 22, 2026, Mexican special forces in Tapalpa, Jalisco, authorized by left-wing President Claudia Sheinbaum and acting on intelligence from the US military, killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, Nom de Guerre “El Mencho,” the 59-year-old leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the most-wanted man in Mexico.

Within hours, the cartel put up roadblocks, arson attacks, and running gun battles across a dozen states, ravaging Tapalpa and other cities. By the time the violence subsided, over 70 people were dead, including 25 Mexican National Guard troops. The entire country is holding its breath as it prepares to enter a new phase of its decades-long Drug War.

Does decapitating a cartel end the Drug War?

The operation was also the culmination of a strategy that Claudia Sheinbaum's predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had promised to abandon, namely, the militarized war on drugs that since 2006 has left between 350,000 and 400,000 Mexicans dead and more than 130,000 disappeared. Instead, while making some initial welcome gestures, he militarized the Southern Border, created the National Guard, and continued the War on Drugs.

Removing El Mencho may weaken CJNG in the short term. But it could also ignite the next phase of Mexico’s drug war, one that extends far beyond the country’s borders and deeper into the Western Hemisphere.

The Mexican drug war has never been Mexico's responsibility alone. It is the product of an insatiable American thirst for drugs that has only intensified with the opioid crisis, as fentanyl has flooded US streets, claiming tens of thousands of lives annually, with support from Big Pharma. The United States remains the world’s largest consumer market for narcotics; American demand generates billions of dollars annually for trafficking organizations.

Mexican cartels such as the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel now supply fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin to a US market whose demand keeps increasing, according to new reporting.

American guns are also at the center of this crisis. There are exactly two legal gun stores in all of Mexico, operating under strict military supervision. Across the border, in the four US border states, there are more than 9,000 legal gun sale points.

An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 guns are trafficked from the United States into Mexico each year. Roughly 70% originate north of the border. These include .50-caliber rifles capable of piercing armored vehicles and downing helicopters; many of them were from the American military. A new raid on a CNJG ammo depot revealed that 47% of the ammunition came directly from one US Army plant in Kansas City. That very same ammo was used to kill 13 police officers in Michoacán in 2019.

The CJNG now dominates 23 out of Mexico’s 32 states, with operations stretching from the Pacific Coast all the way to the Northern border. The cartel's estimated worth exceeds $20 billion, drawn not only from drugs but from a diversified portfolio of extortion, petroleum theft, human trafficking, and kidnapping.

It has used extreme force and military-level tactical planning against its rivals, including the state itself. In 2015, it shot down a Mexican military helicopter in Jalisco. It has assassinated mayors, attacked police convoys with improvised armored vehicles, and used drones and explosives against state security forces.

Internally, polls suggest support for the operation is between 80 and 90%. After years of feeling helpless before cartel violence, many Mexicans welcome any action that produces “results.” With this, we see the rise of “penal populism” across Latin America, where electorates increasingly embrace tough-on-crime approaches, even when those approaches destroy democracy and human rights.

The high popularity of El Salvador's right-wing dictator Nayib Bukele, whose approval ratings have hovered around 90%, testifies to the political appeal of iron-fist tactics, regardless of their clear governance costs. Bukele's mass incarceration model, where tens of thousands have been jailed without due process in inhumane conditions where torture is common, has become a model that politicians across the region now invoke, including in Honduras, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Peru.

That comes despite his success being predicated on secret deals with gangs, not on a War on Drugs—most countries that have tried his militarized tactics have suffered increases in the violent crime and homicide rates, at the same time as their economies have become increasingly unequal and democratic societies have cratered.

Externally, President Donald Trump has made clear his view that “cartels are runnning Mexico” and that Sheinbaum and other Latin American leaders should go to war with them, otherwise he will do it for them. His administration has designated Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and considered military intervention in Mexico. A US intervention would be disastrous for both Mexico and Sheinbaum, so the El Mencho operation is the price they settled on.

To add insult to injury, this summer, Mexico will host numerous World Cup matches, including four in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco state. The Sheinbaum government is trying to give the allure of tightening security ahead of the games.

She has modeled aspects of her approach on Brazil. Before the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, Rio de Janeiro launched aggressive “pacification” campaigns in favelas, military occupations that temporarily suppressed violence but failed to address its roots while killing high rates of civilians and eroding civil liberties. The War on Drugs has not stopped there, either. We have to wait and see if Mexico follows this tragic pattern.

Across Latin America, the right has successfully framed security as a question of toughness versus weakness, where, as Bukele would put it, “All the gangs know is violence,” and thus must be met with violence. This framing leaves progressive governments perpetually on the defensive, forced to prove their bravado by adopting policies that at the very least, in theory, fly in the face of leftist principles.

The left's consistent (and successful) approach, emphasizing socioeconomic development, public health interventions, drug decriminalization, negotiation, and targeted intelligence rather than mass militarization, has struggled to gain traction in a climate driven by right-wing narratives and fearmongering.

The fundamental problem is that leftist programs take years to bear actual results, while voters demand immediate security. The right, meanwhile, offers quick and strong-handed solutions that reassure voters. It is harder to kill monsters with microloan programs and harm reduction clinics than with tanks and M-16s.

When Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched his war on drugs in 2006, he targeted the Gulf Cartel and its armed wing, Los Zetas. The kingpin strategy eliminates cartel leaders, but each decapitation meant groups splintered, and each splintering produced more violence, creating an endless loop of violence until neoliberal President Enrique Peña Nieto was able to sign pacts with certain gangs before resuming the military approach.

During this period, the number of major cartels grew from about half a dozen to more than 200, operating across the country and the entire world. The homicide rate tripled, while many border cities have homicide rates well over 100 per 100,000. Now, hundreds of thousands are dead as a direct result.

Mexico finds itself once again at this crossroads, where it must choose wisely. El Mencho’s bras droit, “El Tuli,” was killed in a clash with security forces hours after. But, the pattern suggests that new leaders will emerge, and the violence will continue. Cartels are resilient, and can adapt to new leadership, new business structures, and market forces very reactively. Taking out one leader, or even the drug trade, won’t put them out of business.

Left-wing governments have struggled to respond without appearing weak. Some voices, particularly those outside of direct political power like academics, human rights advocates, and a few leftist intellectuals, have pointed out the dangers of returning to kingpin strategies, the inevitability of retaliation, and the way military operations invariably claim civilian lives.

So far, however, the Sheinbaum coalition and the left in Mexico have, for the most part, supported the operation, praying that embracing these shows of force can help the left reclaim dominance over the security debate. But, ceding ground to the right on security might risk alienating the rest of the left; shifting the Overton window to the right; and making politics, rather than policy solutions, determine the direction of Mexico’s Drug War.

Sheinbaum’s operation thus creates a profound paradox.

On one hand, demonstrating the ability to confront organized crime may help counter the narrative that progressive governments are soft on violence. On the other, history suggests that decapitation strategies rarely defeat cartels.

Removing El Mencho may weaken CJNG in the short term. But it could also ignite the next phase of Mexico’s drug war, one that extends far beyond the country’s borders and deeper into the Western Hemisphere.

Can you win the politics of security without reproducing the failures of the war on drugs? It may buy Sheinbaum and the left time to continue expanding the welfare state, strengthening institutions, and foolproof Mexican democracy, but it may also open the door for further weaponization of security to destroy that very progress later on.

The better alternative may be to instead embrace a true leftist, principled defense of nonviolent solutions, or, to theoretically and politically justify a security progressivism. Such will be the test of the Latin American left in the wake of rising right-wing populism on the back of security fears.

What follows is the foreword to a new collection of unpublished writings by Daniel Ellsberg, titled "Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope" (Bloomsbury: March 2026), written by his eldest son, Robert Ellsberg.

The introduction of the book, now available, is written by Michael Ellsberg, Daniel's youngest son, who co-edited the collection along with Jan Thomas.

My chosen epitaph: “He helped to end the Vietnam War, and he struggled to prevent nuclear weapons from being exploded ever again.” —Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023)

My father was a complicated man. On the one hand, he had an acute appreciation for beauty in all its forms: music, poetry, the sound of the ocean, the colors of the sunset visible from his dining room in Kensington. After his death I found a closet piled high with packets of photographs—almost all of them closeup shots of flowers. He kept a frequently updated anthology consisting of photocopies of his favorite poems, many of which he had memorized and remained capable of reciting even in his last months.

All of this was in contrast with his long-standing preoccupation with the darkest moments of history, and the potential for greater tragedies to come. The bookshelves that surrounded his downstairs office were sorted according to labels such as Torture; Bombing Civilians; Nuclear First Strike; Terrorism; Lies; Genocide; and finally, Catastrophe. As he noted in one of his last interviews in the New York Times, he spent so much of his life thinking about these things not because he found them fascinating, but because he wished to make them literally unthinkable. In his efforts to alert the world to the danger of nuclear annihilation, he engaged in action (including almost a hundred acts of civil disobedience), gave countless speeches and interviews, and wrote an extraordinary memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Yet by the end of his life, acknowledging the lack of progress in achieving his goals, he expressed regret that he hadn’t done more.

All the while, it could be said that a major part of his life was spent thinking—trying to understand and unravel the mysteries of the human condition and to devise ways of thinking that might turn the tide of history. He could sit for hours, occasionally scribbling his almost illegible notes onto a yellow pad, otherwise staring into his own private abyss.

Many of his central concerns are reflected in the writings compiled in this volume. They show that he was not just concerned with the political or strategic aspects of war and nuclear planning—problems that could be fixed with a change in leadership or better policies. These threats to human survival were rooted in certain deep-seated problems with humanity itself. Some of these pertained to human nature in general: our willingness, almost unique in the animal world, to kill members of our own species. Then there was the tendency to derive our identity from our membership in a group, which set limits on our capacity for empathy with outsiders, those considered the “others.”

We are a very flawed species, dangerously so. We are dangerous to ourselves in the short and long run and we are the enemy that threatens the long-run survival of most other species. Seeing humanity’s flaws, depression sets in. I am ashamed of my species, and I am sad for us and other species.

But other problems were more specific to the nature of rational, bureaucratized organizations in which individuals were encouraged to subordinate individual ethics (“which deal largely with obligations toward and concerns for others than oneself”) to the ethics of the organization, defined in terms of obedience to authority, or loyalty to the boss or the “team.” This tendency was compounded by the compartmentalization that made it easier for bureaucrats to deny their sense of personal responsibility for the outcome or consequences of official policy.

In the years following the end of his trial in 1973 for his part in copying and revealing the Pentagon Papers, he engaged in a wide-ranging study of these problems. He considered the example of Nazi Germany, examining the various forms of complicity, whether on the part of the masses, on the part of soldiers and officers who executed immoral policies, or on the part of officials. Among these was Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, who alone among the Nuremberg defendants pleaded guilty, even for things in which he had not been directly involved.

As Speer explained: “For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences—from the very beginning.” This view resonated with my father’s experience of what he called the “moral stupidity” shared by many organization men, motivated by the desire not only to keep one’s job but “to keep one’s status, one’s self-image (as a good person, as tough/manly, autonomous, obedient, loyal), and the good opinion of teammates, bosses, sponsors, constituents, and allies.”

In a lecture in May 1971 titled “The Responsibility of Officials in a Criminal War,” he had copied a quote from Speer in which he found a damning indictment of his own early culpability with regard to Vietnam War policy:

If I was isolated, I determined the degree of my own isolation. If I was ignorant, I ensured my own ignorance. If I did not see, it was because I did not want to see. . . . It is surprisingly easy to blind your moral eyes. I was like a man following a trail of bloodstained footprints through the snow without realizing someone has been injured.

My father spent many years reflecting on the work of the psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose controversial experiments at Yale were recounted in his book Obedience to Authority. Milgram had devised an experiment in which unsuspecting subjects were assigned the role of conducting a test of memory. This test involved the testers’ obligation to punish wrong answers by applying shocks of increasing voltage to a supposed “learner” (actually an actor in a separate room). The subjects were instructed by the “scientist” to continue with the test, even when, disturbed by the “learners’” protests and cries of pain, they wondered whether they should continue. They were told that it was necessary to complete the test and assured that while the shocks were “painful,” they caused no “permanent tissue damage.” Non-answers were to be treated as false answers, and many subjects continued to apply the shocks even when the “learner” fell silent. The disturbing revelation of the experiment was how compliant the subjects were in obeying authority, even when doing so caused them personal stress (the reason that such an experiment was later deemed unethical).

The mechanisms of this obedience, and what lessons it might offer about how to break the spell and induce disobedience or dissent, was for my father a topic of deep interest and importance. In his copy of Obedience to Authority, he heavily underlined one of the permutations in the experiment in which the “subject” was exposed to the example of a fellow “subject” (in fact, another actor) who said, “This is crazy! I refuse to continue.” Milgram learned that in cases where subjects were exposed to an example of conscientious disobedience, they were able to awaken from their hypnotic captivity to authority.

What would save us, he believed, might require some wholesale evolution of human consciousness. Did we have time to achieve this?

He examined lessons from anthropology, history, and psychology. He studied the example of dissidents and those who acted on the basis of conscience, who took responsibility to act even at great personal risk. To understand these dynamics, he believed, was not just a matter of intellectual interest. The answers could make all the difference in ensuring a future for humanity.

And as his notes make clear, these reflections on averting catastrophe had deep personal roots. He noted, “When I was fifteen, I experienced a catastrophe.” The story of “the Accident” that took the life of his mother and younger sister is described in detail in the opening section of this book. There he confined himself to recounting the story from various angles, without reflecting on the ways it may have affected his life—his own sense of survivor’s guilt, his capacity for risk taking, even his vocation as a whistleblower. But the ease, in his notes, with which he intersperses reflections on this story with his more wide-ranging reflections on authority, obedience, culpability in the face of disaster, and the responsibility to raise an alarm (“to tell truths that might save lives”) shows that the connections were a matter of conscious reflection.

Over and over, he continued to deconstruct the events and their meaning. Was his father to blame for falling asleep at the wheel? Was his mother to blame for forcing him to keep an appointment she had made to attend a birthday party for her brother in Denver? Was he in part to blame on account of his impending decision to abandon his assigned destiny as a concert pianist?

He could draw the parallel between his own fear of losing a mother’s love and the organizational or group conscience that made it unthinkable for so many officials to become whistleblowers: to be seen by their colleagues as disloyal, apostates, violators of trust, unworthy of being considered an insider. This parallel led him constantly to reflect on his own example. What had allowed him, in particular, to break free? To defect? To cease the desire to be the president’s man? To raise the alarm that someone you trusted, a figure of authority, might be asleep at the wheel?

Many of the flaws in humanity have been evident throughout history, from biblical narratives of holy war to the Iliad to the mad destructiveness of World War I and the many examples of genocide, of which the Holocaust stood out not just by its scale but by the application of mechanized, industrial methods of execution. And yet with the splitting of the atom, humanity had entered a fantastically more perilous stage of history—conceivably the Final Solution to the human problem. Flawed humanity had suddenly become equipped with the technology and scientific knowledge to threaten its own survival.

Einstein observed, in a famous sentence, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” To this my father notes: “What change was Einstein calling for? We need to use our human capacity for change on our own propensities—specifically, our readiness to gamble with catastrophe. We need to change what it means to be human.”

The extensive reflection on “what it means to be human” is one of the more surprising themes among these selected thoughts, or pensées, to borrow the title of Blaise Pascal’s famous work. The allusion to Pascal is not casual. The seventeenth-century French scientist and Christian apologist left his most important work in the form of aphoristic notes and fragments for a grand project of Christian apologetics. This project began with his own characterization of the human condition: “Boredom, inconstancy, anxiety.”

Yet for my father, the question of what it means to be human was not oriented, as it was for Pascal, toward the prospect of individual salvation, but toward the survival of all humans and other earthly creatures. What would save us, he believed, might require some wholesale evolution of human consciousness. Did we have time to achieve this? We were like the crew of the Titanic, steaming forward at full speed in fields of ice, racing toward a rendezvous with disaster. Was it already too late? Or was there still time for a mutiny?

The exposure to people who represented a different philosophy of life—based on the power of truth, the priority of life, compassion for others, and willingness to endure sacrifice and suffering in the service of what is right—brought him to a completely new understanding of his life and its purpose.

Reflecting on his own experience, he pondered the factors that had prompted his own awakening to a sense of loyalty and responsibility to something higher than obedience to executive authority—or to a community larger than the organization, the administration, the brotherhood of insiders. What were the steps that tracked this journey?

My father began his career in the late 1950s as a defense analyst for the RAND Corporation, granted access to the most highly classified secrets of our nuclear war planning. His concern was never about fighting a nuclear war, but about preventing it—especially by means of deterrence and an effective system of command and control. He believed this work to be of the highest importance; he was trying to save the world. Yet what he came to recognize was that these plans were characterized, on the one hand, by a fantastic degree of murderousness, far exceeding anything ever imagined, and on the other, at the same time, by an incredible degree of make-believe and fantasy. Together, these two qualities represented a kind of madness, depicted accurately in the film Dr. Strangelove. It was a madness, he later realized, not inconsistent with extreme intelligence and rational capability.

An important turning point came in 1961 when he was presented by the Pentagon with a graph indicating the estimated casualties that would result from executing the existing plan for general nuclear war. This plan called for destroying every city in Russia and China with a population over a hundred thousand. The predicted loss of life from blast and radiation (the latter covering large portions of adjacent allied countries) was six hundred million. (In light of later calculations about the risk of nuclear winter, he realized that even this estimate was a vast understatement.) Of the piece of paper that contained this estimate, he said that it “depicted evil beyond any human project ever.”

That the word “evil” came to his mind was perhaps evidence enough that he was not suited for this line of work. And yet it meant that the execution of evil plans did not require, as many people would suppose, monsters, highly aberrant or “clinically disturbed” people—“people not like us,” as he put it. It could be carried out by intelligent, ordinary family men like his colleagues at RAND, who were neither better nor worse than anyone else. It spoke to Hannah Arendt’s reference to the “banality of evil,” or as he would say, “the banality of evildoing and most evildoers.” From that point, he had one overriding life purpose: to prevent the execution of this plan. He continued to maintain his security clearances and insider status, believing he could best achieve his purpose from within.

His two years in Vietnam (1965–67) as part of an interagency task force to study and offer advice on the war launched the evolution of his own consciousness. The first stage was his exposure to the human reality of the war. The people of Vietnam, he would say, “came to be as real to me as my own hands.” He returned from Vietnam committed to helping our country extricate itself from this futile and mistaken policy.

But then came the experience of reading the Pentagon Papers, a secret history going back to America’s support for the French effort following World War II to recapture its colonies in Indochina. His new understanding of this history changed his entire perspective. Everything the United States had done in Vietnam was an extension of that initial effort by the French—to impose, by force, a regime of our liking on the people of Vietnam.

“Is this right?”—not “Is this mistaken or futile?”—became his predominant question. It was a question he had never heard from his colleagues. Nor was it documented in the Pentagon Papers, in which moral and ethical questions were never raised. “The only questions asked were: Will this work? Is it expedient? Is it worth the risk? Will we get away with it?”

To have continued this war, year after year, for reasons of state, against the wishes of the people we were supposedly defending, was not a mistake but a crime—a crime that had to be resisted. But how? That question was answered in August 1969 when he attended a gathering of war resisters in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where he encountered people who operated from a completely different set of values. Many of them were inspired by the principles of Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of them was a young man named Randy Kehler, who mentioned in his speech that he would soon be going to prison for refusing to cooperate with the draft. It is impossible to overstate the impact of this encounter on my father. After fleeing the conference room and sobbing for a long time, he asked himself, “What could I do to end this war if I were willing to go to prison?” That question, like the Accident, divided his life in two—a before, and an after.

The exposure to people who represented a different philosophy of life—based on the power of truth, the priority of life, compassion for others, and willingness to endure sacrifice and suffering in the service of what is right—brought him to a completely new understanding of his life and its purpose. And though he continued until his death to deal in political considerations, weighing strategy and tactics that might reduce the risk of nuclear war, his underlying preoccupations centered on moral, and, for want of a better word, “spiritual,” considerations.

He realized that the fate of the earth, threatened by nuclear weapons, made it urgent that we recover our capacity to think in these terms:

What is missing . . . in the typical discussion and analysis of historical or current nuclear policies is the recognition that what is being discussed is dizzyingly insane and immoral: in its almost incalculable and inconceivable destructiveness and deliberate murderousness, its disproportionality of risked and planned destructiveness to either declared or unacknowledged objectives, the infeasibility of its secretly pursued aims . . . its criminality (to a degree that explodes ordinary visions of law, justice, crime), its lack of wisdom or compassion, its sinfulness and evil. (The Doomsday Machine, 348)

He was aware that to speak this way entailed the risk of being dismissed as a fanatic, an extremist, lacking in “objectivity.” And yet, if we are truly to step back from the brink of catastrophe, we must confront the true moral dimension of our problem. By what right—for what reasons of national security or “defense”—could one person or one country presume to gamble with the fate of the world?

He did find himself pondering his vocation, often referring to the mythical seer Cassandra (“a crier in the wilderness”), who was blessed by the gods with the power of seeing the future, yet cursed in that nobody would believe her. In releasing the Pentagon Papers, he had believed that he was perhaps “Cassandra with documents”—that is, armed with the receipts that would justify his warnings that past patterns of lies and escalation were being repeated by the Nixon administration. But his documents, which ended with the Johnson administration, couldn’t prove it. They justified people’s opposition to the war, but most people believed that Nixon was committed to getting the United States out of Vietnam. Seventeen months after the release of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon was reelected in a landslide.

Daniel Ellsberg. (Photo: Courtesy of Robert Ellsberg)

Like Cassandra, my father characterized himself as a “‘doomsayer’ (not to be believed, to be thought mad, extreme).” This characterization applied even more to his warnings about nuclear doomsday. But “as for me,” he added, “I want to change the future—not only foresee and warn.” To do that, he sought to “protest, reveal, risk for others, seek understanding, prevent danger, evaluate risks, avert evil, and teach by word and example.”

Perhaps, he said, the right word for this role was “prophet.” Most people think of prophets as those who are able to foresee the future. Yet the biblical prophets were not fortune-tellers. They were so attuned to the underlying spiritual and moral pathologies of their time that they could soundly anticipate the disaster that was sure to follow. They too wanted to “change the future.” Through their warning they hoped to effect moral and spiritual conversion. They hoped that the people might “choose life,” opt for justice, and restore right relations rather than drift blindly toward destruction.

In words that might have been uttered by Jeremiah, my father noted:

I am living in a society that is preparing a catastrophe.
I taste ashes in the wind.

Unlike the biblical prophets, he did not believe in a personal God. His parents were ardent converts to Christian Science, a faith he himself had been quick to abandon. This rejection extended to an aversion to organized religion in general. Yet at times he seemed to tap into a deeper spiritual spring:

I am seeking wisdom, enlightenment. I am studying, meditating, seeking teachers, looking for explanations and examples of human societies.

And elsewhere:

Can we divest mysticism from its ties to mainstream religion, especially religious beliefs and doctrines? I don’t believe in a God that listens to us, responds to us or protects us (as in war). One can, however, for calm and reassurance, profitably consult with and attune to spiritual energies such as Love, Beauty, Consciousness, and Unity.

The word “conversion” (which in its root means turning around, going in a different direction) appears a number of times, sometimes in personal terms:

What happened to me? I was at the height of my—and RAND’s—influence and prestige. I had the equivalent of a religious conversion: I was “Born Again.”

But in confronting the dangers of our time, he also suggested that what was needed was not just new policies or a revision of our war plans, but a social conversion in the form of moral “evolution.” He did not despair of this possibility. One time, while participating in a protest, he found himself grouped with a cohort of “people of faith.” One of them asked him, “Are you a person of faith?” “No,” he answered, but I am a person of hope.”

I thought of that line during his last months, as I was writing the introduction to a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of a book I had written on saints, prophets, and witnesses for our time. In my introduction I credited his example with leading me to my own calling, remembering and sharing the stories of those throughout history who offered a heroic example of faith, hope, and love in action.

I cited his identity as a person of hope, and noted that in that spirit he had dedicated his life to preserving the planet from the perils of nuclear war. His hope was not an expectation that all would turn out well, but a form of action. I quoted him: “I choose to act as if we had a choice to change the world for the better and avoid catastrophe.”

At the time, he was dying of pancreatic cancer, and I knew he wouldn’t live to see my words in print. But I did have the opportunity to read my introduction aloud to him. He listened intently. I had hoped he would be pleased to hear how his example had played such a role in my own vocation. But he wasn’t. He frowned and said, “I don’t want you to say that.” Was he disturbed by a reminder of my Catholic faith, which he tended to regard as a form of personal rebellion? Or was he made uncomfortable by the implication that he was some kind of saint?

In that light, it was interesting to me, in reading this collection of his notes, to find a surprising reference to my book, and a “lesson” he evidently drew from it:

The lesson of Robert’s book, All Saints, is that these people’s life stories, their examples of sanctity, are healthy to contemplate now, in the late 20th century. These were whole lives of change, not just moments or isolated acts.

Many of the saints were not perfect; they were not irreproachable in all aspects, all the time, all their lives. Doesn’t that make their lives all the more exemplary and inspiring for us?

That was my dad. He knew that he was not irreproachable “in all aspects, all the time,” all his life. But the survival of the world could not wait for irreproachable people. It would require many people of compassion and hope who could recognize the dangers facing our planet and were prepared, as Camus put it, “to speak out clearly and pay up personally.” It would require a kind of awakening to the moral and ethical dimensions of our crisis.

He had hope that such awakening could occur. This hope was not the same as naïve optimism. He reckoned realistically on the low odds. But low odds were not zero odds. He retained hope that catastrophe could be avoided. The basis for that hope came in part from the example of certain historical “miracles.” Among these miracles, he noted the fall of the Berlin Wall without a shot being fired and the peaceful collapse of apartheid in South Africa—both seemingly impossible, until they happened. It was that sense of hope in the face of seemingly hopeless odds that kept him going.

I fear there’s not enough time and it’s too late to achieve enough change in enough people. But I’m not going to give up.

If we go down, we’ll go down fighting, helping each other.

His own experience had shown that you should never discount the potential for unexpected consequences. He hoped his release of the Pentagon Papers might help end the war. And so it did—though not in a way he could have foreseen. The Nixon administration, in its obsession to silence him, was not satisfied with indicting him on charges carrying a penalty of 115 years in prison; it set up the illegal “Plumbers” unit to commit a range of crimes against him. When these same Plumbers were later arrested at the Watergate Hotel, Nixon resorted to paying them hush money and committing obstruction of justice to prevent them from revealing their crimes against my father. When this conspiracy was uncovered, not only did it result in the dismissal of the case against him, but ultimately it also forced Nixon’s resignation. That, in turn, effectively ended the war.

You could never know. Nor could you underestimate the power of an act of conscience or truth telling. Randy Kehler, when giving his speech at the conference of the War Resisters International, could not have imagined the impact his words would have on one person sitting in the audience.

As my father liked to say, “Courage is contagious.” We can’t know what we will accomplish, and we might not ever know the results of our actions. Yet in light of what was at stake, the chance of making a difference justified the risk, and at the end of the day, he believed, that was a good way to use your life.

He knew that he was not alone. In one of his last interviews, he said that many people don’t really think or care much about the suffering of people far away, the “others,” those not of their tribe. But there were those who do: the resisters, the peacemakers, the truth tellers. “Those,” he said, “are my tribe.”

What was his counsel for them? Perhaps it is in the last line of these notes:

What can we expect?

Prepare to step into the moment when sudden surprise opportunities for change arise . . .

Knock on doors, many doors, not knowing which may open.

Be ready to drive through.

What was his hope for them? As he wrote in a final letter to his friends and fellow peacemakers: “My wish for you is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.”

As people of faith, a Muslim Imam, a Jewish Rabbi, a Protestant Pastor, and a Catholic Archbishop, we come from different traditions, yet we arrive at the same moral truth: The power to take a life must be exercised with profound humility, restraint, and reverence for human dignity. When irreversible harm is at stake, mercy is not weakness; it is moral strength. Across our faith traditions, we are taught that justice is not simply punishment. Justice divorced from mercy ceases to be just at all.

Our faiths teach that judgment ultimately belongs to God. Our responsibility is to protect life whenever possible, to act with compassion toward victims, and to refrain from violence when it is no longer necessary to protect society. Compassion for those who grieve is essential, as is humility about the limits of human judgment. God is God, and we are not.

Doug Battle’s life was taken, and that loss is permanent and devastating. We hold his family and loved ones in prayer, and we do not minimize their grief or the harm caused. Faith does not ask us to forget the victim, nor does it excuse the wrongdoing that led to this tragedy. Rather, it calls us to confront suffering truthfully to honor the life that was lost while resisting the belief that another death can restore what has been taken.

When those most deeply affected by violence, particularly a victim’s own family, call for mercy, faith asks us to listen with care. In this case, the victim’s daughter has publicly urged the governor to choose clemency, and 6 of the 8 original jurors, who once bore the responsibility of this decision, now support mercy in the form of clemency for Sonny Burton. Extreme punishment does not heal loss. It compounds it.

A system that knows when not to kill demonstrates wisdom, not weakness.

While Sonny Burton bears responsibility for his actions, faith traditions consistently teach that punishment must be proportionate to culpability. Capital punishment has long been understood, even by its supporters, as reserved for the most extreme acts of intent and responsibility.

Burton’s case brings this teaching into sharp focus. He did not pull the trigger that took a life, yet he faces execution while the state agreed to resentence the triggerman to life without parole and he later died in prison. In moments like this, faith calls us to examine not only what the law permits, but what conscience requires.

Clemency in such circumstances is not a failure of justice. It is a humane expression of justice, one that recognizes accountability while refusing to impose irreversible punishment where moral certainty is absent. Exercising restraint in such moments can strengthen, rather than weaken, public trust. A system that knows when not to kill demonstrates wisdom, not weakness.

In a situation such as this, where a non-shooter still faces death while the State resentenced the shooter to life without parole, prudence calls for restraint. This is not about being “soft on crime.” It is about being faithful to a vision of justice that is humane, measured, and worthy of public trust.

As faith leaders, we walk alongside families in their pain, and we know this truth intimately: More death does not heal trauma. It only deepens it. As people of faith, we believe this moment calls for mercy.

Governor Ivey, as people of faith, we respectfully ask you to choose humility over finality and mercy over irreversible harm. Clemency for Sonny Burton would not deny justice; it would affirm the sacred value of life.

I have spent my career studying the consequences of US military action. I teach about international conflict and diplomacy. I have lived in communities still scarred by the legacy of US nuclear testing. I do not romanticize war or underestimate how quickly “major combat operations” can become a global catastrophe.

Early Saturday, President Donald Trump ordered US military strikes against Iran in coordination with Israel. He warned that Americans could face “casualties that often happen in war” as if the human cost of war were an unavoidable fact of life rather than a choice made by him.

We have seen a version of this story before.

In 2002, Congress made a historic mistake by authorizing President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. That decision was rooted in deception, fear, and a desire for vengeance. That war cost the lives of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. It also shattered trust in government and left a legacy of instability that the entire world is still living with.

Only two months into the new year, Trump has already invaded or attacked two countries. As Americans, we must treat this moment with the gravity and urgency it demands.

Constraining a president’s ability to launch needless, open-ended war is one of Congress’ most important constitutional responsibilities. Congress failed to meet that responsibility in 2002. It must not fail now.

There is a dangerous myth in American politics that time will solve what leaders refuse to confront. That if we just “wait and see,” crises will cool and accountability will take care of itself. But as Martin Luther King Jr. warned, time is neutral. If Congress stays silent, time does not become an ally of peace; it becomes an ally of escalation, destruction, and death.

Today, the stakes are higher than they were in 2002. The international diplomatic infrastructure that once constrained conflict has been eroded by the Trump administration. We no longer have the nuclear arms agreements we did a decade, or even a month, ago. And our military is integrating and using artificial intelligence for military operations faster than our lawmakers’ ability to make laws and provide oversight.

We are entering a period where the speed of decision-making is accelerating, while the guardrails that prevent catastrophic miscalculation are weakening. This combination should terrify every American.

Only two months into the new year, Trump has already invaded or attacked two countries. As Americans, we must treat this moment with the gravity and urgency it demands.

The greatest responsibility of our federal government is to protect the welfare of the people who call this country home. As a member of Congress, I’ll fight to make sure that no president—Democrat or Republican—can drag the United States into needless wars based on lies or their own capricious arrogance, and I will never relent in my commitment to securing our country and the world from the threats posed by the weaponization of emerging technologies and the continued risk of nuclear war.

The timing of Trump’s attack on Iran poses unprecedented risks to global security. Friday night, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth canceled a Defense Department contract with the AI company Anthropic over its refusal to authorize the use of their technology to spy on Americans and direct lethal attacks. Anthropic came under scrutiny earlier this year after reports that its AI chatbot, Claude, was used during Trump’s reckless and unconstitutional invasion of Venezuela.

This week, one of the sticking points in the negotiations was whether AI could be used to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. Anthropic refused, and Hegseth canceled the contract. Within hours, Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI reached a deal with the Pentagon. It’s a profitable deal for OpenAI and its shareholders, and a disturbing development for anyone who cares about peace and the future of humanity.

Congress must immediately pass legislation limiting Trump’s ability to take further military action against Iran. That is just the beginning of the work that must be accomplished with all deliberate speed. Congress must also pass legislation limiting national security agencies from using AI technology to launch lethal strikes, and prohibit the Pentagon from any use of AI in its nuclear weapons program.

Now is the time to act.

This op-ed first appeared in the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Over a year into President Donald Trump’s second lawless, unconstitutional administration, Congress is only “considering” reasserting themselves as a co-equal branch of government. They have mounted no meaningful response to repeated usurpation of war powers and purse, ignoring continued obstructions of justice and violations of civil liberties. Congress has been so desperate to avoid imposing accountability on this administration that the mere idea of impeachment sent them into a “frenzied rage” throughout 2025.

This inaction bears rotten fruit again and again. The president’s unilateral declaration of war on Iran in February of 2026 can be traced directly to congressional inaction after Trump’s unilateral strikes on Iran in May of 2025. At that time, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) forced a vote on H.Res 537, impeaching Donald J. Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors. Congress voted to table the resolution. By refusing to impose consequences eight months ago, Congress has effectively green-lit this war, including the murder of more than 50 schoolgirls.

American voters across the nation and in swing districts have supported impeachment for nearly a year. Today mainstream grassroots groups like 50501 have joined the call for Congress to impeach Trump. Imagine if Congress was leading this effort instead of fighting it. What could we accomplish if we had our nominal leaders on our own side, rather than fighting against us at every step?

Today, individual representatives say they support impeachment, but they throw up road blocks: insisting it is a process (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)), that there should be an inquiry first (Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI)), that they need to have leadership’s buy-in (Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY)), or that they must wait for the midterms (Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)). These are all lies.

The American people like cowards even less than they like fascists. As a result, Democrats today are less popular than Donald Trump.

Impeachment is a privileged resolution, and that means any member can introduce articles of impeachment at any time through Rule IX and demand that the House address it within 48 hours. Congress is missing the will to act.

The first impeachment articles of Trump’s second term were filed in April of 2025 by Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.), after Citizens’ Impeachment (then Operation Anti-King) coordinated a grassroots campaign to push for impeachment. H.Res 353 incorporated Citizens’ Impeachment’s article on tyranny and was filed under Rule IX to force a vote. The backlash—from Democratic leadership and from his own party—was so intense that Thanedar withdrew the articles from the floor five minutes before the vote. The resolution has been with the Judiciary Committee, untouched, for the last 10 months.

Where would we be if the opposition party had followed through on that vote in April? What if DOGE; illegal firings of federal workers; and wildly destabilizing, illegal tariffs had been enough for Congress to begin asserting their power?

Rep. Thanedar has since learned to use the drafting of impeachment articles as a political tool instead of the desperately needed accountability that the nation requires. In December of 2025, Thanedar’s office asked Citizens’ Impeachment to endorse H.Res 935 impeaching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for the murder of two shipwrecked survivors. Citizens’ Impeachment did so, with the caveat that simply drafting articles was not enough—the articles needed to be filed under Rule IX and brought to a vote as soon as possible. Rhetoric was escalating, military assets were being moved into position, and it was clear that military action was imminent.

Had Rep. Thanedar forced a vote then, when Hegseth’s murder of shipwrecked survivors was in the news and Congress had just reminded military members that they must refuse illegal orders, he would have brought consequences to bear on one of the least popular members of Trump’s cabinet, and possibly forestalled the Venezuela strikes. Instead, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth once again usurped congressional war powers without consequence. H.Res. 935 remains with the Judiciary Committee, irrelevant and ignored.

Similarly, Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) spent months requesting an impeachment inquiry into Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s behavior before Robin Kelly (D-Ill.) decided to just write up the articles and make it happen. A full 187 members of Congress have now endorsed H.Res 996, an impeachment resolution for Noem. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) even claimed he would pursue impeachment if Noem wasn’t fired “immediately.” Without a vote though, even those actions are empty. Jeffries made that promise one month ago. Noem is still in office, H. Res 996 remains in committee, and Noem’s federal paramilitary forces continue their occupation of American cities unabated.

Articles of impeachment record the lawlessness of this administration, but they aren’t magical. The real power that every member of the House has is to force votes on those articles, putting their colleagues on record for their endorsement of the Trump administration’s repeated constitutional violations. And with the exception of Rep. Green, they absolutely refuse to use it.

In perhaps the most baffling abdication of both power and good sense, only two members of Congress have even considered impeachment for the Department of Justice's inept and corrupt handling of the Epstein Files. No articles have been written or filed though, despite the nearly unanimous vote to release the Epstein Files; the enormous, bipartisan outrage of the public at the Epstein Class; the blatant cover-up and obstruction of justice at the hands of Attorney General Pam Bondi; and pre-written articles of impeachment sent directly to Congress by thousands of constituents. Congress cannot seem to connect the dots to realize that not only would impeachment be good for the country, it would be overwhelmingly popular, even as midterms loom on the horizon.

The American people like cowards even less than they like fascists. As a result, Democrats today are less popular than Donald Trump.

What’s new here is that Congress already knows it can and should do more. As early as July 2025, one anonymous representative admitted it to NBC, saying of their constituents: “They aren’t buying that just because we are in the minority, we can’t do anything. The truth is we can. And we should.”

With the midterms coming up, voters have a chance to do something about this toxic dynamic. There are more than 100 pro-impeachment candidates on the ballot this election cycle, including prominent contenders like NJ-11 Analilia Mejia, former national political director for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and a member of former sPresident Joe Biden’s Department of Labor

The 435 members of the House are the only people with the power to begin impeachment proceedings. The 100 members of the Senate are the only people who can convict and remove Trump and his enablers from power. For a year, these powerful people have refused to take action. They have chosen to delay, and wait, and defer, allowing ever more harm to come to America and its people. In 2026 we should replace them all—they do not have the courage to meet this desperate moment for the country.

We, the Cabinet of the Progressive International, condemn in the strongest possible terms the US-Israel military assault on Iran—a devastating escalation that has already killed scores of civilians and propelled the world towards war.

The assault once again exposes the true character of US diplomacy. Indirect talks between Tehran and Washington—mediated by Oman—were little more than a screen behind which the Trump administration coordinated an agenda of “major combat operations” under the banner of ‘Operation Epic Fury.’

Trump has been clear: This is a regime change offensive—devoid of any legal justification let alone authorization. Trump has framed these strikes as “pre-emptive,” necessary to eliminate “imminent threats,” and to defend national security. Yet Iran has made no immediate threats to the US. On the contrary, it is a longstanding ambition of the US and Israel to wage war on Iran—the lethal consequences of which will be borne by its people.

These strikes did not begin today. They are an extension of a longer project to redraw the map of West Asia by force. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, Yemen to Iran, each escalation is a stepping stone in a broader project to suffocate regional sovereignty in the service of US and Israeli interests. Each has left behind shattered states, displaced populations, and the wreckage of societies that dared to assert independence.

Imperialist war does not liberate peoples—it subjugates them. The evidence is found in the ruins of Gaza, Baghdad, and Tripoli, where bombs leveled cities and “democracy promotion” left ashes in its wake. Marco Rubio made it clear in Munich: the US does not wage war for freedom, but for recolonization—whether in West Asia, or across the Western Hemisphere.

We refuse to remain passive observers of this project to recolonize the planet. From the Cabinet of the Progressive International, we commit to working with members and allies across the world—in their factories and ports, parliaments and courts—to break the war machine that propels our species toward extinction.

Last week, Trump’s Labor Department proposed a rule aimed at making it easier for businesses to call workers “independent contractors” instead of employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It’s the latest round in a regulatory back-and-forth. The legal details get dense fast. But the real-world implications are straightforward: millions of workers are at risk of losing foundational minimum wage and overtime protections, exacerbating their financial precarity.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) provides employees with minimum wage and overtime protections. When Congress passed the FLSA, it sought to cover the broadest concept of employees possible, including those who were performing piece rate garment work out of their kitchens - something that today might look like gig work.

Since the 1940s, courts across the country and in vastly different employment contexts have consistently held that someone is an employee if they are economically dependent on the employer for work. Despite this broad protection in the law, too many employers today misclassify workers as independent contractors—including dishwashers at restaurants, auto mechanic technicians, and even nurses—in order to sidestep legal obligations and lower labor costs. These misclassified workers don’t just lose out on minimum wage and overtime protections. They are often misclassified under other employment laws too, leaving them saddled with higher payroll tax burdens, all while not having the protections of Unemployment Insurance if they are let go, Workers’ Compensation if they are injured on the job, or other typical benefits associated with employment.

Trump’s latest proposed rule would give employers cover to misclassify more workers as independent contractors. Specifically, it tosses aside a decades-long test that the Wage and Hour Division uses when determining a worker’s economic dependence, and instead advances a slimmed down version of the test that will enable businesses to more easily skirt their responsibilities under the FLSA. The Department believes that the long-standing test as articulated in the Biden 2024 Final Rule leads to “unnecessary classification of….workers as employees” and makes the independent contractor classification “more difficult.”

In short, the Department thinks the current test is too complicated, and employers are erring too often on the side of classifying workers as employees. The Department further claims that a slimmed-down test of classification would be a better fit for the modern economy. But at a time when businesses’ relationships with workers is getting more complicated, the test for determining classification shouldn’t be narrowed; it should remain probative. At a moment when we need a high-powered microscope to understand the complex layers of business models and management practices, the Department of Labor is seemingly saying a simple magnifying glass will do just fine. This approach will only exacerbate trends already underway in industries and occupations that have traditionally provided stable, middle-class jobs. Take, for example, nursing.

You might assume that someone working as a nurse in a hospital or nursing home is surely an employee of those entities. Not so anymore. Already, hospitals are relying on staffing agencies to fill nursing positions, and these agencies, in some cases, are misclassifying nurses as independent contractors. Research from the Roosevelt Institute has also highlighted how new app-based companies are using Uber-like platforms to hire, place, and manage nurses, all while claiming they are independent contractors. On these platforms, workers must compete for shifts and bid on pay, sometimes not knowing until the morning of whether they got a shift. These gig platforms have created a race to the bottom in wages and job quality, leaving some nurses without their own health insurance and relying on second jobs to make ends meet. Under Trump’s proposed rule, it will be far harder for workers under these models of management to realize their rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act. And it will only encourage other businesses to follow suit.

To be sure, there are many legitimate independent contractors who are in business for themselves. These small businesses are important parts of our economy. But a dishwasher in the back of a restaurant isn’t in business for herself. An auto technician who shows up to the same shop day in and day out likely isn’t in business for himself. And surely a nurse caring for patients in a hospital isn’t in business for themselves.

The Trump Administration pulled out a sledgehammer on a cornerstone of the New Deal. Trump’s DOL and others who are proponents of making it easier to classify workers as independent contractors often claim this provides workers with greater flexibility in their life. But flexibility doesn’t mean better outcomes. Weakening the FLSA doesn’t result in a better life for more workers.

In fact, recent research on job quality experienced by workers shows stark differences in outcomes between independent contractors and employees across some key metrics. Independent contractors, for example, are more likely to report receiving less than 24 hours notice of when they need to work. At the same time, they are no more likely than W-2 employees to say they have input on when they can take a few hours off for personal reasons. Yet, independent contractors remain more likely to report wanting to work more hours and receive more money.

Last week’s proposed rule sadly isn’t a surprise but it is a stark reminder of how little this Administration cares about using the tools of government to enforce laws and advance policies that enable workers to secure a better life.

For what seems like the 50th time in my long life, the US, with Israel, has attacked another nation, as per usual without an honest debate in Congress and so far with the reported deaths of both Iran’s leader and 80 or so of its schoolgirls. I’m not going to pretend that I understand the workings of President Donald Trump’s brain well enough to gauge the casus belli, but I will note—because again I’ve been around a while—that Iran has the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas and the third-biggest pool of oil (trailing only Saudi Arabia and, um, Venezuela).

As oil executives helpfully explained to Politico last month, they are generously prepared to be a “stabilizing force” in Iran should the regime fall—indeed, they’d rather do it there than in Venezuela because, as executives explained, “Iran’s oil industry, despite being ravaged by years of US sanctions, is still considered to be structurally sound, unlike that of Venezuela’s”:

Bob McNally, a former national security and energy adviser to former President George W. Bush who now leads the energy and geopolitics consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group, said the prospects for growing Iran’s oil production are “completely different” from Venezuela’s.

“You can imagine our industry going back there—we would get a lot more oil, a lot sooner than we will out of Venezuela,” McNally said. “That’s more conventional oil right near infrastructure, and gas as well.”

In the meantime, our attack almost guarantees that the price of oil will jump, also good news for the industry that backed the president’s re-election so fulsomely. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported:

Iran and its neighbors on the Persian Gulf are some of the largest oil and gas producers in the world and the country has long threatened to disrupt oil exports as an act of self-defense or retaliation from attack.

That may be already happening. According to data from Bloomberg, some oil tankers are pausing or turning around outside the vital Strait of Hormuz, a narrow, deep channel between Iran and Oman that connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and thus to global markets in and bordering the Indian Ocean.

But this kind of analysis is almost too easy, because so much of the geopolitics of the last century has been about the control and the flow of oil.

What’s interesting is the lessons others are taking from it.

Let’s look for a moment at Cuba, which seems like it might well be next on the Trump hit list. The president said Friday that he was looking for a “friendly takeover” of the island nation, and it’s clear that the tool he’s using is energy: After cutting off Venezuelan supplies, he’s also pressured Mexico to stop sending crude to Havana. As a result, he explained, “They have no money. They have no anything right now.”

Which is largely true—things in Havana have grown desperate in the last few weeks as Washington has tightened the screws they’ve been turning for decades. As the Spanish newspaper El Pais put it in a story, the entire nation is on “the verge of darkness” as energy supplies dwindle. It quotes a young anthropologist, José Maria:

He says the blackouts don’t affect him as much as others: His area is “privileged,” close to the water pump that supplies the municipality. He doesn’t have a generator, but he does have a rechargeable fan and a battery for his phone. From his apartment, on some days, he can see entire neighborhoods plunged into darkness.

As it happens, I went to Cuba to do some reporting the last time the country was in such a fix, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it Havana’s economic lifeline. In those days the country’s biggest problem was food, and it survived in part with a fairly remarkable turn toward urban agriculture. I was endlessly impressed with the Cubans I met who were learning how to grow the food their neighbors needed, even as I was depressed by the police state they were inhabiting.

Now the overwhelming problem is energy, and it’s here that something else quite profound has been happening: an almost unbelievable surge in the production of solar power. As The Economist reported on Thursday:

Mr Trump is obsessed with oil, but Cuba has been building out an alternative source of energy supply at record pace: solar panels imported from China. According to Chinese export data compiled by Ember, a think tank, in the 12 months to April 2025 Cuba’s imports of Chinese solar panels grew by a factor of 34, faster than anywhere else in the world. The island has gone from having almost no solar power a few years ago to levels which help it cope with Mr Trump’s embargo.

The regime’s energy policy is mostly responsible for the boom. In March 2024 the government announced a plan to build two gigawatts of solar power plants by 2028. It depends heavily on China for funding and construction, as well as for the solar panels themselves. On February 11 the government claimed that its new solar plants generated almost a gigawatt of power during the lunchtime peak, enough in that moment to meet the electricity needs of a third of the country.

With their help, life of a sort stumbles on. Here’s a Reuters report from last week:

“Given the frequent outages, which pretty much stop you from doing anything, a friend offered to help me invest in panels and set everything up,” Havana resident Roberto Sarriga told Reuters.

Sarriga said that with the help of solar panels he could have internet, charge his phone so people can locate him, and power a TV to keep his elderly mother entertained watching her favorite soap operas.

Most people can’t afford their own panels, of course—unless they have relatives abroad who can send them dollars. But private businesses often can, and on Thursday the government offered new tax breaks for businesses that undertake new renewable energy projects. Perhaps in response, the Trump administration said on Friday that it would allow small oil sales to private businesses.

“The strategy here is to show the Cubans and the world that the only lifeline that Cuba has left is the United States,” said Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, a nonpartisan policy and advocacy group in Washington. “That doesn’t mean choke them off. That means leave it clear that they have become a de facto dependency of the United States.’’

But it’s not the only lifeline. China has solar panels to sell, for cheap, and once they’re up your lifeline is the sun. And unlike the oil terminals we apparently bombed at Iran’s Kharg Island complex Saturday morning, there’s really no good way to strike at solar energy, because it’s inherently decentralized. Look at that picture at the top of this essay, of a small farmer washing off his solar panels; that’s a person set up to survive what the world has to throw at him.

That’s clearly the story from Ukraine, which has weathered Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on its energy infrastructure by building a new, harder-to-attack infrastructure. As Paul Hockenos reports:

Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”

Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.

It’s not just missiles, either. Iran, for instance, is widely regarded to have the ability to mount cyber attacks on centralized American infrastructure. As Rodney Bosch reported during the last round of US strikes on the nation:

US intelligence officials had warned that Iran might retaliate against American involvement by launching cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Electrical grids, water systems, and financial networks were seen as high-risk targets.

(On days like this, I’m glad I have solar panels all over the roof. )

China has obviously figured out all these lessons. It foresaw the attacks on Venezuela and Iran, two of its big suppliers of crude, and began to dramatically increase its oil stockpile. But of course it’s done something much more important: build out the un-embargoable supply of electrons that come, most easily and cheaply, from the sun and wind.

Since 2021, China has added more power capacity across all energy technologies than the US has in its history, including 543 gigawatts last year, according to figures released late last month by the country’s National Energy Administration.

None of this is about ideology. China, Cuba, the US, Venezuela, Iran—all suffer from democratic deficits at this point (a sad list for an American to have to compile). It’s about power, in both meanings of that word.

And it’s about survival, as the rest of us imagine rebuilding a world that might actually work for its inhabitants. We have a few humble but powerful tools—the solar panel, the windmill, the battery—that make it easier to imagine something other than our current nightmare.

"Cuba is next," said Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday night in America, March 2, 2026, grinning between a Venezuelan surgical decapitation and an Iranian bombing campaign like a man checking items off a list. "They are going to fall. This communist dictatorship in Cuba, their days are numbered."

They are already falling.

They fall in hospitals without power. They fall in nursing homes without food. They fall in cancer wards where the machines went silent weeks ago and no one came back to restart them. They fall in kitchens where mothers boil water they carried for miles, over fires made from broken chairs and splintered tables. They fall in apartments dark for 20 hours a day, on an island 90 miles from Florida, while a United States senator smiles on television and calls it progress.

This is not a warning about what might happen to Cuba. It is a clinical description of what is happening right now, today, while you read this, while the news cycle skids forward to the next detonation and pretends the last one never happened.

The strategy is to open enough fronts to make sustained resistance on any single front feel impossible.

Since December 2025, the United States has seized oil tankers on the open sea, threatened tariffs against any nation that dares sell fuel to Cuba, and pressured Mexico into halting shipments. The timeline is precise: The first tanker seizure came on December 10. The last major fuel delivery arrived on January 9. On January 29, the executive order dropped, threatening tariffs on any country that supplies Cuba with oil. The island has not received a significant shipment since, and Bloomberg satellite analysis shows nighttime light levels across eastern Cuba have fallen by 50%. The island is going dark, and we can see it from space.

An engineer would call what followed a cascading systems failure. Fuel feeds the electrical grid. The grid powers the water pumps. The pumps keep millions of people alive, or they used to. Sever the first link and the rest follows with mechanical certainty, then human consequence, then preventable death.

Now the grid fails for up to 20 hours a day in parts of the country. Eighty-four percent of Cuba's water pumping infrastructure depends on electricity that no longer reliably exists, so taps go dry and pressure vanishes. Nearly 1 million people get drinking water from tanker trucks that are running out of diesel, which means even the emergency solution is collapsing. Five million Cubans live with chronic illnesses, and chronic illness does not pause for politics. Thousands of cancer patients have watched chemotherapy and radiotherapy simply stop, not because the medicine is gone, but because there is no power to deliver it. The United Nations resident coordinator in Havana has called it what it is: acute humanitarian risk, deteriorating by the day.

Cuba's population has plummeted from roughly 11 million to an estimated 8.6 million in five years, a peacetime collapse that demographers compare, for sheer velocity, to nations at war. Sugar production has fallen to its lowest level in over a century. The official inflation rate masks a real rate economists estimate near 70%, which means wages rot while prices sprint. Airports cannot provide jet fuel. Garbage trucks sit empty. Hospitals operate by flashlight, and a flashlight is not a ventilator.

And on Sunday, a senator from South Carolina went on television to say their days are numbered, as if the dying had not already begun, as if the darkness were not already inside the wards.

I am an engineer by training. I see systems. I also see what people do when they want to hurt civilians while keeping their hands clean.

Siege is a system.

It has inputs: fuel, food, medicine, money. It has choke points: tanker seizures, executive orders, tariff threats. It has predictable failure modes: grid collapse, pump failure, hospital shutdown, preventable death. It has a kill chain too, and it selects its victims with the cold efficiency of triage in reverse. The elderly go first. Then the chronically ill. Then the infants whose mothers cannot reach hospitals that cannot run incubators. Then everyone else, slowly, invisibly, deniably.

This is not new. The architecture is old. Only the language changes, and the public gets trained to hear that language as policy instead of violence.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, supply lines were severed, medical infrastructure collapsed, and a population was sealed inside and slowly starved. The authorities described it as a public health measure. The engineers of that system understood that you do not need to kill people directly if you can cut off what keeps them alive and let time do the rest. In Gaza, the same architecture returned: fuel cut, hospitals dark, water systems destroyed, international law invoked by everyone and enforced by no one, while cameras rolled and the death toll climbed and the world performed its anguish on schedule and moved on.

Cuba, March 2026: tankers seized on the open sea. Airports grounded. Cancer wards without power. A population that increasingly cannot leave because Nicaragua has closed its visa-free corridor and the Florida Straits remain as lethal as ever. The Supreme Court struck down the tariff mechanism that underpins the blockade, and the administration has shown no sign of relenting. Not a pause, not a pivot, not even the decency of shame.

The architect of this particular siege is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American whose parents left the island before Fidel Castro took power. He has spent a career positioning himself for this moment. That a man whose family left the island seeking a better life now engineers another for the millions who remain is not irony. It is the kind of cruelty that requires a surname and a face.

I am not calling this a genocide. I am describing a pattern, because the pattern is visible if you stop letting the headlines drag your eyes away. Civilian populations besieged through infrastructure strangulation. Justified by the language of regime change. Enabled by the manufactured exhaustion of everyone who might object.

That exhaustion is not an accident. It is the strategy.

I have spent the past year documenting how this administration builds systems designed to break people slowly. Detention facilities that warehouse human beings indefinitely while the paperwork dissolves—70,000 detained and climbing at 3,000 a month, with the courts gutted too fast to process them. Environmental protections gutted by executive order faster than any court can respond. Regulatory frameworks designed to expire by default if no one has the resources to defend them. The cruelty is not always loud, but it is always organized, and it always counts on you to look away.

Cuba is not a different story. It is the same story, told in Spanish, 90 miles from shore, with an ocean in between that is treated like a moat around your conscience.

Consider the sequence. In January, Venezuela was struck and its president seized. On January 29, the executive order blockading Cuba dropped, pushing its population into darkness. This weekend, Iran was struck. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to operate in American cities under rules that courts have challenged and the administration ignores. Detention capacity expands. Environmental rollbacks accelerate. Each crisis buries the last, and the burial is the point.

Venezuela buried the detention story. Iran buried Venezuela. Cuba is being buried by Iran. And by Tuesday, something new will bury Cuba, because the machine does not rest and it does not need your agreement. It only needs your fatigue.

This is not incompetence. It is architecture. The strategy is to open enough fronts to make sustained resistance on any single front feel impossible. To overwhelm not just governments and institutions but the moral attention of ordinary citizens. To make atrocity feel normal, ambient, inevitable, like background noise you learn to tune out because it hurts too much to keep hearing it.

Every authoritarian project in history has relied on the same calculation: The public's capacity for outrage is finite and can be outpaced. Move fast enough. Break enough things at once. People stop tracking the damage. Then silence arrives, and even when silence is not consent, it functions like consent, and the architects know that. They build for it.

We said, "Never again" after the Holocaust. We said it while watching Gaza in what should have been real time but always felt like delay. We are saying it now, about everything and nothing, the words worn down by repetition, polished by overuse, easy to carry and easier to abandon.

Cuba is 90 miles from Florida. The people are real. The starvation is real. The hospitals are dark. Cancer patients are dying. Water is not coming. And a United States senator went on television Sunday evening and smiled about it.

So here is the test, and it is not abstract. The lesson of "never again," apparently, is that it has a radius. It has an attention span. It has an expiration date. The architects of this era know exactly how to exploit all three, and they do it in plain sight, with clean suits and confident voices and a grin that dares you to care.

Do not let them.

Do not let Cuba become the crisis you meant to care about but never quite got around to, wedged between the bombing and the raid and the next emergency engineered to make you forget the last one. Do not outsource your moral attention to the news cycle. Do not accept exhaustion as an excuse. Do not accept policy language as a mask for suffering.

The siege is the strategy. The overwhelm is the weapon. And your attention, right now, today, is the one thing they cannot seize on the open sea.

When the Israeli lobbying group UN Watch spread disinformation about Francesca Albanese, they were trying to silence her condemnations of the true “common enemy of humanity”—the illegal system of oppressive, corporate-media-military and surveillance forces shaping a brutal new world order, and now bombing Iran.

Francesca Albanese has evoked the ire of Israeli officials, the US government, and Western countries that have failed to stop, and continued to support, Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They are mad at her for doing her job and excelling at it. When she accepted the position as United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, she was a widely published human rights expert. She never hid her focus and strong positions on the rights of Palestinians or the fact that her historically grounded research focused on Israel’s occupation of Palestine. She began as special rapporteur in May 2022, and by November she gave a talk at the Irish Center for Human Rights titled, “Resetting the Mind: Settler Colonialism, Apartheid, and the Right to Self-determination in Palestine.”

Albanese has proven to be the most important global voice defending Palestinians against the Israeli extermination campaign in Gaza that has continued for 28 months. In doing so, she exposed a growing web of neocolonial forces at the forefront of genocide, still intent on completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and turning Gaza into a multibillion-dollar resort for the billionaire class (revealed on a disgusting though rarely cited videotape). President Donald Trump’s profit-making enterprise called the “Board of Peace” convened for the first time in January, and some 60 countries were invited to join for a one-billion-dollar fee in a pay-to-play scheme that Pope Leo XIV referred to as an attempt to replace the UN. Jeremy Scahill explained on Democracy Now! what exactly this muddle of corporate shills, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and a group of ragtag government representatives are dreaming up for their Epstein-Class playground on the Mediterranean. Depriving Gazans of any independent representation or defense, their terms are these: “You either fully bend the knee and accept a colonial apartheid regime [and] accept a new reality as dystopian plantation workers on Jared Kushner’s real estate project or we’re going to kill you.” As Asal Raad pointed out, “’They’re building resorts on the graves of Palestinians… slaughtered in a genocide—for profit—and @nytimes calls it a ‘glittering plan.’”

Francesca Albanese has incisively corrected the record and debunked Israel’s denials and justifications for genocide so often repeated in the Western Press. It took her one eloquent sentence to expose media’s role in facilitating Israeli attacks on the enclave when she wrote, “Israel has written one of the darkest pages of human history and the world is still holding the pen.”

The powerful global consortium of weapons-based profiteering and neocolonial states have attacked one of the most forceful advocates for humanity, at the same time the US and Israel are bombing Iran.

She made it look easy when she shattered a foundational rhetorical question lobbed at anyone who dare criticize the state of Israel, Do you believe Israel has a right to exist? When a journalist threw that one at Albanese, she patiently explained: “Israel does exist. It is a recognized member of the United Nations.” France and Italy exist, if they want to merge that’s up to them, but she added, “What is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist.”

Last year over 700,000 people signed a petition nominating Albanese for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. But her effective advocacy for Palestinian rights made her the target of US sanctions. The action came after she published a study in July 2025, naming the major global corporations profiting from Israel’s ongoing occupation and genocide in Gaza. She named 60 companies that have played a role in "sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project.” The military-industrial complex, dominated by US weapons manufacturers, is, unsurprisingly, at the heart of this nexus. The occupation and bombing of Gaza “provided a testing ground for cutting-edge military capabilities: air defense platforms, drones, AI-powered targeting tools, and even the US-led F-35 programme.” After being used on Palestinians, deadly technologies are marketed as “battle proven.” At a major weapons conference in Tel Aviv in December 2025, Israel boasted that their weapons are tested “live on Palestinians” to increase profits.

In the July report, Albanese also drew attention to the financial industries, consulting firms, social media, and public relations companies that help design the misleading narratives that have deflected blame, refused to use terms likes genocide, and parroted Israeli talking points in sanitizing Israel’s brutality.

In tandem with the nexus of military force, security surveillance, corporate and media power, its acolytes are formulating an attendant neocolonial ideology. At a Munich Security Conference in February, US Secretary of State Mario Rubio introduced the conceptual architecture for, in the words of Jonathan Cook, “a return to brutal Western colonialism,” in a speech well-received by European dignitaries. The humanitarian community is left struggling to find a way to continue to represent humanity as the ground shifts beneath their feet.

When Albanese began to expose the big picture of expanding military domination, and warned of its global consequences, the campaign to discredit her went into high gear. The latest attacks on the special rapporteur came in response to a videotape appearance she made at a conference in Doha where she argued that this growing systemic threat should be viewed as a “common enemy of humanity.”

The pro-Israeli lobbying group UN Watch, released an altered video of her talk and claimed that Albanese called Israel itself the “enemy of humanity.” One need only look at the original tape of her address to prove that she said no such thing. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot augmented the false charges adding that Albanese condemned Israel “as a people and a nation,” and demanded her resignation. Pointing to the doctored videotape being used to portray her as antisemitic, Albanese told Medhi Hasan, “The cut and paste of that video was so rudimental that it was almost insulting to human intelligence.”

The powerful global consortium of weapons-based profiteering and neocolonial states have attacked one of the most forceful advocates for humanity, at the same time the US and Israel are bombing Iran. They are committing crimes of aggression against a sovereign state that has not threatened or attacked them, and major media outlets such as the New York Times have spurred them on. After a US bomb struck a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing 165 people (mostly girls between the age of 7 and 12), hours later another US-Israeli strike on the town of Lamerd hit mostly teenagers in a gymnasium, killing 20 youthful volleyball players. Witnesses described “the continuous screaming of the injured.” But news of these bombings were not prominently featured in establishment media. As Fatima Bhutto put it, “From Gaza to Iran, Children Have Always Been Sacrificed by Western Imperial Aims.” Trump’s illegal war is unpopular—just a quarter of Americans back the strikes on Iran—and there is no legitimate rationale for another war in the Middle East.

Former UN official and Human Rights Lawyer Criag Mokhiber has also identified what he referred to as a “US-Israeli Axis,” calling it “the greatest threat facing humanity today” and describing it this way: “A murderous bombing campaign in Iran, continuing genocide in Palestine… belligerent occupation of several countries, acts of transnational terrorism, repression at home, schemes to profit from murder and colonization… massive corruption of the public and private sectors across the West, sanctions against human rights defenders and international courts, attacks on international institutions, the dismantling of international law, mass surveillance of the rest of us, and a growing trail of blood and destruction around the globe.”

In her characteristic expression of deep humanity, woven into Francesca Albanese’s words is an alternative vision of a world shaped by humanity and freedom. “We, who do not control large amounts of financial capital, algorithms, and weapons, we now see that we, as a humanity, have a common enemy. And freedoms, the respect for fundamental freedoms, is the last peaceful avenue, the last peaceful toolbox that we have to regain our freedom.”

The gaggle of for-profit genocidaires, or what Trump calls his Board of Peace, is looking to expand its mission from Gaza to other conflicts, seeking to further dismantle international law and the humanitarian community. As the death toll escalates under US-Israeli bombs and spreads war throughout the Middle East, Negin Owilaei argues in Truthout, “We need to reckon with the American War Machine,” and I would add, push back against the common enemy of humanity—the growing nexus of military and propaganda alliances.

When I was small my mother warned me never to approach a sick animal. The dying ones, she said, are the deadliest of all.

That hasn’t been my experience; most of the dying creatures I’ve encountered just want a quiet place to pass their final hours. The source of my mother’s anxiety was closer to home than she had yet to recognize, but her fear was palpable. She was haunted by the vision of her curly-haired child falling prey to some sickly, snarling, yellow-eyed feral creature with nothing left to lose. That’s a mother’s worst nightmare.

Flash forward to February 28, 2026. Dozens of schoolchildren were reported dead in “one of two strikes that appear to have hit schools since US and Israeli warplanes launched their attack on Iran around 10:00 a.m. local time.” It was a mother’s worst fear come true, many times over.

Why would Israel and the United States kill children? The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that neither country is shy about the systematic extermination of the very young when it serves their strategic interests. These deaths, however, seem to be the products of tactical indifference rather than intentional annihilation. The girls’ school was near an Iranian naval base, and the high school was in the neighborhood where former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lived and was targeted by bombers.

Every empire in history has eventually turned against its own people, and always at the same historical moment: right before it dies.

This is how dying animals behave in a mother’s nightmare. They’re not looking for human children to kill—not the way an airborne raptor or an Israel Defense Forces soldier would. They simply lash out blindly in a desperate fight against the inevitable. Sometimes children get in the way.

Yes, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. Big deal. Others like him were already prepared to step in.

Our political culture is naive, almost childlike, in its attachment to the “great man” theory of history, with the “evil man” as its shadow side. Powerful figures do sometimes alter history, but only within those timeworn channels Alfred Tennyson called the “ringing grooves of change.” Khamenei’s power began with the US overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, which set the stage for Iran’s current theocracy. The brutality of the Shah only hardened the steely resolve of Khamenei’s predecessor, who cast aside pro-democracy Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri to put Khamenei in power. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone equally hard-lined.

US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are merely the latest leaders to be vomited up from a groove whose name is “colonialism.” Its source is not the culture or beliefs of ancient Jewish tribes. This groove traces back to the chieftains and pagan shamans of pre-Christian Europe. It rings with the sound of cauldrons and cannons and the church bells of the inquisitor. If some of its own children must be sacrificed, too, so be it.

Once again, pro-democracy protesters have been betrayed by US-made bombs. Attacks by foreign countries almost always strengthen their current leadership and weaken protest movements. There’s no reason to think this time will be any different. Khamenei is almost certainly more powerful in martyrdom than he was in the last months of his life. The protesters must now wait for the inevitable betrayal. May they find solidarity in just people around the world.

As-yet-unconfirmed reports suggest that the bombers have targeted some of the leaders who are best positioned to form an independent government. That wouldn’t be surprising. The US and Israel don’t want an independent Iran. They want a vassal.

But wait, you say. Israel and the United States aren’t dying animals. They’re very much alive and will be for the foreseeable future. Don’t be so sure. Netanyahu has been clinging to power for years to avoid prosecution for a litany of corruption charges. Trump was also threatened by multiple prosecutions before winning re-election. Both men, having feasted lavishly on ill-gotten gains, were desperate to avoid the consequences of their own actions.

For Netanyahu, Israel’s future looks grim. Much of the world has turned against it. Public opinion is evolving from revulsion over its actions to doubts about its very legitimacy as a theocratic ethno-state. Public support for Israel, once considered immutable, has plummeted in the US and Western Europe, especially among younger people who are more likely to consider it an “apartheid state.”

Israel, dependent on Western largesse, is likely to face a critical decision when these generations assume power: become a truly democratic state that ends radicalized privilege or remain an unsustainable international pariah. Either way, the clock is almost certainly ticking on the era of Eretz Israel envisioned by Zionism’s founders. It may take decades, with great bloodshed along the way, but this change seems increasingly likely.

Trump and Netanyahu may parade before the cameras like winners, but they carry the stink of losers—moral, spiritual, and tactical losers.

This is not an outré idea. Israel’s military and political leaders see this future almost as clearly as independent observers do. No wonder they’ve become increasingly open in their violence. It’s a sign of desperation as well as hate.

The United States may not disappear as a nation in the foreseeable future. But its global dominance and that of its elites will end, and probably soon. That prospect fills its current leaders with existential dread. Billionaires build airstrips in the Hamptons and rehearse the apocalypse in mountaintop retreats. Politicians try to seize control of oil-rich nations through brute force and feed the fantasy that exorbitant military spending can crush the spirit of independent peoples.

As the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this twilight, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Richard Nixon said this when he tried selling an equally delusional war to the American people: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world."

The “forces of totalitarianism and anarchy” are us. Every war the US has fought in the intervening half century has been a strategic and military failure. The United States has become a pitiful, violent giant—lethal and proud, but pitiful just the same. It spends itself into social oblivion for military machinery. It turns the technology of human suppression against its own population with increasing ferocity. As inequality surpasses that of the Gilded Age, software surveils our every move as drones and helicopters hover in the sky.

Every empire in history has eventually turned against its own people, and always at the same historical moment: right before it dies.

Trump and Netanyahu may parade before the cameras like winners, but they carry the stink of losers—moral, spiritual, and tactical losers. They’re pitiful because they’re desperate, and they’re desperate because their realms are dying. The grief of mothers and fathers means nothing to creatures such as these.

Here’s silent whisper for the wounded and discouraged, the grim-faced and the grieving, the unseen victims in Palestine and Yemen and Iran and around the globe: May they see with their hearts that time is running out for the Trumps and Netanyahus of their hearts. May they take comfort in the inevitability of their fall.

Yes, they’re still deadly. Of course they are. They’re killers. But so was John Wayne Gacy, and he was a clown.

Since resuming power 13 months ago, President Trump has declared he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time, he has attacked civilian boats in the Caribbean, abducted the head of Venezuela, blockaded Cuba, conducted air strikes in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, and even threatened to invade Greenland. He bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, and now is waging war to achieve regime change, not an easy task in a country of 90 million people.

What is common to all these strikes is that the target was weak. Note that Trump is not trying to topple North Korea, or force Russia out of Ukraine, or threaten China’s economic domination. His targets can’t do much harm to the US, at least in the short run, which makes it easy to score what he calls “victories.”

It’s obvious that Trump loves the feel of power. It no doubt gives him a rush more intoxicating than any drug. He is the ruler of the strongest nation in the history of the world, but he doesn’t have the freedom to unilaterally act on domestic affairs, although he constantly tries. The courts are in the way, as is popular dissent. Judges and citizens are preventing him from exerting his will, even making him change course by removing troops and immigration forces. And it will, he surely knows, get even worse if the Democrats gain control of either house of Congress.

But he has a free hand in foreign affairs. The Supreme Court won’t stop him and there is no international court that the US recognizes, nor does he believe he is morally bound by international law. He couldn’t care less about the United Nations, and he hopes that military engagement against the weak makes him look strong to the American public. Also, in Iran’s case, a war with a quick victory has the added benefit of possibly improving his paltry approval ratings by diverting public attention away from “affordability” and the Epstein files. Already the joke is that they should have called the Iran adventure, “Operation Epic Epstein.”

Just think what the total freedom to attack means for Trump. For starters he gets to deploy his toys—the trillion-dollar arsenal of US warships and fighter planes. It’s the ultimate video game for power-hungry adults. And no one can stop him abroad, and while the Republicans in Congress could, they certainly won’t.

Trump seems to believe that these military attacks will secure his place in history as the greatest president of all time. He and only he had the guts to get rid of the Iranian theocracy that has bedeviled the US since the 1979 hostage crisis. And only he will end communism in Cuba, that pesky island of resistance only 90 miles from shore. Most importantly, he is remaking the Middle East into a US-Israeli safe zone. He is showing the world that the US means business and that whatever it wants, it should get—of course in the name of protecting the US and securing world peace.

As Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Steven Miller, put it, “We live in a world , in the real world…that is governed by strength, this governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”

Before claiming all this aggression demonstrates Trump truly is a Hitler-like dictator, we should recall that he is not the first Commander-in-Chief to follow these “iron laws of the world.” Truman sent troops to fight in Korea (1950), Eisenhower sent them to Lebanon (1958), Kennedy to the Bay of Pigs in Cuba (1961), Johnson to Vietnam (1964), Nixon bombed Cambodia (1969), Reagan invaded Grenada (1983), George H. Bush invaded Panama (1989), Clinton bombed Kosovo (1999), Obama bombed Libya (2011), Trump sent missiles to Syria (2017,2018), and Biden ordered airstrikes in Syria (2021), and Yemen (2024)—all without a declaration of war by Congress.

This is what US presidents do because they can. But no president has been quite as overtly aggressive as Trump. Even when he tries, he can’t hide his desire to dominate. He doesn’t spend time building alliances or forming a consensus at home. He just acts as if the weaker countries of the world are his playthings. He can push them around at will, first with tariffs then with bombs, and his sycophantic enablers will cheer him on. From Trump’s perspective, what’s not to like?

Nothing, unless it doesn’t end well. And there are dozens of ways his current path in Iran could lead to his own destruction. The American public is not likely to approve of these adventures, especially if prices rise because global trade is severely disrupted. More ominously, it’s possible that a war with Iran could spiral out of control, sucking the US in with ground troops and leading to yet another forever war and American casualties. That’s why MAGA isolationists also are having trouble with Trump’s foreign interventions.

And there is a question of whether the Iranians who want regime change will trust the Americans. They are certainly aware that the Afghans who assisted US forces and the CIA in their (failed) war of liberation were awkwardly abandoned during our troop withdrawal, and those who were given safe haven have in many cases been unceremoniously kicked back to their dangerous homeland by Trump.

The upshot of all this adventurism is that we may again witness a moment in history when the universe actually bends towards justice. Debilitating hubris has a way of striking down the mighty: LBJ was driven from office by his Vietnam debacle and Nixon had to resign because of his secret dictatorial actions. Will Trump blow himself up as well?

Maybe, but let’s pray, with the nuclear button close at hand, he doesn’t take all the rest of us with him.

Once again, the United States and Israel are illegally attacking Iran, as they did last June. It is already a regional war, which will take a horrible toll on ordinary people in many countries, with reports a girls’ school was bombed, killing at least 85 people.

Unlike the limited strikes in last June’s 12-day war, this is aimed not just at Iran’s nuclear or military facilities, but at regime change in Iran, as President Donald Trump declared, and government targets in Tehran have been hit, with Israel claiming Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed. Predictably, Iran is firing back at Israel and at US military bases in the region.

Late last week, the Foreign Minister of Oman, who had been mediating negotiations between the US and Iran, stated prospects were good for a possible agreement. However, according to an Israeli official, the talks were apparently a treacherous ruse, as the US and Israel had planned coordinated attacks on Iran for months.

This crisis lies at the feet of President Trump, who abrogated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in his first term. That multilateral agreement had effectively capped Iran’s nuclear program well short of acquiring The Bomb. Now, once again, two nuclear-weapon states are bombing a non-nuclear-weapon state. Meanwhile, Trump has preposterously called for Iranians to overthrow their government.

Congress should also impeach, convict, and remove the president from office for this illegal act, as politically unlikely as that appears now.

The timing of this attack, while perhaps planned for months, came as momentum was building in just the last few days for Congressional War Powers Resolution votes in both the House and the Senate. Democratic leadership in both Houses of Congress had coalesced behind the resolutions, Senate Joint Resolution 104, sponsored by US Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), with 12 other co-sponsors, and House Concurrent Resolution 38, sponsored by US Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), with over 80 co-sponsors. That resolution may be voted on as soon as Tuesday or Wednesday, according to Khanna.

Sen. Kaine issued a statement asking, “Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of US meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East?” and “Is he too mentally incapacitated to realize that we had a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was keeping its nuclear program in check, until he ripped it up in his first term?,” while calling the war a colossal mistake and “a dangerous, unnecessary, and idiotic action.”

US Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, stated, “Everything I have heard from the administration before and after these strikes on Iran confirms this is a war of choice with no strategic endgame,” and “It does not appear Donald Trump has learned the lessons of history.”

Congress must assert its constitutional authority over matters of war and peace against an out-of-control, rogue president and executive branch, and vote in favor of the Iran War Powers Resolutions. Congress should also impeach, convict, and remove the president from office for this illegal act, as politically unlikely as that appears now.

Anti-war protest demonstrations are already being held this weekend in many cities, including Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Princeton, Norwalk, Greenbelt, Canandaigua and others, reflecting not only the illegality of this war but also its unpopularity, as 70% of Americans oppose war with Iran, according to a recent poll. The world urgently needs more diplomacy, not more war.

While this may prove impractical as the war has already begun, and may metastasize in unpredictable ways, we should recall the recent Don’t Give Up the Ship video by six US senators and representatives, all veterans of the military or intelligence services, reminding members of those services of not only their right, but their obligation, to refuse to obey illegal orders. I don’t know if this illegal attack on Iran was what they had in mind, but it certainly applies.

On Saturday in the Washington, DC area, it was sunny and warm after an unusually cold, snowy winter. I had thought of taking a stroll on Theodore Roosevelt Island to watch the Potomac River flow, as Bob Dylan might recommend, but was deterred by the thought of the smell and filth from the collapse of the major sewage pipe that released over 240 million gallons of poo into our precious, life-sustaining, wild river. One cannot help but reflect on the metaphorical, and literal, consequences of our choices as a nation, to prioritize endless, bottomless spending of our tax dollars on war and weapons of destruction over infrastructure to keep our communities safe and healthy.

May we start making better choices, right now. Let’s end this senseless war and prioritize human and environmental needs over the profits of the war machine.

A mini-brouhaha has erupted over whether or not the Democratic National Committee has buried an “autopsy” report on its party loss in the 2024 presidential election. Some fear that the report isn’t being released because it suggests the defeat was the Harris campaign’s failure to break with the Biden administration’s disastrous policy that enabled Israel’s sustained genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza. As a result, some groups are charging the DNC with a coverup and demanding that the autopsy report be released.

I’ve been on the DNC for more than three decades and am no stranger to how the party handles, or avoids handling, issues involving Palestine/Israel. In 1988, I spoke from that year’s convention podium introducing Jesse Jackson’s platform plank calling for “mutual recognition, territorial compromise, and self-determination” for both Israelis and Palestinians. For my efforts, I was asked to withdraw from the DNC—because “party leaders” were concerned that Republicans would use my membership as an issue in the campaign. (I was reinstated in 1993). I served 16 years on the party’s Executive Committee and 11 as co-chair of its Resolutions Committee. On eight occasions, I presented testimony arguing that the party needed to acknowledge Palestinian rights. And in 2016 I was appointed to serve on the Convention Platform Drafting Committee. Having argued and lost this many times, I am well aware of the party establishment’s fear of addressing Palestinian rights. Finally, this past year, I was appointed by Chair Ken Martin to serve on a Middle East Working Group, which he created to sort out how our party deals with America’s policies in the Middle East.

And yet, I believe that for those of us who support Palestinian rights and are concerned that leading Democrats have been on the wrong side of this issue for too long, the fight over whether an autopsy report exists and, if it exists, what it might say, is not where we need to be focusing our energy.

I say this because we already have all the evidence we need to write our own autopsy report that demonstrates conclusively that voters, especially Democrats and Independents, are fed up with blind support for Israeli policies. This is a fact. And while we have hard polling data to prove it, establishment Democrats and political consultants reject this reality and continue to operate from an outdated playbook.

But the changes are real and can’t be ignored. A wide range of polls have established just how extensive they are. A recent Gallup poll shows that for the first time more Americans sympathize with Palestinians (41%) than with Israelis (35%). This is especially pronounced among Democrats where sympathy for Palestinians is three times greater than it is for Israelis. And a John Zogby Strategies poll from February shows that a plurality of Americans now view the US relationship with Israel as more of a liability (45%) than an asset (34%). Again, among Democrats the margin is three to one (57% to 19%).

This growing antipathy toward Israel translates in shifting attitudes toward policy. In August of 2025, The Economist found:

• 43% of voters favor decreasing military aid to Israel, with only 13% wanting to see an increase in such aid. Among Democrats the decrease/increase ratio is 58% to 4%. Among Independents, it’s almost the same.

• Is Israel committing genocide? Among all voters, 44% say “yes” and 28% say “no.” Among Democrats, the ratio is 68% “yes” and just 8% “no.” And among Independents, it’s 45% to 19%.

Other polls show voters affirming that they’re more likely to support candidates who advance such positions and less likely to vote for those who defend Israeli policies and want to maintain current levels of military aid to Israel.

For further evidence of this shift, with just months before the midterm elections, it’s striking to note that more than three dozen congressional candidates have already declared their intent to reject PAC contributions from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. This includes a number of sitting members of Congress, all of whom have previously been strong supporters of Israel and have, in previous elections, been the recipients of millions of dollars from pro-Israel sources, including PACs and dark money independent expenditures. One of these members of Congress recently spoke at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in which she termed Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and announced her support for cutting US military arms to Israel.

While these changes in attitudes toward Israel have been brewing for several years now, they were dramatically accelerated by Israel’s more than two-year assault on Palestinians in Gaza. While the horrors accompanying Hamas’ October 7th attack generated an initial flush of support for Israel, as the toll of Palestinian civilian casualties grew and the extent of Israel’s gratuitous mass devastation of Gaza became clear, support for Israel collapsed.

This was clearly in evidence in the 2024 presidential contest. Post-election analyses showed that Vice President Kamala Harris lost the backing of a wide range of Democratic and Independent voters because she refused to make a decisive break with President Biden’s support for Israel. Instead of listening to her own instincts and being more critical of Israeli practices and more vocal in support of Palestinian rights, she listened to the establishment political consultants who cautioned against “rocking the boat” on this “sensitive issue.”

The consultants, campaign operatives, and media analysts didn’t get the changes that were afoot then, and they still don’t get it now. They are caught in a time warp that views the US politics of the Middle East as if the last two years of Israel’s genocidal war hadn’t occurred. But they did happen and they have been transformative.

It used to be said that criticism of Israel was akin to touching the “third rail” in American politics—avoid it or get burned. In a way, it still is but in reverse. Support for Israel was once the issue sine qua non for candidates for Congress. Polls now show that voters are less likely to vote for candidates who refuse to criticize Israel or who take money from pro-Israel PACs.

As we get closer to the 2026 midterm elections, we can expect more candidates to publicly distance themselves from Israeli policies. We can also expect that pro-Israel groups will panic and up the ante by pouring tens of millions into defeating candidates who are critical of Israel. My sense is that this may backfire, as it did with the recent special House election in New Jersey, because in 2026 what will be controversial are Israeli policies and pro-Israel campaign contributions, not the opposite. The sooner the analysts, consultants, and media figure that out, the better our politics will be.

Given this background, fighting for the party to release an autopsy, is less important. Surely, if it exists, it should be released, but where our attention might better be focused is in supporting candidates who are refusing to accept pro-Israel PAC contributions and running on platforms challenging failed policies of the past. We should also join the growing number of Democratic National Committee members who are calling on the party to ban dark money in elections. This is an instance where looking forward, not backward, will help to bring the change we need—and to be where Democratic voters are already.