Ceasefire? The Iran War is Permanent
They’re scum … they’re led by sick people and they’re vicious, violent people. There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.
Trump has declared the ceasefire with Iran “over.” But it was never any more of a ceasefire than Israel’s “ceasefire” in Gaza.
We’re all Charlie Brown to Trump’s Lucy with the football. Maybe next time, if we just praise Dear Leader’s unearned and capricious gestures toward peace, he’ll really stick to the ceasefire—countermanding all the warmongers he happily surrounds himself with whose advice he takes every day.
I’m on record expressing deep skepticism about the recent Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US even as I cheered for it. Constructed out of papier-mâché, it deferred on the most important questions and empowered Israel as spoiler because it promised the IDF would withdraw from occupying Lebanon even though Israel agreed to no such thing. But I publicly supported the MOU anyway—knowing that it was destined to blow away in the wind—because the ceasefire was (and remains) an urgent priority.
This is the eternal recursive trap of an antiwar advocate in a world run by demons.
The thing that makes me want to hurl household objects at the wall is the credulous and narrowly technical way that 99% of public-facing personalities engage with the Iran War. Sports announcer-like play-by-plays obscure more understanding than they reveal. The media’s attempt to sound neutral in the face of flagrant lies papering over illegal mass murder brings shame to a profession whose only future seems to be in manufacturing consent for oligarchic interests. And don’t get me started on the national-security commentariat.
The Iran War constitutes a series of violent imperial crimes. And we must retain the “imperial” adjective lest we erase the larger material forces that gave rise to the crimes. But crimes against whom?
Against Iranians foremost—between 3,500 and 6,000 Iranians dead, more than 26k injured, and Iran’s economy in smoldering ruins.
Against the world, which has been forced to eat dramatic increases (>24% on average) in energy prices and food inflation—the kind of spike that kills off the most vulnerable and softens up the precarious middle class to appeals from far-right demagogues. The kind of worldmaking that becomes an excuse for liberal governments to steal resources from the people as they tell tales that justify military spending at the expense of the welfare of the governed.
And against the American people, too.
The Pentagon admits to 13 US troops killed, and 425 wounded in action (the numbers are undoubtedly higher than this). The war has already directly cost US taxpayers $103 billion in 120 days while the cost of everything rises and government spending on welfare and healthcare falls off a cliff. Trump said it himself, “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things…We’re fighting wars.” And the tab is still running.
We are all made to be sacrifices at an altar of nonsense and theft. Some more than others.
Still, there is a strategic rationale for all the bloodletting that any sane person would oppose but that serves both oligarchs and the national security state but essentially nobody else: America’s North Star in the Middle East remains Israel’s regional primacy and that means taking military measures to weaken Iran. If only we could have understood this from the start, we would have known that the Iran War was meant to be permanent. That what Trump branded a “ceasefire” was what Hegseth admitted was a strategic pause for “reloading.”
It’s not just that Trump was stupid enough to be conned into doing a war that Netanyahu failed to convince every president in the 21st century to do. It’s that unleashing ebbs and flows of bombing against Iran from now until forever prevents Iran from seriously challenging Israeli primacy in the Middle East; the inter-state version of the profoundly impoverished-yet-evil Israeli theory of “mowing grass.”
To be sure, there have been setbacks. Iran has proven itself more powerful than Washington jingoes imagined. In fact, the war has exposed how the global power projection that remains the Quixotic aim of American militarism is no longer technically possible. But that doesn’t matter if the larger point is perpetuating Epstein geopolitics or fulfilling the millenarian vision of white supremacists and Zionists.
As long as US politicians keep the American national security state tightly bound to the state of Israel, there will be no change to Washington’s investiture in Israeli primacy as a constituent part of American primacy. And as long as that primacy construct doesn’t change, the US will continue to face the “need” to keep Iran weak relative to an Israel that literally kills people to manipulate the balance of power in the Middle East and facilitate the Nazi-like idea of a “Greater Israel.”
So next time a US president calls for a ceasefire with Iran, take a look at American munitions stockpiles and oil reserves. I bet they’re running low. Take a look at the oil futures market and Polymarket. I bet they’re insider trading on it. Take a look at stocks and the bond market. I bet investors are selling.
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