Veterans Day is Not about Thanking Veterans

One in three Iraq War Vets Believes it Wasn't Worth it. Source

It's About Ensuring We Have More of Them

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired.

I just watched the start of Monday night Football in one of my local haunts and the San Francisco Forty Niners are playing the Seattle Seahawks. The national anthem is about to be sung by a man in uniform on a platform flanked by others in uniform. He is an Asian man by the looks of it, and in the US this means East and Southeast Asia it doesn’t mean an Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistani like it would back home. He’s there to show the US military and US society as a whole is inclusive, and non racist.

Below him there are lines of people in military garb and a huge American flag is slowly unfurled on the ground. Perhaps there were jets flying around too as occurs on occasion to advertise US capitalism’s most advanced peace keeping equipment. I left before I could determine that.

The whole scene nauseates me and I let out a loud wow as the monster flag was slowly appearing on the pitch  A young couple sitting a few places over, hear me and the man quickly places his hand over his heart. Oh dear, I thought to myself, I am about to get in trouble. I say should we sit or are we all supposed to stand and the young woman says she too is unsure and feels unsure about it. She is Latina which is encouraging.  I then move on and say it reminds me a bit of Nazi, Germany, a bit too nationalistic for me I say.

I made some comment about the suicides in the military and the way they are treated when they return after finding themselves in the most horrible position of being shot at or having to shoot at another human being with the intention of ending their lives. I point out that those most aggressively campaigning for wars never fight in them and so on, that the rich don’t fight wars working people do.

The young man was clearly not offended by my remarks and I am not sure if he was unsure about my position and did not want to be seen to be enjoying a pint on veterans day without being sufficiently patriotic so he did the hand over heart thing. Either way, they were not gung ho on war and the military and had serious thoughts about the nature of it all. As I left I urged them to watch Sir No Sir as we also talked a little about the Vietnam War.

 But the reality is that the US is a very nationalistic and militaristic society. The draft was ended in 1973 so we have what they call an all-volunteer military force. As most workers don’t join the military for sadistic reasons, the conditions that draw them have to be created. Poverty, desperation or the lack of opportunity for employment and advancement is a big plus. Getting cheap loans, a free education are also used. As it is, less than 0.5 percent of the U.S. population is in the military. This has a crippling effect on a small number of families whose young sons and daughters are sent to defend US capitalism’s profits abroad.

The propaganda of patriotism and nationalism is very strong. We are told to “support the Troops” which means in reality that we must support US capitalism’s predatory wars. But the flag waving is all for when our young people are leaving these shores not so much when they return; this is common of all nations. Meanwhile, the opioid crisis has devastated young veterans and in 2018 325 active-duty members died by suicide.

Veterans of combat have always constituted a significant portion of the homeless, “Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are facing elevated rates of suicide and mental illness, drug and alcohol dependence, car crashes, and homelessness.”, according to statistics, “At least 970,000 veterans have some degree of officially recognized disability as a result of the wars. Many more live with physical and emotional scars despite lack of disability status.”  Watson Institute: Costs of War.

For Veteran’s Day 2018, Caitlin Johnson, the Australian independent journalist wrote the following:

“The US will be celebrating Veterans Day tomorrow, and many a striped flag shall be waved. The social currency of esteem will be used to elevate those who have served in the US military, thereby ensuring future generations of recruits to be thrown into the gears of the globe-spanning war machine.

Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won’t be any of them left. Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil.”

"Last week I saw the hashtag #SaluteToService trending on Twitter. Apparently the NFL had a deal going where every time someone tweeted that hashtag they’d throw a few bucks at some veteran’s charity. Which sounds sweet, until you consider three things:

1. The NFL’s ten wealthiest team owners are worth a combined $61 billion.

2. The NFL has taken millions of dollars from the Pentagon for displays of patriotism on the field, including for the policy of bringing all players out for the national anthem every game starting in 2009 (which led to Colin Kaepernick’s demonstrations and the obscene backlash against him)."

This is an accurate account of what Veterans Day really is about in my view.

I want to remind, no urge the reader, to remember Pat Tillman. Tillman gave up fame and fortune in order to join the US military and defend his country from those that attacked it on September 11^th 2001.  He was all over the media. Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other warmongers took him and ran with him. He would be the poster boy for the US military. He would encourage young men to do the same and join up.

But Pat Tillman was a genuine leader and an honest person. Afghanistan and his experience in the military led him to draw different conclusions. He was not going to do the US warmonger’s bidding. He was not going to be the poster boy for military service. He has been airbrushed from history. He was killed by what we are expected to believe was friendly fire while serving in Afghanistan. The same qualities that drew him to join the military would be the same qualities that would lead him to play a different role on his return. He was respected, looked up to, seen as a genuinely honest and principled individual; everything those who send our young people in to these predatory wars are not.

I recommend the reader take the time to watch The Pat Tillman Story.  One cannot help doubt the official version of his death on watching this while at the same time feeling proud and impressed by his mother and father and the struggle they went through to get to the truth.

Most importantly, lets not continue to be fooled and let’s tell the truth about what the military is for. It is an offensive force, not a defensive one. And for so many it’s simply a job; often the only decent one around.

Another Child Abuse Scandal Rocks Israel

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim

11-8-26

On Facebook  

 

A horrific child abuse scandal, yes another one, rocks Israel. Ariel is a settlement in the occupied West Bank. On Sunday, Israeli prosecutors charged three women from the private "Luchik" daycare there with more than 400 acts of abuse against 17 babies and toddlers, aged six months to three years. You will not be surprised to hear that this occured in Ariel, a major West Bank settlement: 

 

1) The accused are director Natalya Kislevsky, 37, and caregivers Darina (Dasha) Khalufa, 37, and Anna Pagelsky, 40. The indictment runs almost 100 pages and describes "punishment methods."

 

2) The first was "the choking method." The caregivers blocked toddlers' airways with hands, paper or cloth and pinned them to mattresses by the neck. They kept doing it after the children "choked, turned red and fought for breath, to the point of clouded consciousness."

 

3) The second was "the binding method." Children were wrapped tight with their arms pinned and laid face down. Some were force-fed while tied, with their heads tipped back and their jaws forced open. Others were locked alone in a dark room while they cried. The other toddlers watched all of it.

 

4) Palestinian children get the same methods as procedure. UNICEF found they are blindfolded and tied with plastic ties, and called the ill-treatment "widespread, systematic and institutionalised." Save the Children found 60% of former child detainees it consulted had been held in solitary. Rights groups said in April that about 350 children were in Israeli prisons, "bound and blindfolded."

 

5) Israel even passed a law in 2015 that allows force-feeding of Palestinian hunger strikers. In Ariel, force-feeding a tied-up child is one of the charges.

 

When the victims are Israeli toddlers, Israel calls binding, force-feeding and dark rooms abuse and files a 100-page indictment. When the victims are Palestinian children, it calls the same things security. Israel is a sick and violent society and it is now eating itself. 

AOC's Appeal For Unity. Between Capitalists and Workers.

Follow this link for the video short.

Richard Mellor

 

Which “we” is she talking about? The boss and the worker? The Democrat and the Republican? The banker and the bus driver? Yes, we’re all in this together. 

She is one of the Democratic hopefuls in the 2028 election; she wants to obscure the class divide, bury it. Though not a Democratic Party supporter as anyone that reads this blog knows, I was somewhat excited when she first arose on the scene defeating an entrenched Democratic party machine incumbent. 

But there are great dangers when you are thrust in to the enemy’s camp. It’s one thing to criticize the system and its rottenness and bias from without; as a small minority. But to enter its tangled web even if you are forced in from below and have a significant class base, you are faced with an insurmountable challenge. 

We cannot defeat them. We cannot transform society through the ballot box. Look at the Iran war; most Americans oppose it but it’s not ending. Most Americans want health care but the ballot box can’t deliver it and so on. A victory like hers and Mamdani’s is forced to deal with the laws of the system as it is; just calling oneself a socialist is not enough. The interests of the working class, the vast majority of us, cannot be realized within the present economic system of production. 

 

I suggest folks read John Clarke’s piece on this blog that deals with this issue. On the Primacy of Building Movements and the Limits of Electorialism.

The only way to avoid betraying one’s base and instead building on such a success like this woman had in penetrating the club’s defenses, as Mamdani and others have and will, is build and strengthen the movement on the ground. Broaden the struggle against the system of oppression and concentrate on the workplaces, communities, organizations of the working class and youth.

AOC’ appeal for unity here is an attempt to undermine the class conflict inevitable in a system of exploitation. She is lost to the working class not because she is a coward or weak. It is because she does not recognize that the economic system we know as capitalism is heading headlong toward the abyss; it cannot be made nice. And she has no alternative to it. She does not see that that working class can govern. That the working class is the only force in society with the social weight to change it. 

It’s not utopian to see the world in this way. It’s utopian to think we can continue down the path the so-called free market is taking us and avoid catastrophe. 

Michael Roberts: US mid-terms: AI stuck in the middle

 

US mid-terms: AI stuck in the middle

The Democrats won the 2026 US mid-term Congressional elections by a landslide. Before the vote, President Donald Trump told voters to think of him and his record when they voted – it seems that they did so.

About 124 million people voted in the elections, according to preliminary data from the University of Florida Election Lab. That’s up from the 112 million in 2022 and 118.6 million in 2018. But while the overall number of votes cast was up, the voter turnout rate for 2026 still lagged behind both the 2022 and 2018 mid-terms.  So that means that more than half of Americans eligible to vote failed to do so in this drubbing of Trump and the Republicans.

Of the less than 50% that did vote, there was massive swing to the Democrats.  On the national vote, the Democrats led by around a huge 13% points, the largest lead recorded since 1982. It was biggest congressional landslide in 50 years, marking the heaviest Republican defeat since the 1974 Watergate era. The Democrats will end up with up to 255 seats in the lower House of Representatives, marking their largest majority in nearly two decades (218 seats is the pass mark). And they will take 55 seats in the 100 seat Senate and thus control the upper house too.

In every state and every demography the Democrats led.  This was particularly the case with those voters aged 18-29.  Whereas there was a small majority of white males who voted Republican, that was not the case with the under 30s, where white males polled 57-40 for the Democrats. In every other category the lead was higher, with 96% of black females under 30 years voting Democrat. 

Moreover one-third of ALL voters under 30 self-identified as themselves as “democratic socialist” according to NBC’s exit poll — three times as many as those under 30 who considered themselves as Trumpist-MAGA supporters. 

And the issues were clear. According to data compiled by the Pew Research Center in October 2026, the economy was the number one priority for 84% of all voters, followed by 47% of all voters who ranked the Iran conflict started by Trump.  Healthcare was also high up the scale of issues. The vote for the Democrats was against Trump’s unnecessary war against Iran; the rising cost of living in food and energy; his brutal attacks on immigrants in the streets; and disgust at his corruption, lies and bombastic hubris. Opinion polls showed that Trump has the lowest approval rating for a US President ever.

So a Congress now controlled by the Democrats is in a position to investigate and challenge Trump’s activities and policies and to propose alternatives.  Leftist liberal economist Daren Acemoglu saw the Democrat victory as ”a lifeline for US democracy”.But only a lifleline, because voters who took Trump to power in 2024 and have now turned against him, could easily swing back if the Democrats cannot deliver on the issues of the “obscene levels of inequality in this country, with the real affordability crisis and with the vexing problem of creating good jobs for Americans of all skills..” Acemoglu reckons that “neither progressive Democrats’ reliance on taxes, transfers and traditional regulations, nor centrists’ attachment to the status quo, nor the wishful thinking of those banking on AI-driven “abundance” is radical enough.” That’s because things are going to get worse under the AI-led economy. 

What is the answer, according to the Nobel prize winner?  Americans need “well-paid, career-building jobs for all workers, and especially those without a college degree, who have been left behind in the postindustrial economy of the last half century.”  There should be a “workable plan for redirecting AI, so that this promising technology isn’t shaped by the dreams of a small cadre intent on artificial superintelligence and automation of most of what humans do. We must instead articulate why it is feasible and desirable to build pro-worker AI and how this can create jobs and decent incomes for workers.”

Meanwhile, the ‘affordability crisis’ is acute, not just in the US. Households worldwide are struggling with cost-of-living increases due to the wars and the aftermath of the Covid-19 outbreak, with wages struggling to keep up with persistent price pressures. Global prices for many commodities have remained elevated for several years, fuelled first by the pandemic-induced supply chain shortages and then by the wars in Ukraine and Iran.The war in the Middle East, which began last February, has raised the annual global rate of inflation towards 5%, well above the 2% target set by many central banks around the world. Price increases in necessities like food and energy have been particularly sharp. The global food price index is up 42% since the pandemic-led slump of 2020. And in just the last year, crude oil prices are up 57% while diesel is up 50%. The danger is that inflation could accelerate further next year if the Middle East conflicts continue until the end of this year and beyond. The global supply chain is already under renewed pressure and international trade growth is dropping back.

There are many areas of spending for American consumers like health, education and child care where costs have been racing past wage increases in the last 20 years. But now, since the pandemic, price inflation in food, fuel and other necessities are also shooting past wage increases. One year ago, consumer prices in the US were rising by 2.7% year-over-year. US workers’ average hourly pay was growing by 4%. Fast forward to now: prices are now rising 3.5% yoy, but wage growth has slowed to just 3.2%. Pay after accounting for inflation turned negative back in April. In the last year before the election, average real hourly earnings decreased 0.7%.

Average mortgage rates have doubled since the end of the pandemic to over 7% a year. As a result, in the US (and across Europe), the housing market has dived. The IMF’s mortgage-based affordability index (which measures the ratio of actual income to required income for a typical home loan) shows sharp declines. In the US, the index fell from roughly 150 down to the mid-80s (where values above 100 represent affordability).

In contrast, under Biden and Trump, the richest 10% of households saw their median net worth jump from $2.8M to $3.67M, about $872k or 30% up, from 2022 to 2025. The bottom 40% of households (by income) lost ground. Then Trump signed his ‘big beautiful’ bill handing the biggest tax cuts to those at the very top.

No wonder Americans voted out Trump’s Republicans. But what now? The Democrat leaders are now in control of Congress, but what are they proposing to do? What are the chances that the Democrats have any idea how to stop the rise in inflation and the cost of living? And can or will they end the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine that have contibuted to the affordability crisis? 

Democrats claim they will roll back Trump’s tariffs, reverse cuts to Medicare, lower healthcare and housing costs, and increase regulation on tech sectors like AI. But there will be no cuts in the grotesque level of ‘defence’ spending. Indeed, support for Ukraine in the war against Russia will probably be increased. In his new book, Twilight of American Imperialism, Jack Rasmus calculates the astounding rise in US government ‘defence’ spending and costs. According to his estimates, total US defence spending has more than doubled from 2019 at $1.5trn to a staggering $3trn next year. 

It seems the Democrats have no idea about how to control accelerating inflation except to rely on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates – a policy that will only increase the likelihood of a recession. And there are no proposals to reverse accelerating inequality.

Much is made in the mainstream media and among mainstream economists that the US economy is motoring along.  It’s true that US real GDP growth is stronger than in Europe or Japan, but that is hardly a high benchmark. US real GDP increased at an annual rate of 3.4% in the third quarter of 2026 – a seemingly big bounce from Q2. But this hides the trend. Year-on-year real GDP growth is slowing. At 2.1% in Q3 2026, it was near a low since the pandemic. The US economy is still growing, but at no more than 2% a year.

Moreover, US real GDP growth, investment and with it, jobs, are almost totally dependent on the AI investment boom. As former White House economic adviser Jason Furman showed: “The only big real construction increase in the United States over the last year has been data centers, up 64 percent. The power plants that feed them are up a more modest 4 percent, and everything else is down—with a particularly large decline in manufacturing, down 24 percent, which is off what had been a very high peak in 2024.”

These mega investments are managing to drive up output per worker.  The productivity of labour rose 3.6% in the third quarter. That meant the trend growth in productivity now matches the long-run postwar average and is well ahead of the 1.5% pace of the 2007–2019 cycle.

But will this last?  There are already signs that the AI investment boom/bubble is beginning to leak, if not burst – at least in Asia. And now the Democrat victory has sparked a sell-off in broad-based tech and AI stocks, with the Nasdaq sinking 5.5% in a single session, as investors worry that a Democrat Congress will stop or slow data center builds.

The question now is whether investor fears about over-investment and declining prospects for profits from AI will spread. Unless the massive investments in data centers and other AI-connected equipment, chips and software start delivering increased profitability, then a bust is not far away.

Iran: The Story The West Does Not Want You To Know

August 1953 Mohammed Mosaddegh, arrested after CIA/M16 coup

The Story The West Does Not Want You To Know

By Lim Tean*

 

I will be honest about why I wrote this article.

 

Across my social media platforms, I encounter daily a particular brand of ignorance that I find increasingly impossible to ignore. Iran is dismissed as a crazy country ruled by medieval mullahs, its people caricatured as fanatics who chant “Death to America” for no coherent reason. And from that caricature flows a conclusion that should horrify any person of conscience — that it is therefore perfectly justifiable for America, Israel, or any other country to bomb Iran, kill its people, and destroy its infrastructure.

 

This is not analysis. It is the recycling of propaganda as a substitute for thought. And it has real consequences — because populations that are kept ignorant of history can be mobilised to support atrocities committed in their name.

 

Iran is not a cartoon. It is one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilisations. And its anger at America is not irrational. It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

 

Let me show you why.

 

The Original Theft

 

To understand Iran today, you must begin not in 1979, but in 1908.

 

In that year, on the sun-baked plains of Khuzestan, workers drilling for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company struck black gold at Masjid-i-Suleiman — the first great oil discovery in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and ultimately British Petroleum — the BP that today trades on the London Stock Exchange as a pillar of corporate respectability — had found the resource that would not merely enrich its shareholders, but change the course of world history.

 

The discovery was not merely commercially significant. It was strategically transformative. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had made the fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil before the First World War — giving Britain’s fleet superior speed and range, but making it utterly dependent on a secure oil supply. Iranian oil did not merely enrich British shareholders. It powered the British Empire’s ability to wage and win the greatest war in human history. The Iranian people received almost nothing in return.

 

For decades, Britain extracted Iran’s oil under terms of stunning inequality. Iranian workers toiled in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. Iranian communities near the oilfields lived without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation — while British staff enjoyed swimming pools, clubs, and comfortable salaries. The Iranian government received a pittance in royalties, and was denied even the right to audit the company’s accounts. Iran’s greatest natural treasure was being systematically looted, and the Iranian people knew it.

 

A man arose who decided to say: enough.

 

Mosaddegh and the Crime of Democracy

Mohammed Mosaddegh was everything the West claims to want in a Middle Eastern leader. He was democratically elected. He was secular. He was a constitutional lawyer steeped in European liberal tradition, who had studied in Paris and Neuchâtel. He wore suits, not robes. He believed in parliamentary democracy, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.

 

In 1951, as Prime Minister, he did something unforgivable. He nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, returning Iran’s oil to its rightful owners — the Iranian people. The Iranian parliament voted for it unanimously. The Iranian street erupted in celebration. For the first time in their modern history, Iranians dared to believe that the wealth beneath their feet might actually benefit them.

 

Britain was apoplectic. The Americans were alarmed. And so, in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched Operation Ajax — one of the most consequential covert operations in modern history. They bribed Iranian generals, hired thugs to create street chaos, spread disinformation, and toppled the democratically elected government of a sovereign nation. 

 

Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He died in 1967, never having been broken, never having recanted — a man of extraordinary dignity whose only crime was wanting his country’s wealth to belong to his country’s people.

 

In his place, the West reinstalled Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi — and handed him SAVAK, one of the most feared secret police forces in the world, to keep his people in line.

 

This is the original sin. This is where the story truly begins.

 

The Shah’s Gilded Cage

The Shah that America restored and sustained was not a moderniser, whatever his propaganda claimed. He was a man of spectacular vanity and profound disconnect from his own people.

 

Consider this extraordinary fact: Mohammed Reza Shah held his coronation not once, but effectively twice. He had been on the throne since 1941, but waited until 1967 — twenty-six years — to hold his formal coronation, because he felt the circumstances had never been grand enough for a ceremony befitting his self-image. When he finally crowned himself, in a ceremony of breathtaking opulence, ordinary Iranians watched from a distance that was not merely physical.

 

But the coronation was merely a rehearsal for the true performance of imperial delusion — the celebrations at Persepolis in October 1971.

 

To mark the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, the Shah staged a spectacle that remains one of the most extraordinary acts of self-aggrandisement in modern political history. Heads of state and royalty from across the world were flown in. A tent city of fifty lavish pavilions was constructed in the desert near the ruins of Persepolis, the ancient Achaemenid capital. 

 

The tents themselves — along with virtually everything else — were imported from France. Maxim’s of Paris catered the meals. Guests dined on quail eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, and roast lamb, washed down with vintage Bordeaux. Iranian culture was largely absent from a celebration ostensibly honouring Iranian civilisation. The Iranian people were spectators at a party thrown in their name, to which they were not invited.

 

The estimated cost was anywhere between $100 million and $300 million — at a time when millions of Iranians lived in poverty, lacking clean water, adequate healthcare, or basic education.

 

The Iranian people drew their conclusions.

 

Khomeini’s Rational Revolution

When Ayatollah Khomeini offered the Iranian people his theory of velayat-e-faqih — the guardianship of the Islamic jurist — and proposed an Islamic Republic as the vessel for a new Iranian order, he was not offering them theology alone. He was offering them dignity. He was offering them the promise that Iran’s sovereignty, Iran’s resources, and Iran’s future would belong to Iranians — not to the Shah’s court, not to Western oil companies, not to American strategic planners in Washington.

 

The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a mass movement of extraordinary breadth. Secular nationalists, leftists, intellectuals, bazaar merchants, students, and the religious poor all marched together. They had different visions of what would come after — but they were united in what they were marching against. A corrupt, repressive monarchy sustained by American power and serving American interests, which had delivered neither freedom nor prosperity to its own people.

 

When the American Embassy was seized and diplomats taken hostage, the West erupted in outrage. But behind that act was a simple, searing Iranian fear — that America would do in 1979 what it had done in 1953. That Washington would organise another coup, reinstall the Shah, and extinguish the revolution. The hostage crisis was many things — chaotic, counterproductive, damaging to Iran’s own interests — but it was not irrational. It was the desperate act of a people who had already been betrayed once by American power and were determined not to be betrayed again.

 

When America Armed the Man Who Gassed Iranian Children

If the 1953 coup was the original sin, the Iran-Iraq war was the confirmation — the moment that removed any remaining doubt in Iranian minds about what American power truly meant for their people.

 

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. It was an act of naked aggression against a revolutionary government that was still finding its footing, launched with the tacit encouragement of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran as an opportunity to be exploited. The war that followed lasted eight years. It consumed perhaps one million lives. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century’s second half — and it has been almost entirely erased from Western historical memory.

 

What has been even more comprehensively erased is America’s role in sustaining it.

 

As the war ground on and Iranian forces began pushing back Iraqi advances, Washington made a decision of breathtaking cynicism. It could not allow Iran to win. 

 

And so America began providing Saddam Hussein with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions, military equipment, and — most damningly of all — with the precursor chemicals for the weapons that Saddam would use to commit one of the most documented war crimes of the modern era.

 

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces on a massive scale — mustard gas, tabun, sarin. Thousands of Iranian soldiers died in agonising chemical attacks. And Washington knew. American officials knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons. The intelligence community reported it. And the Reagan administration made a deliberate policy decision to continue supporting Saddam regardless — because an Iranian victory was deemed strategically unacceptable.

 

The most haunting chapter came not on a battlefield but in a Kurdish village. In March 1988, Iraqi forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons, killing thousands of Kurdish civilians — men, women, and children — in a single day. It was the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in history. And even then, Washington’s response was muted, carefully calibrated to avoid jeopardising its strategic relationship with Baghdad.

 

Iranian mothers who lost sons to American-supplied chemical weapons are still alive today. Iranian veterans who survived those attacks carry the physical scars — destroyed lungs, ravaged skin, broken bodies — into old age. Iran has never forgotten. Iran will never forget.

 

And yet Western commentators express bewilderment at the “Death to America” chant.

Consider for a moment what that chant actually represents, stripped of its theatrical staging. It represents the voice of a mother whose son was gassed with chemicals whose precursors passed through American hands. It represents the voice of a nation that had its democracy stolen in 1953, its resources plundered for decades before that, its revolution encircled and sanctioned, and its sons killed in a war that America prolonged deliberately to prevent Iranian victory.

 

If any Western nation had suffered a fraction of what Iran has suffered at the hands of a foreign power, that chant would be taught in schools as an anthem of righteous resistance. It would be celebrated in films and memorialised in monuments. Instead, because it is directed at American power, it is presented as evidence of Iranian irrationality. The arrogance required to sustain that position is staggering.

 

47 Years of Punishment

Since 1979, the United States has imposed on Iran some of the most comprehensive and punishing sanctions ever inflicted on any nation in modern history. Sanctions on oil. Sanctions on banking. Sanctions on technology. Sanctions on medicine. Sanctions that have impoverished ordinary Iranians, denied patients access to life-saving drugs, and strangled an economy of 93 million people.

 

And surrounding Iran on all sides — in the Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Arabian Peninsula — America has built a vast archipelago of military bases, projecting power and telegraphing threat. Iran has been encircled, economically strangled, and subjected to covert warfare including the assassination of its nuclear scientists on its own streets.

 

Throughout all of this, Iran has survived. It has adapted. It has built regional influence through patient statecraft, cultivating allies across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It has advanced its nuclear programme not out of theological ambition but out of the entirely rational calculation that the only nations America does not attack are those that possess nuclear deterrence.

Justice Delayed

 

When analysts speak of America’s strategic defeat in its confrontation with Iran, they reach for the language of geopolitics and military balance. But there is another language that must be spoken — the language of history.

 

For 47 years, a people of ancient civilisation, extraordinary intellectual depth, and justified grievance have been punished for the crime of reclaiming their own sovereignty. They were punished for Mosaddegh’s ghost. They were punished for daring to say no to a superpower that had grown accustomed to treating the Middle East as its private strategic estate.

 

The “Death to America” chant that so offends Western sensibilities did not emerge from the Quran. It emerged from Operation Ajax. It emerged from SAVAK’s torture chambers. It emerged from Persepolis while children went hungry. It emerged from sanctions that killed patients who could not obtain medicine. It emerged from chemical weapons whose precursors passed through American hands. It emerged from a history that the West has studiously refused to confront — because confronting it would require acknowledging that the rage it provokes is not irrational.

 

It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.

 

Understanding this does not require endorsing every act of the Islamic Republic. It requires only honesty — the willingness to read history as it actually happened, rather than as Western convenience has chosen to remember it.

 

Iran is not a cartoon. It is a civilisation. And civilisations have long memories.

 

Much of the historical foundation of this piece draws on two remarkable books that I commend to every serious reader: Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran — Axworthy served as Head of the Iran Section at the British Foreign Office before becoming one of the foremost academic authorities on modern Iran — and Scott Anderson’s Shah of Shahs. They changed how I understand this civilisation. They may change how you understand it too.

 

The picture below is of Mohammed Mosaddegh, August 1953- at the moment of his arrest in a coup plotted by MI6 and the CIA

 

*Lim Tean is the founder and Secretary General of the People’s Alliance for Reform (Singapore) 

Israeli Occupation Forces Continue To Attack Palestinian Journalists in West Bank

Israeli soldier shares a dehumanizing photo of the arrest of Palestinian journalist Marah Awad

Andy Worthington*

Nov 2 2026

An Israeli soldier has shared a dehumanizing photo of the Palestinian journalist Marah Awad, blindfolded and handcuffed, after soldiers raided her family home in Beit Ummar, north of Hebron, on October 26.

 

According to her brother Hamouda, Israeli soldiers broke into the home in the early hours of the morning, violently ransacked it, and, after confirming Marah’s identity, asked her, “What do you write about Israel?”, accused her of incitement against the occupying regime, seized her phone and computer, and then tied her hands, blindfolded her, and took her to an unknown location. She is one of around 40 Palestinian journalists, mostly from the West Bank, who are currently held in Israel’s grotesque torture prisons for Palestinians.

 

Marah’s arrest took place during ten days of Israeli aggression in Hebron (Al-Khalil) and the surrounding area, which came to an end today. Over 3,300 people were displaced, schools were closed, homes were destroyed, and the entire area was placed under military lockdown, following an attack on a military checkpoint on October 23 in which two Israeli soldiers were killed. 

 

Over the course of its brutal ten-day occupation, approximately 540 homes were appropriated and used as military barracks by Israeli forces, while at least 115 Palestinians were arrested.

 

*Andy Worthington is a Journalist, activist, photographer, singer & songwriter, based in London UK. He is recognized as an authority on Guantánamo.  His website is here.