Democracy has nothing to do with the chokehold that the warfare state has on the American body politic, writes Norman Solomon.
Pentagon officials testify on June 18 during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the Department of Defense budget request for fiscal year 2026. (DoD/Alexander Kubitza/Public Domain)
Twenty years ago, one day in June 2005, I talked with an Iranian man who was selling underwear at the Tehran Grand Bazaar. People all over the world want peace, he said, but governments won’t let them have it.
I thought of that conversation on Saturday night after the U.S. government attacked nuclear sites in Iran. For many days before that, polling clearly showed that most Americans did not want the United States to attack Iran.
“Only 16 percent of Americans think the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran,” YouGov pollsters reported, while “60 percent say it should not and 24 percent are not sure.”
But as a practical matter, democracy has nothing to do with the chokehold that the warfare state has on the body politic. That reality has everything to do with why the United States can’t kick the war habit. And that’s why the profound quests for peace and genuine democracy are so tightly intertwined.
On Saturday evening, President Donald Trump delivered a speech exuding might-makes-right thuggery on a global scale: “There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days.”
[See: PATRICK LAWRENCE: ‘Completely & Totally Obliterated’]
Now more than ever, the United States and Israel are overt partners in what the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946 called “the supreme international crime” — “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression.”
Naturally, the perpetrators of the supreme international crime are eager to festoon themselves in mutual praise. As Trump put it in his speech, “I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before.” And Trump added: “I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they’ve done.”
[By Monday, Trump had shifted course and announced a ceasefire deal between Israel and Iran.]
Combined US-Israel Military
A grisly and nefarious truth is that, in effect, the Israeli military functions as part of the overall U.S. military machine. The armed forces of each country have different command structures and sometimes have tactical disagreements. But in the Middle East, from Gaza and Iran to Lebanon and Syria, “cooperation” does not begin to describe how closely and with common purpose they work together.
More than 20 months into Israel’s U.S.-armed siege of Gaza, the genocide there continues as a joint American-Israeli project. It is a project that would have been literally impossible to sustain without the weapons and bombs that the U.S. government has continued to provide to the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces.
Israeli airstrikes light up the streets of the Gaza Strip, sometime during the 2023- 2025 campaign. (Jaber Jehad Badwan / Wikimedia Commons /CC BY-SA 4.0)
The same U.S.-Israel alliance that has been committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has also enabled the escalation of KKK-like terrorizing and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people in the West Bank. The ethnocentric arrogance and racism involved in U.S. support for these crimes have been longstanding, and worsening along with the terrible events.
The same alliance is now also terrorizing Iranian society from the air.
As we have seen yet again in recent hours, the political and media culture of the United States is heavily inclined toward glorifying the use of the USA’s second-to-none destructive air power. As if above it all. The conceit of American exceptionalism assumes that “we” have the sanctified moral ground to proceed in the world with a basic de facto message powered by military might: Do as we say, not as we do.
While all this is going on, the word “surreal” is apt to be heard. But a much more fitting word is “real.”
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,” James Baldwin wrote,
“and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
Now, people in the United States have real-time historic opportunities – to do everything we can to take nonviolent action demanding that the U.S. government end its monstrous role in the Middle East.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in June 2023 by The New Press.
This article is from Z Network.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Solomon says 60% of us didn’t want to attack Iran, and 24% were “unsure”. The theories about the intent of the bombing aside for the moment, there is a growing popular voice against our militarism in our country. I didn’t see this in Iraq, or Libya, Sudan, Yemen. Gaza is also becoming totally unsupportable, IMO.
While happy to see a flicker of anti-War sentiment once again in the US, pretty sure that the ‘popular voice’ as presented by State Media is the result of Bad Orange Man being President. The same atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine under Biden were A-OK as were the slaughters in Iraq under the Bushes and under Obama in Libya, Sudan and Yemen. Americans, in general always against War, are not allowed to speak out against War unless Trump is in power.
The state of israel was born through violence, was expanded through violence and is sustained through violence.
Sure enough Annie. Accomplished with way too many freebie’s from the U.S. IMO
Well said Mr. Solomon.
Trump at the bidding of Bennie the blade trashed the JPCOA 8 may 2018 it’s been all down hill ever since.
Simply flattened by the unending ghoulishness of those in the USA government whose aggression
– militarily and/or by governmental sanctions – everywhere in the world appears unending. Toxic
masculinity doesn’t begin to describe it. More like restrained genocidalism, or “slightly inhibited
mass murder and bludgeoning” if you do not do what we say. Viciousness. Carrying a stench of
pathology. “Vicious means deliberately cruel or violent, or marked by violence or ferocity.”(AI)
Doesn’t the word acutely describe our other head of state, Netanyahu and his Smotrich band of brutalizers?
Our Congress, especially, the Democratic leadership are failures in dealing with this same attitude
expressed by Project 2024 and its adherents. ALEC, the Heritage Society, and American Enterprise
Institute all belong to and advance the bullying pathology. All violence is not marked by physicality;
some of the abject worse is that variety of psychological aggression lumped under “control.”
If “we” (the warfare elite) wanted democracy, we (mere U.S. citizens) would have it at home.
Why would the supposedly #1 power in the world need to prove itself over and over to the rest of the world while achieving just the opposite? Why this sick American leadership psyche?
The direct correlation between forever wars and crumbling infrastructure, stagnant wages, and the abandonment of the common good is obvious. Even in the U.S., the insatiable hungry ghosts of the trickle up war profiteers and power mad political leaders can’t be fed infinitely.
reading views like yours, mr. solomon,
tells me: i’m not the only one thinking that
the doomsdays of “divide and CONquer!”
should finally be over.
“peace does not pay!” is still the mantra
of all war mongers who have come out
unscathed from all the killing they still
think they’re entitled to do everywhere.
i am truly embarrassed to witness that my EU
country which started – and lost – two world wars,
still refuses to reverse course. instead of finally
promoting world peace, our f.lawmakers think
they must CONvince us to allocate a massive
5% of our annual budget to defense spending.
if they ever had true intentions to keep the globe
from overheating, i now know: they don’t CARE about
climate change and its hugely costly consequences bc
they fool themselves into thinking that it affects other,
i.e. mostly ‘lesser’ people, in the global south, not us,
of course, up north.
will our protesting voices be heard?
or will they be drowned out by those of all haters of [climate]
justice and equality for all, by all the fear mongers around?
Last I checked, Britain is no longer in the EU.
(Context: A couple of Scotsmen beg to differ with the notion that Germany started the first world war.)
Not “WAR”… business as usual.
You damned sure have a very a strong point here!