It’s dangerous to valorize those who die in pointless wars.
President Donald Trump watching as the American flag is raised on a newly-installed flagpole on the South Lawn of the White House, June 18, 2025. (White House / Daniel Torok)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
Reading by Tim Foley
The U.S. soldiers who are getting killed in the war with Iran were not heroes. They did not die defending their country. They did not die fighting to protect Americans. They died advancing the geostrategic agendas of oligarchs and empire managers which benefit ordinary Americans in no way.
It’s important not to valorize these people for two reasons. Firstly, it assists U.S. military recruitment by falsely portraying these imperial stormtrooper careers as noble and heroic. Secondly, it falsely frames the war they died in as a righteous cause which is making the world a better place, rather than as a war of aggression against a nation that posed literally zero threat to their homeland.
These are not harmless little white lies. They are extremely destructive propaganda narratives which facilitate acts of mass military slaughter on real human beings.
Don’t assist the warmongers in circulating these lies. Don’t pretend they are true to help people feel nice feelings about the dead soldiers. People should not be feeling nice feelings about the dead soldiers. People should be angry and upset, and they should be demanding that this horrific war end immediately.
Those soldiers did not die for any noble reason. They died for money, for power, and for Israel. They wasted their lives, and they died for stupid, unworthy reasons. Don’t let anyone claim otherwise.
On Feb. 28, President Trump told Axios that the war on Iran could end “in two or three days.”
President Donald J. Trump oversees Operation Epic Fury at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, FL, Feb. 28, 2026. (White House photo by Daniel Torok / Public Domain)
On March 1, Trump released a video message saying the war would “take four weeks or less.”
On March 2, Trump said from the White House that the war is “projected four to five weeks,” adding the U.S. military has the “capability to go far longer than that.”
On March 4, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the press, “you can say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight.”
On March 6, Politico reported that the Pentagon is planning for the war to run through September.
I wonder what they’ll be saying after September?
Proportionate? Iran’s not trying to be proportionate. Proportionate would be for Iran to kill Trump. Kill his entire cabinet. Kill his opposition. Bomb the shit out of New York and Los Angeles. Bomb a school full of American kids. Bomb some hospitals. That would be proportionate. https://t.co/3VzLZBrKJQ pic.twitter.com/6SqD2FlXNc
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 2, 2026
The left’s resistance to the Iran war has been relatively muted and inadequate up to this point. One reason for this is because a lot of pro-regime change voices inserted themselves into the pro-Palestine movement and have been promoting their view for three years.
I used to follow a few pro-Palestine accounts on TikTok and Instagram who sound great when they’re talking about Gaza but suddenly transform into Lindsey Graham whenever they’re talking about Iran.
I mean I’m exaggerating slightly — they dress it up in leftist-sounding language etc. — but functionally their position hasn’t been much different from that of Marco Rubio.
I don’t have time to get into a big flame war with minor internet personalities so I’m not going to call anyone out or cite specific examples, but the long and short of it is they wanted regime change and promoted the idea that we should all “center Iranian voices,” i.e., the voices of warmongering Iranian diaspora.
That’s been happening throughout the pro-Palestine movement, both online and off, and it’s put a wobble on people’s confidence when it comes to resisting Trump’s latest mass atrocity.
This idea that we need to defer to the Iranian diaspora about the morality of this war is bat shit insane and does not deserve to be taken seriously.
Too many leftists have let warmongers of Iranian descent bully them into silence on this front in exactly the same way they let western Jews bully them into silence about Palestine for decades.
Their wholesome leftist sensibilities get exploited by cynical manipulators because they want to be receptive to what they perceive as a marginalized group, and it leads them to espouse the exact same foreign policy positions as the C.I.A. and the U.S. State Department.
This is stupid, and it needs to stop. Your instincts about the horrific nature of this war are correct. Anyone who told you not to oppose this is an asshole. Don’t let anyone shout you down and shut you up, regardless of where their family happens to come from. Shout right back at them. Tell them to shut up. You are right, and they are wrong. Get out there and start resisting this thing.
Blumenthal: I am more fearful than ever after this briefing, that we may be putting boots on the ground pic.twitter.com/LYyNzE5yiH
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 3, 2026
I don’t understand people who fret about sending American boots on the ground in a war of aggression that’s already slaughtering hundreds of civilians every day. These people are like space aliens to me. I cannot for the life of me imagine what it would be like to inhabit a mind that sees bombing civilians as fine and only becomes “fearful” of a horrific military conflict if it will kill a lot of soldiers from the same country as you.
CNN has a write-up titled “One Tehran resident was hoping for war, but the death of a friend in a bombing raid ‘destroyed’ him,” which reports the following:
“A resident of Tehran who spoke with CNN on Friday said that he had been hoping for a war that would topple Iran’s ruling government, but the death of his friend in a bombing raid ‘destroyed’ him.
“‘I was waiting for war, I was begging for it,’ he told CNN. ‘I knew that there will be sadness and pain, but I didn’t expect to get involved so quick.’”
Devastation in Enghelab Square, Tehran, on March 3, 2026, following U.S.-Israeli attacks. (Tasnim News Agency / Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
I’m sorry to be insensitive but what the fuck did pro-war Iranians think “please bomb our country” was asking for? What did they think that would look like in practice?
This is why you need to be dismissive of EVERYONE who supports this war. Even Iranian diaspora, and even Iranians in Iran. Nobody who wants the U.S. and Israel to bomb the place where their family lives truly understands what it is they’re asking for.
They’re not interfacing with reality in their worldview; they’ve bought into the war propaganda and ingested a fantasy, just like all the shitbrained warmongering westerners. Nobody with a truth-based relationship with reality would ever ask for this.
Now they’ve got what they asked for, and they’re probably going to watch their country get bombed to rubble and then plunged into chaos and instability for the foreseeable future as the U.S. and Israel try to create a gigantic Libya in west Asia.
Sometimes you need to tell people to shut the fuck up and stop demanding crazy acts of war, regardless of what country their family happens to be from.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from Caitlin’s Newsletter and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
May God, the Almighty, bless you Caitlin Johnstone for this superbly blunt and highly responsible piece of sober journalism. I salute you for your amazingly appropriate phrase : “…all the shitbrained warmongering Westerners”. Just a small revision in order here. Not just SOME Westerners are shitbrained, so too shitty brained are most of the self-indulgent Iranian diaspora in the West and elsewhere and many of the even more shitty-brained elites across the First World who sustain this Zio-Con aerial rape of I.R. Iran with their misapplied finances, logistics, contrabands, armaments and other lethal resources. If tomorrow Trump’s whimsical idiocy leads him to put boots on ground, these shitty-brained allies and Israel-addicted strategic partners would looneyly join in by enthusiastically freefalling their brainwashed youngsters and even booted grannies onto Iran !
Remember what Mr. Trump, a famous draft dodger has said of those in the military. There’re suckers (or words to that effect).
The administration has justified striking Iran not because Iran was poised to attack us, but because we knew that Israel intended attack Iran, after which the US might be attacked” by Iran in response, and therefore we should attack them first.
Doesn’t that sound Orwellian?
It is well to remember the opening statement of Justice Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg trials, during which he condemed “preventive, preemptive war” as the ultimate sin committed by the Nazi regime.
Now we’re beginning to hear the same old justifications we hear every time the establishment serves us up a new war of choice. I just heard, surprisingly, Tucker Carlson (no neocon he) say that “even though we may oppose the war, we should support the troops.”
Hmm, that sounds familiar. Exactly how does one “support the troops” without at least indirectly supporting the war? The only way to “support the troops” is by demanding an immediate end to this atrocity. But how many Americans are talking about marching in the streets these days. I’m old enough to remember the Vietnam war. It was only because we had a selective service system that protesters flooded the streets. Tragically, if this horror lasts very long, and we see US “boots on the ground,” it might take a resumption of the draft to resurrect an antiwar movement in this country.
“Sometimes you need to tell people to shut the fuck up and stop demanding crazy acts of war, regardless of what country their family happens to be from.” — Caitlin Johnstone
“The enemy is anyone who is going to get you killed, no matter which ‘side’ they are on.” — Joseph Heller ‘Catch-22’
A key activity for Americans right now would be “counter Recruitment”. If you know any young people who are swept up in the propaganda and thinking about enlisting, please go have a long hard talk with them. As a larger issue, activists might want to (discreetly) watch recruitment stations, or perhaps follow the recruiting sergeant to schools, and then work to see who they are targeting and have those long hard talks with them.
Don’t get mad …. organize.
A “teach-in” might not be a bad thing to resurrect for this coming Easter as well.
Words of wisdom from other dissidents who have opposed the authoritarian and militaristic tendencies of their own respective societies, but still rejected or came to reject US-led meddling in their country and others (see also: Ai Weiwei, Andrei Nekrasov, Simón Rodríguez Porras, Francisco R. Rodríguez, Edgardo Lander, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), etc.):
“More than fourteen or fifteen people in my family were executed by Saddam, so I was so happy the day that the Americans came and got rid of Saddam’s oppressive regime. […] Saddam has gone, but in his place, we now have 1,000 Saddams. I feel like Iraq has been stolen from us.”
– Kadhim al-Jabouri, former motorcycle repairman for Saddam Hussein imprisoned for 1.5 years under his regime who later participated in the April 2003 destruction of his Firdos Square statue, quoted in “I Toppled Saddam’s Statue – Now I Want Him Back,” British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), July 5, 2016
“The least bad option, Nayouf says, is for UN agencies, the European Parliament and human rights groups – ‘not hypocritical states’ – to continue to press for an end to ill treatment, respect for fundamental rights and the release of political prisoners. ‘But to change the regime by force? No. I don’t want to see Syria destroyed.’”
– Nizar Nayouf, political activist and journalist imprisoned and tortured under the regime of Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad in Syria from 1991 to 2001, quoted in Lara Marlowe, ““Democracy in Syria Would Be Bloody ‘Like Iraq’,” The Irish Times, Aug. 31, 2007
““I will never cheer the U.S. government striking other countries in any way, shape, or form because history has shown that when U.S. government intervenes, it’s never because of humanitarian reasons. […] I don’t think the United States should have ever intervened in Syria at all, or in any other place.”
– Maher Arar, wrongfully accused Syrian-Canadian terror suspect imprisoned and tortured by the Assad regime with US complicity in 2002-03, quoted in “The Emperor’s New Cruise Missiles” from Jeremy Scahill’s “Intercepted” podcast on Apr. 12, 2017
Poverty is not an excuse for joining a military that murders innocent people on a regular basis in service to a corrupt, rapacious government that starts aggressive wars constantly.
Joining the US military is volunteering to be a war criminal.
Like poverty has been offered as an excuse for participating in brainless mercenary wars by individuals, allied nations and states feigning alleged neutrality too proffer their prospective growth and prosperity as “national” excuses for smartly collaborating in any sadistic rape by the globalistic imperialists and the driving Zionists ! The key question is what actually motivated Trump to buy into this clearly Zionistic-subvertion of the peaceable doctrine of pre-emption ? Surely, it can’t just be blackmail via Epstein file !
They’re cannon fodders!
Victims of their own stupidity.
Didn’t trump say , I paraphrase ,He disliked those who get caught ?
in regards to the wet fart blaster The Maverick , Jumping J McCon
Sweet couple