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If the left is mad at you, go join the far right instead of mending fences! Genius! I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, the far-right government of Israel had gone all in on murderous violence in order to steal land under the guise of “self-defense.” The left was no longer buying that particular line of bullshit because, let’s be honest, Netanyahu’s government wasn’t even trying to hide what they were doing anymore. Why bother when America has a Christian Nationalist government willing to support Israel under any circumstances because they think Jesus Christ is returning at any moment? If you were a cycncial power-hungry piece of shit like Benjamin Netanyahu, wouldn’t you go for the brass ring as long as these theocratic fucksticks were running the show?

The right, of course, fully supported any violence that resulted in dead Muslims, so why not cross the aisle? Oh, everyone knew that the right harbored an immense amount of antipathy for Jews, but Israel was just sooooo fucking important to the Evangelicals! They would definitely be good long-term allies!

Looked like it was paying off, too! The Trump regime was abusing using the full power of the federal government to silence critics of Israel! Happy days!

The second Trump administration carried this partnership to its logical conclusion. Official actions now focus on Jews — at least those who support Israel in traditional ways — alongside Christians, white people and men as groups that need government protection, in the form of executive orders, investigations and federal lawsuits.

What could possibly go wrong? The regime was on the side of Israel, the left was on the run, and Israel was safe! Hooray!

Oh, but there was that pesky little Nazi problem, wasn’t there? You may have noticed I’ve written about it a few times.

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I’ve been banging this drum for a while now because it’s been super obvious that the American right was infested with literal Nazis (and pedophiles, but I repeat myself) and they were ascendant. As I point out with some regularity, I am not an Ivy League-educated political wizkid.1 I possess no special power to see the future. I am, however, unencumbered by the need to pretend the Republican Party is a normal political party instead of a collection of rapists, perverts, pedophiles, and fucking degenerate grifters. It comes in very handy for accurately understanding reality.

Like, for instance, pointing out to my fellow Jews over a year ago that they were committing suicide by allying themselves with literal goddamn Nazis:

I was not subtle about it:

Don’t you fucking say it can’t happen. You’re watching Republicans do it right fucking now to the trans community and immigrants and you’re not saying a fucking word because “Something something Trump is pro-Israel.”

It can happen and you fucking damn well know it will. The ultimate goal of the Christian Nationalists is to send all the Jews to Israel so we can fulfill their grand end-times prophecy. That’s all their support for Israel was ever about in the first place. They expect us to all die in a grand war against Muslims and kick off the Apocalypse. If you’re not acutely aware of this, you are so painfully ignorant, you’ll be inside the gas chamber expecting a steak dinner before you realize you’re choking to death on the Zyklon B.

Was that too harsh? Too fucking bad. You’re siding with the Nazis because you think you’ll be safe, said the sheep hiding in the wolf’s shadow.

That brings us to today. Would you be shocked to discover that, oh my fucking god!, it turns out that the Republican Party might not be such good friends to the Jewish community after all?!

…the Republican Party seems to be in the midst of an antisemitism rug pull: Just as major Jewish leaders decided to start working in earnest with the conservative movement and burn bridges with liberals, the MAGA vanguard has decided that Jews may not belong in their coalition after all.

Shapiro, an Orthodox Jewish lawyer who rose to prominence first as a columnist and later as a campus speaker and podcaster before starting The Daily Wire in 2015, has found himself on the losing end of a battle with Tucker Carlson for the future of the conservative movement.

Of course Ben Shapiro is losing to Tucker Carlson. Shapiro offers a veneer of respectability to hide the right’s racism. Carlson offers naked hate with a huge dollop of antisemitism on top. Gee fucking whiz, I can’t imagine why the white nationalists that comprise the GOP’s base are flocking to Carlson. They’ve only become more extreme and violent over the last 50 years. It was impossible to predict they would openly embrace fascism and Hitler!

Except, you know, for all the times they openly talked about how much they loved fascism and Hitler. But other than THAT, how the fuck were right-leaning Jews to know!?!?!? They were totally blindsided by the giant swastika!

It didn’t have to be this way, of course:

Jewish leaders had a choice to make as they faced growing animosity toward Zionism among their longtime partners on the left. They could have engaged in the excruciating work of reconciling their otherwise liberal values with their support for an increasingly illiberal Israel, while simultaneously trying to get their progressive allies to develop a more nuanced understanding of antisemitism and do a better job of including Jews in their coalition.

But that would have been too fucking hard, right? Soooo much easier to scream “antisemitism!” and use it as a cudgel to end any discussion about what Israel was doing. And how did that fucking work out?

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Literally every accusation of Israeli war crimes and imperialism turned out to be correct. Netanyahu’s murderous government is slaughtering civilians with zero regard for either international law or even Israeli law. They are attacking neighboring countries with the explicit intent of snatching and occupying land they have no legal right to.

One can defend Israel’s right to exist and still condemn what it is doing. I do it all the fucking time. One can denounce Israel’s war crimes and still hold the left accountable when it crosses the line into real antisemitism. I do it all the fucking time. It’s not that hard.

Here are some really easy examples:

• “Israel’s government should be tried for war crimes!” = Legitimate criticism

• “Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth!” = Antisemitism

• “Fuck Israel!” = Legitimate criticism

• “Jews are genocidal monsters!” = Antisemitism

See how easy it is? It’s sooooo fucking easy. If you’re not sure if something is antisemitic, just replace “Israel” or “Jew” with literally any other country or ethnic group/religion and think, “Would it be OK to say this?” If the answer is “I would never be OK with that!”, then it’s OK to push back. If you could swap in “America” or “Americans” and the statement is fine, then you should probably nod your head and agree. Both countries are currently being run by violent fascists intent on murder for fun and profit and ethnonationalism.

Israel should exist. It’s a country with millions of people who were born there over the last 75 years. In no universe can erasing it be separated from antisemitism because, whatever your reasoning, you will not apply it to a single other country, which means your reasoning is based on “Israel is filled with Jews.” Feel free to lie to yourself, but don’t think for a second you’re going to lie to me successfully.2

But that does not mean Israel is above criticism. No one is. Israel is drenched in blood. Russia is drenched in blood. America is drenched in blood. China is drenched in blood. And I’m only talking about this century. Never mind the horrors of the 20th.

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American Jews, specifically pro-Israel American Jews, had a choice. They could have demanded Israel do better. BE better. They could have demanded accountability from both Israel for its violence and the left for engaging in widespread antisemitism. Don’t you fucking tell me the left is innocent. I’ve been watching its rapid descent into hate for the last three years. The right paved the way, and far too much of the left gleefully followed.

But instead of demanding better for both Israel and our side, pro-Israel Jews threw their lot in with the Republican Party. They bet that they would be safe with the Evangelicals even as the GOP was being swallowed, in plain fucking sight, by Nazis. It was already a bargain with the Devil because Evangelicals hate us to begin with. Everyone knows the religious right expects us all to die when their Messiah returns. But until that happens, which is never, the theocrats will be more than happy to pour unlimited money to protect Israel until Armageddon. Or until they get impatient and start WWIII to skip to the end.

Who could have possibly foreseen that a party moving further and further to the extreme right would somehow rediscover its love for Nazism, the end boss of right-wing extremism? It beggars the imagination that a party whose only move after losing elections is to lurch to the right would keep doing that until it reached full-throated fascism and genocide. There’s no fucking way that could happen here!

This is what happens when people take the easy way out. When they opt for power over principle. Burning bridges instead of mending fences. When they place devotion to Israel over the safety of all Jews everywhere. These reckless morons have set us back decades. They have made antisemitism acceptable, and hate is fungible. I promise you, the right is already using it to recruit people on the left to their cause. Because if the Jews are behind everything, what other lies have the liberals been telling you?

All of the coming hate and fear and, yes, murder because I promise you, the pogroms are coming again, and for what? Nothing. The Republican Party will be fully Nazi within a decade, and Jews will have no home there. By then, the left will be so done with the conflation of antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel (of which there are so very many) that we will not be welcome there, either. We will be at the mercy of whoever feels like picking up a rock and smashing the window of any shop owned by a Jew. Or the skull of any person visibly identifiable as one. Well-played. A masterful gambit that will surely work out in the long run for us all.

You stupid fucking idiots.

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Donald Trump needs to go ahead and lose his stupid-ass war on Iran and let the world get back to what passes for normal.

Here is what normal has been for us: We have paid artificially cheap prices for the bulk of our everyday living expenses for decades. The prices for those inexpensive t-shirts and underwear and socks and clothes at Walmart and H&M and Shein are subsidized by cheap labor in foreign countries, sometimes at sweatshop-level pay and conditions. Those $4.05 gallons of milk and $3.99 chicken breasts and $4.50 pork chops are subsidized by farm animal feed prices kept low by federal farm programs like crop insurance, agricultural risk and price loss coverage. Gas prices, inflated as they are at the moment, are subsidized by federal tax credits, 100 percent write-off deductions for drilling costs, accounting methods that allow for depletion allowances, and cheap leases on federal land.

We know that the slammed-shut Strait of Hormuz is driving up prices, but how?

Diesel.

Diesel fuel is up 50 percent since February 28, and its cost spans everything from powering the trucks that deliver gasoline and diesel fuel to gas stations to delivery of every single product along the food chain. Diesel powered trucks pick up corn and wheat and soybean seeds from where they are grown on farms and deliver the seeds to warehouses. Diesel trucks carry the seeds from warehouses to farms that buy the seeds to plant every spring. Diesel powers the tractors that pull the planters that put the seeds in the ground. Diesel powers the same tractors that spread fertilizer and pesticides on the crops when they’re growing. Diesel fuel the tractors that harvest the crops and powers the trucks that haul the grain to elevators on the farm, and from the farm to the grain elevators where it is sold into market. Diesel trucks pick up the grain and haul it to be milled, more the trucks haul the milled grain to factories where it is turned into feed or bread or cereal, and then diesel trucks pick up the finished product and haul it to warehouses, and from there, haul the product to stores where it is stocked on shelves.

And this isn’t even getting into what else diesel trucks deliver – everything from jet fuel to asphalt used to repair potholes to new electric service equipment to repair stuff that’s been damaged by storms to carrying lumber for new houses to delivering every single item that either mends your health or saves your life in a hospital or doctor’s office to the new washing machine and dryer you need to the bike you want to buy for your daughter’s birthday to every bloody thing including Tylenol and cosmetics you have ordered over the past year from Amazon.

And then there are the diesel engines that power the container ships that move everything we import to our shores and the diesel powered locomotives on trains that deliver it all to the diesel trucks that carry it to the stores where the prices go up every day.

The inflation caused by Trump’s war is happening all over the world.

There was a national security briefing for Trump two days before he ordered the attack on Iran. It’s the one during which Netanyahu made his big pitch that now is the time to attack – they could hit the entire Iranian leadership with a couple of missiles on the 28^th. Iran is “weak,” Trump was told. Our military is the “the most powerful in the world,” he was told. We have “warriors.” They have “fanatics.” Up in the West Wing, you could probably hear the Diet Coke cans popping down in the Situation Room where Trump was assured that Iran would “surrender” or “capitulate.”

Here’s a horrifying thought. If anyone even mentioned the Strait of Hormuz, Trump was told it could be “handled.” And it’s a sure thing that nobody said a word about the prices of everything being affected by this little air-war “excursion” they had planned for his approval.

And here we are.

Losing a war is a terrible thing, but God knows, we’ve gotten good at it. We didn’t win Korea. That war ended in 1953 with a ceasefire, overseen by a permanent U.S. military presence of God only knows how many weapons and about 30,000 soldiers who serve as a deterrent to North Korean aggression. We sure as hell didn’t win in Vietnam. We invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and didn’t win either conflict, ousted by the humiliation of being told to leave by the government of Iraq and a humiliating military defeat in Afghanistan.

Of course, every administration since Eisenhower has framed our military adventures as victories. We may start wars, but we don’t lose them.

The humiliation this time is not that we attacked yet another country a fraction of our size – we do that every few decades -- but that we ran out of ammunition doing it. Here we are, the country with the largest defense budget in the world by something like a factor of ten, and we just didn’t use enough of the trillions we have spent on “defense” on cannons and artillery shells and bombs and missiles, the stuff that goes “bang” and blows shit up when you pull the trigger. In fact, over the weekend, our Secretary “Look at my ill-fitting suit” Hegseth pitched a tantrum because Senator Mark Kelly had the temerity to go on one of the Sunday talk shows and say out loud what everyone already knows, that our stockpile of every missile in our arsenal is dangerously low, and it “will take years” to “replenish those reserves.”

Hegseth accused Kelly of “violating his oath” and said the Pentagon legal counsel will “review” his comments, to which Kelly responded by referring to a clip of Hegseth saying exactly the same thing at a recent hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in a response to a question from, you guessed it, Senator Kelly, asking how long it will take the U.S. to replenish weapons stockpiles. “I mean, months and years,” Hegseth responded. “I mean, we’re building new plants in real time.” Which kind of sounds like Hegseth should be the one being investigated by the Pentagon legal counsel, but such a thing would make way too much sense, so we know that’s not going to happen.

We’re low on bombs, low on missiles, we can’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz with the largest navy on the seas, so what are we going to do? Well, the news today was that Trump found Iran’s latest peace proposal “totally unacceptable,” even though he admitted that he hadn’t read the whole thing. The ceasefire “is on life support,” Trump was quoted as saying, so he called a meeting of his “war cabinet” to discuss “increasing the pressure on Iran.” An Israeli television network reported that a source told them “Trump is going to hit them a bit.” The source must have been Trump himself, because it sounds just like him.

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan were humiliations, sure, but it was just the U.S. against single countries that didn’t have much effect on the rest of the world. The problem with this one is that Trump got us into a war that affects the whole world. Gas and other fuels are already being rationed in certain countries. The midterm elections aren’t the only thing that will be happening in November. Cold weather will be setting in. In places that depend on liquified natural gas for heat, people are going to be desperate.

If Trump doesn’t somehow slide into his own form of capitulation to Iran by this coming winter, planting season in the spring is going to be hit with some truly unacceptable percentages. Fertilizers like nitrogen and urea are already up more than 50 percent. Next year it won’t be just high prices, it will be shortages.

Every leader around the world knows that the way to get to Trump is to pay him off. The Swiss gave him a gold bar and a Rolex desk clock. The South Koreans gave him a fucking ceremonial gold crown. Qatar infamously gave him a gold plated 747.

The script is going to be flipped on Trump this time. He’s the one who’s going to have to pay off the Iranians to get the Strait of Hormuz open. Maybe he can throw in a promise to build a Trump hotel and a golf course on the beach in Bandar Abbas, the way his sons want to do in Gaza. That should delight the mullahs.

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As we enter the third month of Trump’s “two-week war,”

we have passed the point where we can avoid the oil shock. We are seeing increasingly hysterical articles on Substack warning of societal collapse and famine. These are clickbait, and I find them offensive. My personal favorite are the ones who are pretending we’re going to run out of oil, as if the Strait of Hormuz is where we get all of our oil instead of 10-20% of it. We’re heading for Mad Max territory, baby!

But, no. We are not heading towards full societal collapse, even under this regime of dumbfuck fascist pedophiles.

On the other hand, we are just about out of mitigation efforts. We’re just pretending we aren’t, and everything is fine. Sure, gas prices are kind of high, and prices have been creeping up. But have things really changed for the average American? Why, the economy is still limping along, and the stock market is doing awesome! It’s almost back to its all-time high!

We’re creating jobs and the rich are doing just fine, and isn’t that what really matters? The legacy press is a little nervous, but hey, things don’t look that bad right now. Why, the big banks aren’t even sure if there’s going to be a recession!

Just to be clear: If you have money with Goldman Sachs, you should move it. They are very bad at economic forecasts if they think we are only facing a 25% chance of a recession.

Trump’s oil shock is going to hit sometime in June or July. If we’re very very lucky, it will be delayed until August, but I wouldn’t want to bet on that. It’s going to hit hard, and it’s going to hit fast because, for some insane reason, the legacy press is pretending it’s not coming at all, so the general public really doesn’t know about it.

Too many of the people who do it see it coming are, just as inexplicably, couching it in terms of Armageddon. They’re predicting so much chaos and destruction that people, understandably, are tuning them out. Fearmongering clickbait may get clicks on your article, but it will not encourage readers to act.

I am not pretending that nothing is coming, and I am definitely not predicting the Apocalypse. I am, however, telling you that things are going to suck in the near future. A few months before Covid, I told people to start stocking up on food and to pull money out of the bank. It didn’t occur to me to buy toilet paper because who knew people were going to panic buy that into oblivion for three or four months?1

So, here we are again, with me warning you that you need to prepare for some rough waters ahead. Buy shelf-stable foods. Rice, beans, canned meats. Flour and yeast and salt and sugar. Peanut butter, crackers, pasta, jars of sauce, etc. Here’s a helpful list and why these foods are good.

There are two things happening at the same time:

1. Diesel is going to get much more expensive, which means shipping everything will get much more expensive. Thus, prices will go up on everything, everywhere. There will be fuel shortages, which means some trucks will not go out. A smart and competent government would prioritize getting food to grocery stores over golf clubs to sporting goods stores. But we do not have a smart and competent government. It’s going to be a shitshow run by drunken clowns on meth. What could go wrong?

2. The fertilizer problem - at least one-third of the world’s fertilizer goes through the Strait of Hormuz. Growing season is already underway, and the window for fertilizing crops has passed. Fertilizing them later will not make up for the lost time at the beginning. That’s just how plants work. So there will be fewer crops later this summer and in the Fall. Parts of the world are going to experience famine. We won’t, but there will be less, and what there is will be much more expensive. Buy whatever food you can store now, before prices start to skyrocket and shelves start to thin out.

Now, when Trump’s oil shock hits, the economy, already wobbling, will go into a free-fall. I’m sure Silicon Valley will continue to pump hundreds of billions into their data centers in their insane pursuit of a godlike supreme artificial intelligence that will make them immortal, but that will not be enough to keep the economy afloat.

And, no, I am not kidding about the immortal thing. I really wish I were:

Part of this bizarre complacency we are watching unfold is that companies have built more robust supply chains because of how Covid blindsided the world. Before, everything was purchased and moved on an “as-needed” basis, and that proved to be disastrous. Now, companies keep stock on hand in case of a disruption so they can run on that for a while. No need to worry, everything is fine! As long as the emergency doesn’t last too long. Like, say, less than three months.

And to be fair, no one could have anticipated some fucking imbecile starting a war that would cut off 20% of the global oil supply, one-third of the global fertilizer, and an enormous amount of the global plastic supply. A war that appears to have no end date and was started with no warning or plans to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, even though any moron with 30 minutes of regional history under their belt could have told you Iran would close the Strait immediately.

So, here we are, just weeks away from an economic time bomb the press is studiously pretending isn’t there. When it detonates, how, exactly, do they intend to protect Trump from the consequences? That is, after all, what they appear to be doing right now. From the beginning of the war, the press has barely talked about what would happen if the war lasted more than a few weeks. They absolutely did not talk about what would happen if it lasted more than a month. We’re entering month three, and they are still barely acknowledging what the long-term impact will be, much less what is about to happen and can no longer be avoided, even if Iran agreed to open the Strait right this very second (which they absolutely will not fucking do).

I can only conclude the fix is in and the order has gone out to shield the regime from the consequences of its own stupidity. Something the legacy press has become quite adept at over the years. We have a resurgence of deadly childhood diseases that were effectively eradicated, and it barely makes the headlines for more than a few hours. We literally do not know how many women have died from being denied reproductive healthcare because the legacy press can’t seem to find the time or resources to compile a list. Literally hundreds of Republicans have been outed as pedophiles in the last several years, giving the Catholic Church a real run for its money in the category of “Institutions That Should Be Burned To The Ground To Protect Children.” For some reason, the legacy press hasn’t been able to connect the myriad dots into a cohesive picture.

The unifying problem with these stories is that they cannot be blamed on Democrats. At all. Without a feasible path to accusing “both sides” of causing the pain and suffering, the press would prefer not to talk about them. And so it will be when Trump’s oil shock hits the economy like a sledgehammer.

Will there be gas lines? Maybe. There are a lot more EVs on the road these days, so it might not be as brutal as it was in the 1970s. We also produce a lot more oil domestically than we used to. Still, it’s going to be harsh. Watch for lots of stories about California struggling. Less about Florida nd Texas, though.

Watch for stories about stores in New York City having empty shelves. Less stories about rural hospitals running short on supplies. Any way the press can make it look like Democrats are failing to meet the challenges of Trump’s disaster will be pushed to the front, while the regime’s failures will be downplayed. But you can only paper over reality for so long. Everyone will know what is happening and why. No matter what Fox News says, Joe Biden did not close the Strait of Hormuz.

In the coming weeks, you will be confronted with some people telling you everything is fine and others that this is literally the end of civilization. Both are lying to you. Asia was hit with their oil shock weeks ago, and it hasn’t collapsed into fire and brimstone. Please note the press has barely mentioned what they’re going through. Europe will have its oil shock in the coming weeks and, again, they will not collapse and, again, the press will somehow manage to barely notice it.

And then it will be our turn. Ignore the fearmongers and ignore the liars telling you everything is normal. You still have time to prepare, and knowing what is coming strips it of its power to terrorize and paralyze. My job is to spook you enough to get your ass into gear, not to freeze you into inaction, and absolutely not to lull you into ignoring what’s coming. Trump has fucked us all, but that doesn’t mean you have no options. There’s a lot you can do, and you still have the time to do it. So get moving!

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There are only 175 days until the midterms, and the regime is panicking. They’re afraid of us. Keep making them afraid every single day. Remember, you are never alone. We beat the fascists once. We will fucking do it again.

At least Donald Trump still walks across the South Lawn to his Marine helicopter and stops occasionally to banter incoherently with the press. That ain’t happening with his pal Vladdy The First in Moscow these days. Drone strikes deep within Russia, including some that have reached into and damaged buildings in Moscow, have driven Russia’s president underground where he reportedly moves within “an archipelago of massive sub-surface bunkers,” according to Forbes. Putin is apparently so concerned about a possible coup and getting hit by a Ukrainian drone that the only time he has been seen in public recently was for the severely truncated Victory Day parade in Red Square this week, which featured exactly zero tanks, rocket launchers, ballistic missiles and all the regular show-of-strength stuff that the annual parade usually puts on. Also, the troops that did parade were said to be out of step, bringing to mind Trump’s 250^th Army anniversary parade last summer, when soldiers marching past the White House reviewing stand looked like they were out for a weekend stroll.

The other bad news for Trump pal Putin came this morning in a New York Times story that reported at least 352,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since Putin began his war on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. And that number doesn’t include the Russian troops killed this year, which would add at least 40,000 to 50,000 to that number, according to the best estimates of Russian losses.

I think the number could be even higher, as many as 500,000 Russian deaths. The methodology used to arrive at the casualty figure, according to the Times, included studying social media posts and Russian probate records. However, Putin’s paranoia has reached a level that has caused him to internet access to areas of Russia this year, so even social media posts about soldier’s deaths aren’t reliable. It’s questionable whether Russian probate records are accurate, as well, and the figure for Russian battlefield deaths does not include foreign fighters Russia has put on the battlefield, some of them mercenaries sourced from African countries, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Let’s put it this way: when you’re fighting a country with a GDP that is about a tenth the size of yours, not to mention a landmass dwarfed by your own, you’re not doing too good on the battlefield if your casualties are more than twice those of your enemy.

Not good, Vladdy-poo. It’s no wonder you’ve sentenced yourself to tanning beds and filtered bunker air and every bite you take and your sips of tea are pre-tasted by an aide to make sure you’re not Navalnied by a clutch of colonels looking to make themselves instant oligarchs in a coup.

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Over the years, I have sat down at a good number of Foreign Affairs Desks to write reports. My favorite was the one I had in Mosul, Iraq, in 2003. I was with an infantry company in a small basecamp they had established on the edge of the Old City in a former social security office. To fit canvas cots into the place, they had removed all the desks in the building and piled them in an alley in back, so lacking a real desk, I made one with two stacks of boxes of MRE’s and a piece of lumber I found leaning against the wall outside the building.

I had an actual wooden writing desk in a common area on my floor in the pension where I stayed in Beirut. I set up my Olivetti Lettre 22 and pounded away on Christmas night in 1974 as artillery thundered outside the window from the hillsides just south of the city. My desk in Haarlem in the Netherlands overlooked the train station, and the one I had in Paris looked out through French doors on a walled garden in what they would now call a “boutique” hotel just off the Champs Elysees. I filed my story about the war of terror then raging in the Middle East at a telex machine in a basement room in the hotel – click thunk ckick thunk click thunk – the keyboard worked to create its long ribbon of punctured paper tape that I would feed into the maw of the machine to transmit the story over phone lines under the Atlantic when I was finished writing.

There was something magical about working overseas back then. My backpack was stuffed with paper maps of where I had been and where I was going, and no one back in New York knew where I was from day to day, even week to week, because making international phone calls was so expensive, and letters took days to arrive even when sent via airmail, which was also expensive and only marginally faster than regular mail that went from overseas to the United States on cargo ships.

This afternoon, my friend Clyde Haberman sent out an email with a great line from the Hitchcock movie, “Foreign Correspondent.” Haberman wrote, “The publisher asks a reporter played by Joel McCrea, ‘How would you like to cover the biggest story in the world today?’ The reporter replies, ‘Give me an expense account and I’ll cover anything.’’’ That was the way it was when newspapers and magazines were flush with advertising money and a seat in coach on an international flight didn’t feel like you were being strapped into the electric chair. Airport waiting areas crackled with conversations in a hundred different languages and accents, men were attired in jackets and trousers and long overcoats, and women had had their hair done and wore perfume and pearls and heels and sometimes even gloves, and everyone smoked. On the plane, there was a smoking section in the back of First Class as well as coach, so no matter where you sat, you couldn’t escape the smell of cigarettes.

At the other end of your flight was a foreign land and its mystery. You didn’t speak the language, sometimes you didn’t even know where you were going to stay, and the story assignment you had been given in New York could have been rendered moot by the time you landed. The war that was supposed to break out, didn’t. The minister you were supposed to interview had been deposed by a coup. The politics of a country or even a region had been frozen solid by fear of a terrorist attack that happened on the ground or at sea or in the air while you were on your flight. The cab driver wouldn’t take you where you wanted to go because a new militia had taken over the area and set up roadblocks you couldn’t get through.

Spring is upon us in Northeast Pennsylvania, although across the country in the Rockies they’re digging out from a late snowfall that is said to be as wet as it is deep. There is a war going on in the Middle East, because there is always a war in the Middle East. When governments aren’t at war with each other, they are at war with their own people, and the climate is at war with all of them, all the time.

It used to be that you had to travel overseas to witness wars by governments against their own citizens, but that is not necessary anymore. You can take a domestic flight to a city anywhere in this country and see men wearing masks and helmets and combat vests carrying rifles lining up civilians and handcuffing them and driving them away to be imprisoned behind the kind of barbed wire enclosures you used to have to travel to distant lands to encounter. The word “concentration camp” that you once saw in history books or reports from dictatorships across oceans now appears in our own press about our own country almost daily.

Deciphering reality from propaganda used to be something that you had to do in foreign capitals that were unfriendly to this country such as Moscow and Budapest and Beijing. Now propaganda appears on a screen you can hold in your hand and read as you sit in a café in your own hometown, and deciphering it is just as hard as it was when it was generated in a foreign language.

To learn what is really happening in the war that our own tax dollars are paying for is impossible. You can’t travel where the war is because flights have been cancelled to most of the region, and even if you drove across borders and arrived near where the missiles are flying or have flown, you can’t learn anything because every place anywhere near the war is off limits. You can’t learn anything from looking at satellite photos, because our government has shut down distribution of commercial satellite images of the entire area around the Persian Gulf. The country that our president has ordered to be bombed and “obliterated” by missiles has distributed satellite images of damage they have done to U.S. bases. It feels odd to depend on the “enemy” to provide information, but then, Iran is not technically our enemy because we have not declared war on that country, and our president tells us that it is not a war that is being fought, but an excursion our military has made into lands where we are not wanted, or the war is over.

But I don’t know, because nobody knows anything. Today, Rachel Scott, an excellent reporter for ABC News, talked to our president, because apparently if you call him on his cell phone, he will talk to you. She asked him about the apparent breakdown of the ceasefire in the Strait of Hormuz, where U.S. naval vessels have been fired upon by Iranian drones and so-called “fast boats,” and U.S. forces have hit what they call “targets” on Iranian soil along the Strait. “It’s just a love tap,” our president told the reporter from ABC News.

I don’t know about you, but I have never seen a love tap that leaves a crater in the ground 30 feet deep and 50 feet across where a building used to stand.

I guess we don’t have real foreign affairs anymore. What we have is a Secretary of State who travels all the way to Rome to meet with the Pope of the Catholic Church to try to convince him to stop being critical of the U.S. war on Iran by giving him a gift of a little piece of engraved crystal in the shape of a football.

Upon seeing the crystal football, Pope Leo, who is from Chicago and is known to be a fan of the baseball team, the White Sox, looked blankly at our Secretary of State and said, “Wow. Okay.”

Here is what I can tell you this evening about the war on Iran that is not a war; about the White House ballroom that was going to be paid for by private donations that they now want to charge taxpayers one billion dollars for; about the federal Department of Health that has decided it’s a good idea to recommend vitamin D to treat a deadly disease that was once eradicated before vaccinations became a conspiracy against your health rather than a lifesaver; about a drunken FBI director who thinks it’s a good idea to travel around on government aircraft carrying a case of expensive bourbon with his name engraved on the bottles to give away to favored friends at the same time he is helping to prosecute one of his predecessors for a fake crime; about one of our political parties that has decided the best way to win elections is to make it impossible for the other political party’s supporters to vote…

Wow. Okay.

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Imagine It, but That Probably Leaves Out a Lot

Imagine how much better off we would be if over the last few decades we had not made mistakes of being overly aggressive and unwisely violent toward other countries. If we had gotten in and out of Afghanistan quickly. If we had not attacked Iraq needlessly. If we had been smart about Vietnam. If we had not interfered in Iran many decades ago, and then again threatened them in 2003? Without that threat Iran would have had much less motivation to acquire nuclear weapons. Imagine the savings in military expenses. The generally more peaceful international situation. The many thousands of young Americans who would be alive, or who would be whole. Imagine that and you’ve still just scratched the surface of how big the difference would be.

First, consider ways we could have behaved smarter. George W. Bush invading Iraq was a mistake, full stop. Afghanistan is murkier. You can read about the ways we meddled in Afghanistan for many years before the 9/11 attacks. It’s murky but leaves a legitimate question whether there would have been enough anger at America to have stoked the 9/11 attack if we had not been playing games there long before. If no such attack had happened then there would never have been a need to invade Afghanistan. Or when the attack did happen we could have gotten in and out quickly and figured out getting Bin Laden later, as ended up happening anyway.

In Vietnam, if we really adhered to our own principles then we would have concluded early on that the people there just wanted to be independent, and that which form of government they wanted was their choice. In the same vein we would have allowed the people of Iran to keep their duly elected prime minister rather than our overthrowing him. We would have let them elect who they wanted as their leader rather than our artificially keeping an unpopular Shah in power. Maybe they would have chosen other leadership and maybe that would have been relatively moderate, rather than blowing up in a full-on revolution by the most radical elements (the ’78 revolution led by Khomeini). If their history had played out like that then the situation of the U.S. and Iran being enemies would never have happened. Imagine what that would be like, if the U.S. had just never pushed Iran into seeing us as an enemy. They might have felt no compulsion to have nuclear weapons. Note that over those same decades many other countries in that region have not felt compelled to develop nuclear weapons.

There have been times we have been smarter and have benefited from it. When General MacArthur wanted to be overly aggressive and invasive in Korea President Truman removed him from leading that operation. We now have a problematic state in North Korea, but the wider, and likely longer and worse, war that MacArthur wanted to pursue would have created much more damage for all. Many criticized the first President Bush for quickly leaving Iraq after having pushed them out of Kuwait. Critics wanted him to overrun Iraq, remove Saddam Hussein, and transform Iraq into a more friendly and compliant state, as if that kind of thing has ever gone quickly or well (see Afghanistan.) But Bush ended Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and then got out quickly, saving us and the region and the world from much worse results.

There are the obvious benefits we could have had: for example less military spending, and so many of our own people who would not have been lost or damaged, but there’s much more. What would we have done with that money instead? Be less in debt? Paid for day care? Reduced climate change? As for our dead and damaged, it’s not just that they would be here. For each one with long term serious damage, physically or mentally/emotionally, we have to spend tremendous amounts of money and time helping them, and even then we often fall short. So it’s a double loss. We not only spend time and money helping them, but we also don’t have them being productive people. By productive I don’t just mean producing work that makes money. I also mean their presence that would have made for better families, would have cared for their elderly, would have created situations that would have led to kids growing up better, would have been helpers in our communities.

As for the wider world, in a similar way, a more peaceful world is a more productive world, in all those same senses. Not only would we spend less on defense, many other countries could do the same. Look at what a productive nation Vietnam has become after we stopped making their entire country a war zone. Imagine a more peaceful Iran focused more on being productive. It might always have been a mixed picture in Iran, we don’t know, but it could have been better. A world of productive countries interacting with one another creates a whole different situation. Perhaps China would have stayed as a nonthreatening and fully participating member of the world community as it was in the ’90s rather than switching to feeling like it needed such aggressive posture. With fewer international conflicts there would also be fewer waves of desperate refugees, who put pressure on neighboring countries, or flood places like Europe until the locals get nervous and that creates societal divisions.

In that better picture perhaps the sense of faith in our own country would have remained stronger. More faith because of a better economy, and because of all those additional productive lives and what they would have contributed, and because of less stress on societal ties from controversial wars and all that comes with them. Perhaps there would be less frustration and less divisiveness, and all the repercussions we now have from that.

Just as war has far reaching effects, so does peace. War has ripples that go on very long after, continuing to inflict damage and waste and cost in ways that come as unforeseen surprises (countries becoming enemies, terrorist attacks, waves of refugees). Or they come in ways we don’t connect back to the source and so don’t realize the full cost. Just so, peace has ripples that reach far and continue without end. Countries that are relatively healthy and relatively peaceful allow people to just go on about their lives, creating benefits and improvements that we can’t even realize come from that peace.

Of course such a scenario might have just had different problems develop, but it certainly would have been better, probably much better. There is an enormous gap between how things would be if we had been wise at each of these steps versus where we are. All because of stupid actions. Actions like this current warring on Iran (we are not at war “with” Iran. We are committing war on Iran). It is a gap so far beyond what we are aware of, or that we can picture, that it is in the most literal sense, a challenging, difficult, fuzzily pictured, distantly viewed, hard thing to imagine.

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The post Imagine the America We’d Have Without Decades of Interventionist Wars appeared first on DCReport.org.