As a pointless exercise undertaken because he can, the cavalier Trumpian “war” on Iran will, hopefully, go down in the history books as one of the most inept and foolish undertakings by a major world power in a century.
Lost, as always, in all the narratives about such things, dignified by the term “war,” are the true victims. How dull to talk about loss of life among the ordinary people, after all. How boring to show lives and neighborhoods maimed and destroyed.
As a journalist who has focused his local newspaper on the efforts from week to week for the last three dozen years on the elements that it takes to build and grow a prosperous community, I have seen replayed over and over the time and effort put in by people on all sides of a given project to see it from start to finish: To build a new school, to construct an assisted living facility, to bring to pass vital improvements to streets and parks, to maintain them all, to find ways to pay for them all.
And then comes a bomb. Whoosh! Boom! In an instant, all that effort is turned to twisted rubble and pain.
This hasn’t happened in my community, but it might as well be mine as it is a neighborhood or suburb of Teheran, or Gaza City, or Odessa.
It is not the heads of state or military leaders who suffer any of this, even though the stated purpose of the bombs are to punish them. No, it is the children, maimed, bloodied, killed, and their little brothers and sisters, and innocent parents and teachers and household pets, and their homes and playgrounds that are obliterated.
War is such a heinous mass murderous act. It can only be justified as the last resort against an undeniable evil, and even then cause for great remorse and repentance.
It is an unspeakable travesty that the American people have allowed such a dirty gang of miscreants into their governing leadership as we now have. War is sin. War is evil. Sin and evil are now named where the term “defense” once stood. Department of War! Who is the slaughterhouse manager responsible for that name, and for the unprovoked wanton destruction that agency has been commanded to commit?
But let’s not limit this concern to bombs and assault weapons. The most recent issue of the respected science journal Lancet Global Health has documented even more insidious ways that our nation, and others, have destroyed the lives of innocent people: economic sanctions, levied ostensibly to, again, punish leaders of regimes deemed deserving of the pain they are intended to inflict, have instead taken the lives of no less than 564,258 human beings every single year between 1971 and 2021. Where these sanctions targeted development assistance in low-income countries, an annual increase of infant mortality by 3.1 percent and in maternal mortality of 6.4 percent has occurred between 1990 and 2019.
Lancet reports, “Sanctions are restrictive foreign policy tools that are commonly applied to broad economic transactions, with the punitive aim of coercing behaviour change, such as stopping human rights violations or promoting democracy. According to the Global Sanctions Database, the frequency and duration of sanctions have consistently grown since 1950, while their success rate of achieving the stated aim remains at about 30 percent.”
It adds, “All economic sanctions ultimately function as sanctions on health. Through their direct effects on access to medical products, provision of health-care services, and civilian mental health, as well as their indirect effects on determinants of health such as food security and socioeconomic development, sanctions inevitably or even intentionally undermine people’s right to health. Moreover, the adverse effects of sanctions on health are most pronounced among children, women (versus men), and the most marginalised populations. With a low efficacy rate and a significant and uneven impact on health, it is questionable whether economic sanctions meaningfully reduce the number of deaths relative to military aggression.”
More lives lost due to sanctions than even to war, itself. Ah, the inhumanity.
