Jamie Ahloy Dallaire

Young people keep asking me if this was what the Iraq invasion was like. I've been telling them "Sort of, but this is way dumber and crazier." There were fairly intelligent people who bought into the Iraq war propaganda. Many anti-war folk assumed Saddam probably did have weapons of mass destruction — they just didn't buy into the narrative that war was the answer. There really were interventionists who sincerely believed the war could do good things for the Iraqi people. This is nothing like that. Only the most shitbrained of morons sincerely believe the narratives supporting the Trumpanyahu administration's attack on Iran. Mostly it's just liars and manipulators cynically pretending to believe the stories about nuclear weapons and massacred protesters and bringing freedom and democracy to the Iranian people, because they want Iran to be bombed. This time they're not even pretending to care about the will of the American people. They're not even pretending to care about humanitarian interests or the future of the people they are bombing. They're just spouting extremely obvious lies that get fact-checked and debunked by the mainstream media in real time, and then murdering people and bragging about it. The Iraq invasion was an unforgivable mass atrocity of unfathomable evil, but looking back on it you can understand how a person acting in good faith could have been taken in by the post-9/11 hysteria and the uniform war propaganda of the mass media. There was an argument put forward that Saddam Hussein would be replaced with a government that serves the interests of the Iraqi people, and then the US coalition really did stay in the country and build up a new regime to run things. Compared to what we're seeing now, it's almost quaint. This is just open savagery. The US and Israel are pursuing the Libya model with Iran: smashing and decapitating the nation and then leaving the people to pick up the pieces and deal with all the chaos, lawlessness and sectarian conflict that ensues. They intend to plunge a nation of ninety million people into mass-scale strife and potential state collapse or balkanization, and then casually stroll away from the wreckage in cool indifference to the suffering they just unleashed upon the world. They make no claim to be replacing the Iranian government with a better one. They make no claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to an oppressed people. They're selling WMD lies and atrocity propaganda, but only in the most half-assed and low-energy of ways, with no interest in whether anyone actually believes them. Mostly they're just destroying an ancient nation because they can, and looking at the world saying "Yeah we're thugs. What are you gonna do about it?" This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it comes out of its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.

War is the worst thing in the world. Westerners talk about it like it's a fucking video game, like "hurr durr, we just go in there and achieve our objectives and win," when really war means shredding human bodies to bits. Children burning to death in front of their parents. People holding their own guts in their hands as their life slowly slips away. People getting trapped under rubble and dying excruciatingly slow deaths of suffocation or dehydration. People picking up pieces of their beloved family members. Westerners are able to hold this compartmentalized video game mentality about war because war isn't something that happens to us. We've never had bombs dropped on our neighborhoods. We've never had the experience of seeing a severed hand on the ground after an explosion and trying to figure out who it belonged to. We've never had the experience of seeing our child's shredded body after a blast and thinking about how we'd carefully helped them dress that precious body for school just hours before. We just see the movies. The propagandistic war documentaries. The sanitized news reports. It's not real to us. It's not personal. It's just this cutesy Hollywood image of sexy Good Guys doing flips and spin-kicking evil Bad Guys off cliffs. You know this is true, because if it wasn't then nobody would support US wars. If westerners had an actual, visceral understanding of what war really is and what it actually means, and if they could truly, deeply grasp that the people on the receiving end of those airstrikes are human beings just like them, there's no way they'd support inflicting such nightmares upon their fellow man. Which is why everything in our civilization is aimed at hiding that reality from us. War is made to look heroic and glamorous. Middle easterners are framed as deranged subhuman savages. The flesh-and-bone consequences of western warmongering are hidden from public view as much as possible. They need to do this because the western empire depends on war. War is the glue that holds the empire together. They need the mass-scale bloodshed to continue, and they need the public to provide no resistance to the bloodshed. The empire cannot exist without war. Peace cannot exist without the removal of the empire. You watch these bespectacled pundits and pampered politicians babbling about war the way they'd talk about their plans for a kitchen renovation or a trip to Paris, and you just know if actual war ever showed up on their doorstep they'd literally soil themselves. They'd never recover. They'd spend the rest of their lives in shock and trauma, because what they saw would have shaken them irreparably to their very core. It would impact them in this way because war is the worst thing in the world. Anyone with a functioning empathy center and a truth-based worldview would move mountains to prevent war from happening. And yet we are ruled by sociopaths who actively seek it out. War is the worst thing in the world, and we are ruled by the worst people in the world. The world will never know peace until we cease to allow such creatures to rule over us.