Why Accepting More War is Ahistorical Insanity

Or: Six Reasons for Rejecting War with Iran

Ever war is a war against children.

It is never not a good time to catalog the evils of war.

I started writing what follows during the 2016 presidential race when it seemed to me that either candidate, if elected, would probably eventually start bombing somebody. I never finished it because there are so many arguments to be made against war, and so much evidence to support them, that it’s hard to pick a stopping point. You start pulling at them and they come out and out and out at you, like a fucked up magician’s handkerchief.

I’ve picked a stopping point now because now there’s a lot of belligerence in the air about Iran. Much of it stems from National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has been frothing to invade them for over a decade.

I won’t go into how Iran has complied with the nuclear deal and poses no existential threat to the United States (facts noted elsewhere, even by establishment foreign policy journals), nor into the essential-to-understanding-the-world-but-never-acknowledged fact that this — what’s happening now with Iran — is the reason North Korea is developing nuclear weapons: they, like every other country, pay attention as the United States demonstrates to them, again and again, that the only way to guarantee exemption from…