There is something revealing about the way Western governments talk about war when Iran is involved. The language changes almost instantly. Questions of legality fade into the background. Questions of power, stability, and markets move to the front. What…

After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” On February 28th, the U.S. and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes began…

For decades, the United States moved from covert assassination plots to openly embracing assassination or “targeted killing” as policy. Now, in its war with Iran, that evolution is reaching its most dangerous phase. On March 17th and 18th, the United States…

Is Israel’s trajectory toward isolation and collapse self-inflicted, and has Zionism reached the point of no return? Every war led by Benjamin Netanyahu is framed not as policy, but as fate. “There are moments in which a nation faces two possibilities: to…

Let’s begin by recalling why the US Navy shot-down an Iranian airliner in July 1988 and brought 241 innocent men, women and children to their doom. The answer, of course, is that the Navy was conducting patrol operations in the Persian Gulf during the Tanker…

War is the most horrific series of events upon which any government can engage. It is systematic, industrialized, indiscriminate killing. It kills innocent adults and little girls. It often ruins the post-war lives of the killers. It is young men violently…

In the Western imagination, Taiwan is cast almost exclusively as a flourishing democracy under siege by a totalitarian neighbor, a moral clarity that fuels calls for military defense and ideological solidarity. Sulmaan Wasif Khan’s magisterial new history…

US President Ronald Reagan once declared that “Terrorism is the preferred weapon of weak and evil men.” While the ideological descendants of President Reagan love to incessantly describe Iran as the “#1 State Sponsor of Terrorism,” the US and its Western…

On the eve of the horrific World Trade center attack on September 11, 2001, the mullahs and their IRGC hooligans had been in power for nearly 22 years. Yet the record for that two decade interval subsequent to the founding of the Iranian Revolution does not…

The wording is familiar. The urgency is always absolute. The implication is unmistakable: Israel is not choosing war. It is forced into it. For many, the claim is inherently contradictory. How can a state initiate war – and in Gaza’s case, sustain a genocide…

The joint US-Israeli war on Iran has thrust back into the spotlight a divisive debate about whether the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog. Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States? One side believes Israel lured Trump into a trap…

As we begin a new week, the media is filled with reports that President Trump is ready to approve a US ground operation against Iran, either to seize Iran’s uranium or to attack an island off the country’s coast. Thousands of US troops have sped to the conflict…

The skies over the Ukrainian frontline no longer belong to the birds. In a conflict now entering its fifth year, the rapid rise of small, low-cost drones has created a new kind of aerial pressure – one that hunters and wildlife managers would recognize as…

The war on Iran was neither inevitable nor necessary. As recently as March 3, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi said the IAEA “has found no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear bomb.” On March 18, Director…

President Trump and his minions assured America that he was a man of peace who would abandon the “failed policy of regime change”. Yet, since taking office in 2025, he has bombed seven countries and threatened several more. As a man without principles, Trump…

Originally appeared at TomDispatch. Can you even remember when the U.S. went to war with Iraq in 2003, when President George W. Bush announced that, “at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq…

The origins of chess are contested, but few dispute that while the game began in India, it was the Sassanian Persian Empire that refined it into a recognizable strategic system. It was Persia that codified its language, symbolism and intellectual framework:…

At some point it is wise indeed to pay heed to the numbers – and that’s overwhelmingly true with respect to the battling narratives about the Donald’s Iran War now raging in the Persian Gulf. The fact is, the Iranian “threat” is almost entirely an ideological…

Transcript from Associated Press My fellow Americans, good evening. Let me begin by congratulating the team at NASA and our brave astronauts on the successful launch of Artemis II, it was quite something. It will be traveling further than any manned rocket…

Why are many Latin American countries shutting down nonprofit organizations? Amnesty International claims it has the answer: in every case, it’s part of a drive to restrict human rights and “tear up the social fabric.” Amnesty’s new 95-page report (in Spanish…