![](\"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/Sardar_Soleymani_2.jpg)
\nNearly a thousand of us were gathered in Chicago beneath the alarming edifice of Chicago\u2019s \u201cTrump Tower.\u201d Iran\u2019s General Qassem Soleimani had been brutally murdered the day before in Iraq, with several of his associates; and the welcome surprise of Iran\u2019s relatively measured response was yet a few days off.<\/p>\n
A region-wide conflagration seemed just on the verge of engulfing perhaps millions of lives, and consuming, as well, much of the species\u2019 remaining time and attention needed to face our direst threats: with the new war we could fear continued paralysis in the face of an unfolding climate collapse, a terrifying new Cold War (now with hypersonic missiles), and a global far-right resurgence driven by shocking inequality and violence.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d been to Iran a year before with Voices\u2019 Sarah Ball on a CODEPINK delegation and, addressing the crowd, I thought of how little attention Trump\u2019s worst crimes, his war crimes, now receive from his critics in both parties. I wondered aloud if the right-wing trend that had made Trump commander-in-chief was not, as is often argued, a backlash by the poorest Americans against the same kind of contemptuous disregard that American power also shows for the dignity and safety of the people of Iran.<\/p>\n
Tragically, in its \u201cforever wars\u201d the United States consistently denounces authoritarianism and religiosity among the world\u2019s poorest, but only as an excuse to violently drive the people of those countries even further from security, democracy, and peace.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/Code_Pink_MEK_Washington_3.jpg)
The US condemns the global poor it claims so ardently to wish to protect, too frequently as a shallow pretext for military and economic subjugation. Americans, correct to denounce Iran\u2019s theocratic regime, ignore what Iranians are quick to recognize, that Iran\u2019s worst enemy remains not its own government, but that of the United States.<\/p>\n
On our first day in Tehran, reformist foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met with us and quipped that Iran veers rightwards whenever the war-hawk John Bolton is anywhere near the levers of US power. Today the White House would seem to have moved to the right of its stance under Bolton, while Trump\u2019s enemies in both parties alarmingly hail Bolton as an ally in their quest to encircle Russia \u2013 Iran\u2019s largest ally.<\/p>\n
Predictably, if tragically, this past Friday, religious hardliners swept Iran\u2019s parliamentary elections, with help from a Tehran regime secure as never before in the knowledge that, with US hardliners rampant, Iranians have nowhere else to turn. Iran\u2019s brave dissidents generally rush to reject all expressions of support from US leaders, hastening to agree on one point only with the many Iranians who support the theocracy: that the United States (along with its Saudi and Israeli catspaws) remains the worst threat which Iranians must face.<\/p>\n
There is no reason for US voters to suppose that their government\u2019s hostility towards Iran is aimed at realizing anyone\u2019s human rights. Staunch US support for the brutal Saudi dictatorship puts the lie to any such claim. Iran\u2019s military support for its regional allies is massively dwarfed in destructive impact by the Saudi role, directly and through proxies, in bloodily destabilizing the region.<\/p>\n
The US\u2019 own 2003 invasion of Iraq remains the century\u2019s worst human rights violation (if the Saudis\u2019 US-backed, famine-assisted war in Yemen doesn\u2019t catch it up). An untold number of Iranians facing dire economic hardship were recently gunned down protesting the greed (perhaps more than the strict religion) of Iran\u2019s clerical oligarchs; but the US had, through its crushing sanctions, imposed this hardship deliberately and with the stated intent of callously forcing Iranians to topple the regime for them.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/Trump_Bolton.jpg)
The idea that a US-driven regime change, either through sanctions or through war, might somehow democratize Iran is popular in the US, but it\u2019s a prospect for which few Iranians would ever want to vote. Social scientists place Iran among Earth\u2019s most nationalistic countries, with many in Iran acutely aware of the US-driven coup which crushed Iran\u2019s stubborn bid for secular democracy in 1953.<\/p>\n
The Islamism which revolutionary Iran adopted in 1979 was widely considered an anti-colonialist necessity, a \u201creturn to ourselves\u201d required to resist further US cooptation and violence. Today, Iranians well note that US leaders\u2019 regime-change plans tend to involve installing, as Iran\u2019s \u2018democratic\u2019 rulers, Iran\u2019s most feared terror group, the \u201cMojahedin-e Khalq\u201d.<\/p>\n
In 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, the cultlike \u201cMEK\u201d actually invaded Iran, on Iraq\u2019s behalf, from Iraqi soil, and with air cover from Iraq\u2019s Saddam Hussein. Outside Tehran I visited the chief graveyard of that war, resting place for hundreds of thousands. It\u2019s an odd definition of \u201cdemocracy\u201d under which we hope to impose, through war, the would-be leaders Iranians fear most.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We gathered at a terrible moment this winter beneath the unsightly bulk of Chicago\u2019s Trump Tower, but far more ominous threats loom on our horizon, whether a US war on Iran can be averted or not. Our forever wars, nightmarish enough in themselves, should terrify us for the truly existential crises they prevent us from addressing.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s worst crimes are his war crimes, and both of the US\u2019 political parties seem focused on urging Trump towards more war, not less. No mere election but a grassroots movement of never-before-witnessed scope would seem needed to turn our government, in this late hour, away from empire and towards the goal of human survival. But to succeed, that movement will need to involve and empower the bases of both parties, including many of Trump\u2019s voters who it would seem easier to simply dismiss and denounce.<\/p>\n
When the US settles for condemning Iran, it drives Iran and the world even further towards dictatorship. The most urgent threats facing our species aren\u2019t enemies, like a country or a political party, that we can simply defeat, at however unacceptable a cost, but existential deadlines implicit in our nation\u2019s own wealth and frightened arrogance, deadlines we can\u2019t meet without our \u201cenemies’\u201d freely offered assistance.<\/p>\n
The path we must follow within the US seems also to be the sole survivable path the US has left that it can follow abroad \u2013 to somehow redress those of our neighbors\u2019 real grievances to which their undeniable failings should never have blinded us; to build a movement for species survival which no-one will join if we won\u2019t share our wealth and our power; and to empower those who, like Iran, we\u2019re most inclined to condemn \u2013 in the desperate hope of forging a difficult peace.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Sean Reynolds (joveismad@juno.com) is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org) and, in February 2019, traveled to Iran\u2019s Tehran and Isfahan with CODEPINK. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle<\/p>\n
By Sean Reynolds, Palestinechronicle<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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