The Bases Basis for the Iran War

According to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio the U.S. attacked Iran because Israel was going to attack Iran, likely producing Iranian attacks on U.S. bases. This comment suggested that Israel began a U.S. war, but also that U.S. bases began the war. Neither thing is as unusual as perhaps imagined.

The United States has loaded up with bases the area that Iran has the ability to hit with missiles. Not only does the presence of a U.S. base tend to make wars more likely, but the U.S. claim that read more

Chuck Schumer: Man of Peace

By David Swanson, Progressive Hub, March 9, 2026

For many years, Senator Charles Schumer demanded tougher and tougher sanctions on the people of Iran, as he shamelessly documents on his own website. He insisted on a Cuba-like blockade, punishing and deterring any company or nation from providing life-support to Iran. He predicted, ludicrously but proudly, that such punishing sanctions might lead to an overthrow of the Iranian government.

Like all Congressional supporters and opponents of the Obama-era read more

Tomgram: Janet Abou-Elias and William D. Hartung, Planet Palantir

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Yes, he used the American war machine to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, with a naval armada off that country’s coast and special operations forces flown into its capital to capture its leader. And once Maduro was in a prison in Brooklyn, New York, he turned his attention read more

International Law Needs International Enforcement

Donald Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East is but the latest indication that the system of international law―which provides guidelines for the behavior of nations in world affairs―is crumbling.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after thousands of years of violent international conflict, efforts to establish global norms for nations in connection with war, diplomacy, economic relations, and human rights accelerated.  These efforts resulted in the founding of the United read more

Tomgram: Maha Hilal, The “Legality” of Shooting Ships Out of the Water

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Count on this: a hospital ship isn’t the only thing Donald Trump wants to send to Greenland. In fact, from the Caribbean to Nigeria to Iran, he seems ever more intent on (dis)organizing the world into a Trumpian nightmare. And by the time he’s done (whatever “done” might even mean on this planet of ours at this moment), it’s not going to be pretty.

Count on this as read more

Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, Power, What Is It?

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

I’ve only shot a gun once in my life. When I went to camp as a kid, there was a rifle range and, at age 12 or 13, I shot 22s at a target. And I’ve only had a gun in an apartment I lived in once. When my father, a World War II veteran, died in 1983, I spent time in the New York apartment my parents had moved to after I went off to college. I began cleaning out his closet read more