“We won,”
President
Donald Trump
declared
in March, less than two weeks after launching his
war of choice
against Iran. Claiming that nation was “very much destroyed and, even, obliterated,” Trump had already promised the conflict would bring peace to the region and, somehow, the globe. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing … will continue, uninterrupted … as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump
wrote
. But more than six months and
two
failed
ceasefires
later, the floundering conflict sputters along. And you may have noticed that world peace has yet to be announced.
Having again been bested in battle — the latest loss in a long-running series of meaningless victories (like over lowly Grenada), stalemates (like the
forever war
in
Somalia
), and defeats (like conflicts in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) — the U.S. military has
slunk away
from the fight in favor of an “economic D-Day” that so far seems to be little more than bluster.
Trump’s
other
stated war aims, like Iran’s unconditional surrender and seizing its oil infrastructure, have also fallen by the wayside. In the end, the major accomplishments of Trump’s war seem to be limited to death and destruction: hundreds of U.S. casualties that the Pentagon has sought to
downplay
and
cover-up
, and thousands of Iranian deaths that the Pentagon is
loath to mention or investigate
, including a family of eight — five of them children, one a
20-day-old infant
.
But the almost 40,000 Iranians killed or wounded in the war may only scratch the surface of the true toll, as Ashley Gate writes in her latest piece for TomDispatch. The rough outlines of the ecological devastation are only just coming to light. And if history is any guide, the environmental fallout of the war may reach far into the future, affecting untold numbers of Iranians who survived the conflict and many others in generations to come.
— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch
… [more]
