What If Other Countries Claimed The Right to Bomb the US?

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Negar Mortazavi, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and host of the excellent Iran Podcast. We’ll talk about the potential for another US and Israeli attack on Iran, how Iranian dissidents view such a move, the role of the Iranian diaspora, and America and Israel’s efforts to boost Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah.

Ask Me Anything

Our next Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY, will be this Tuesday, February 24, from 11-12 AM Eastern time.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Josh Nathan-Kazis writes about the Jewish community’s reckoning over Les Wexner, patron of Jeffrey Epstein.

Muhammad Shehada on how Europe might develop an alternative vision to Trump’s plans for Gaza.

My friend, the Swedish writer Goran Rosenberg, has published a beautiful memoir, Israel: A Personal History.

Give a Purim gift to Israelis who resist the draft.

Appearances

I talked about white Christian nationalism on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNOW.

On February 24, I’ll be speaking via Zoom to the Britain Palestine Project.

On March 9, I’ll be speaking to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, I’ll be attending a fundraiser for Gaza in Asheville.

On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Donald Trump has moved this massive military arsenal to near Iran, and there’s a lot of reports that any day now, the U.S. could launch a military assault on Iran. And when I watch the debate about this kind of thing in the United States, I find it very frustrating, because I find that even people who are against Donald Trump attacking Iran, it seems to me, don’t necessarily raise the most fundamental questions. They say, well, how do we know this would work in overthrowing the regime, or how do we know it would work in eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, or, you know, why hasn’t Congress had a vote on this, or why hasn’t Donald Trump explained it to the American people, or why isn’t he focusing on domestic issues?

I mean, all of these are legitimate points to make, but it seems to me, they miss a far more fundamental point, which is: by what right does the United States have to attack a country that clearly poses no threat to the United States, and that the American exceptionalism is so deep in mainstream American political culture that almost never are Americans asked to flip things, and imagine the idea of Iran or China, for that matter, attacking the United States, right? To reverse the lens, the notion that the United States somehow has the right to do things to other countries that we would never, in a million years think it was okay to do to us is just so baked into American conversation. But I think it’s just worth doing the thought experiment, right?

Think about the justifications for America’s attack on Iran, right? And think about how they could be applied if a foreign country wanted to attack the United States. So, one is that Iran has this nuclear program, right? Doesn’t have nuclear weapons, but it supposedly has some kind of nuclear program that could be used to make nuclear weapons one day, right? But Iran has done a much better job of complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty than the United States does. Iran actually signed the Obama nuclear deal, which actually went beyond the obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, right?

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty basically says that countries that don’t have nuclear weapons cannot get them, but crucially, it also says that nuclear-armed countries need to move in the direction of disarmament, right? Donald Trump has moved exactly in the opposite direction, right, basically scrapping the remaining nuclear arms control treaties that exist, moving to modernize and build more and more nuclear weapons, right? So, if the claim is that you have the right to attack countries, because they’re not meeting their obligations on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, I think that would be a better justification for attacking the United States than for the United States attacking Iran.

The second claim is that Iran represents a threat to its neighbors. Now, it’s true Iran has supported groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah and groups in Iraq that have taken violent actions against Israel or against American troops. But the level of aggression that Iran has been involved in vis-a-vis its neighbors absolutely pales to the degree of aggression that the United States has been involved in vis-a-vis its neighbors, right? The United States literally just sent the U.S. military in to kidnap, to abduct a foreign leader in Venezuela. The U.S. is basically, as Donald Trump has threatened to use military force to take over Greenland. He’s threatened to use, kind of, economic coercion to take over Canada, right?

Israel’s also used much more aggression in terms of just the number of bombs that they’ve been dropping, the number of troops they’ve deployed outside of their borders, but if the claim is that you have the right to attack Iran because it represents a threat to its neighbors. Well, ask the people in Venezuela, or Colombia, or Mexico, or even Canada how much of a threat the United States represents to its neighbors; a far greater threat than Iran does.

And the third argument that, you know, for the U.S. use of military force against Iran is that Iran is oppressing its own people. Now, again, I mean, if you think that Donald Trump is actually, genuinely concerned about the Iranian people, you just have to have been sleeping under a rock for the last 10 years. I mean, the idea is so absurd, right? We even see in Venezuela that Donald Trump shows no interest in actually trying to support actual democracy in Venezuela. He basically just wants, you know, autocrats who will basically allow him and his cronies to take more oil. So, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that the U.S.’s goal in Iran would actually be to produce a more decent government that treats Iran’s people better, right?

But again, if the argument is that you have the right to take military action against Iran, a country that does not, clearly does not threaten the United States, and because it’s doing terrible things to its people, well, the United States under Donald Trump is not as repressive as Iran, you know, towards its… domestically. It’s very repressive. It’s not as repressive as Iran, but if we’re looking at the human rights violations that the United States has committed around the world, right, with eliminating the USAID, which is going to lead to the death of millions and millions of people, right? Or America’s contributions to climate change, which are also going to lead to the deaths of huge numbers of people, as the United States is the largest emitter and basically has refused any efforts to curtail its emissions, right?

Again, if the claim is that you have the right to attack countries because they’re committing grave human rights violations, well, again, by that logic as well, people might say that countries have the right to attack the United States. Of course, they don’t have the right to attack the United States, and even raising the conversation in America would make people think that this was an absurd idea. But it is American exceptionalism that prevents us from recognizing that it is just as morally absurd for the United States to bomb Iran as it would be for another country to bomb the United States.

We still have so much work to do in the United States in overcoming this legacy of the idea that the United States is somehow on some different kind of moral or legal plane from other countries. If that was ever the case, it sure as heck is not now, right? Nobody—virtually nobody— around the world sees the United States that way, and the Americans have to… we have to stop seeing America that way. Only when we do that, I think, will we be able to address the fundamental problem with this new kind of imperialism that Donald Trump is practicing, which is based on the idea that the United States somehow can hold itself above the laws and moral norms that bind other countries. The United States has no right to do that. And that, it seems to me, is what’s at the most fundamentally wrong with this horrifying impending attack on Iran.

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