War with Iran: We Are Opening Pandora’s Box
ANGLO AMERICA, 23 Jun 2025
The Chris Hedges Report – TRANSCEND Media Service
A banner bearing a painting that represents various categories of the Iranian society is deployed against the facade of a building in Tehran, with a message that reads in Farsi: “We are all soldiers of Iran” on 22 Jun 2025. (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
22 Jun 2025 – War opens a Pandora’s box of evils that once unleashed are beyond anyone’s control. The warmongers who ordered the strikes by U.S. bombers on Iranian nuclear sites have no more of a plan for what comes next in Iran than they had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria. European allies, whom Israel and Trump have alienated with these air assaults, are in no mood to cooperate with Washington.
The Pentagon, even if it wanted to, does not have the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran — the only way Iran might be subdued. And the idea that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is viewed by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counter force to the Iranian government is ludicrous.
In all these equations the 90 million people in Iran are ignored just as the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were ignored. They will not welcome the United States and certainly not Israel as liberators. They may hate the regime, but they will resist. They don’t want to be dominated by foreign powers. A war with Iran will be interpreted throughout the region as a war against Shiism.
Soon there will be retaliation. Lots of it. It will come at first with desultory missile strikes and then attacks carried out by elusive enemies on ships, military bases and installations. Steadily it will grow in volume and lethality. The death toll, including among the some 40,000 soldiers and Marines stationed in the Middle East, will mount. Ships, including aircraft carriers, will be targeted. We will, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, begin to lash out with a blind fury, fueling the conflagration we began.
Those who lured us into this war know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate. Blinded by hubris, believing their own hallucinations, they have learned none of the lessons of the last two decades of warfare in the Middle East. A war with Iran will be a self-defeating and costly quagmire, one more nail in the rotting edifice of the empire.
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact.
Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com
Tags: Anti-hegemony, Anti-imperialism, Anti-war, Hegemony, Imperialism, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Netanyahu, Pentagon, Trump, USA, War Economy, Warfare
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