{"id":313806,"date":"2026-03-02T12:01:56","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T12:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=313806"},"modified":"2026-03-01T16:08:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T16:08:16","slug":"going-to-war-again-for-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/03\/going-to-war-again-for-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Going to War, again, for Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Blood Brothers – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

28 Feb 2026\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0Once again, the US is going to war for Israel. Once again, many will die for the Zionist state, including US service members. Once again, we will stumble blindly into a military fiasco. Once again, we will do the bidding of a foreign power whose interests are not our interests, but whose lobbyists have bought up our political class, including Donald Trump. Once again, we will violate the U.N. charter by attacking a country that does not pose an imminent threat.<\/p>\n

This is not our war. This is part of Israel\u2019s demented vision of Greater Israel, of dominating the Middle East. But Israel needs our military, our taxpayer dollars, our weapons to do it. And we have handed them the keys to our formidable arsenal.<\/p>\n

The architects of the war with Iran, which the administration feels no need to justify to the American public or the international community, admit it will not be quick.<\/p>\n

Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told<\/a> CBS News on Saturday that the goal is not only to curb Iran\u2019s nuclear program, but \u201cdismantle their terror support network.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo do all that is going to take longer than the strikes on their nuclear program last summer,\u201d Cotton said. \u201cWe\u2019re probably looking at weeks, not days, of joint efforts by the United States, Israel and our Arab partners, who have also been attacked this morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s lackeys in the political class, along with their courtiers in the media, including former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employee Wolf Blitzer, as well as academia, are shining examples of Israel\u2019s transparent and often illegal meddling in the American political system. Forget Russia. Forget China. No foreign government comes close to exerting Israel\u2019s influence.<\/p>\n

Democratic Party leaders are not opposed to attacking Iran \u2014 they are opposed to attacking Iran without being consulted. Two dozen Democrats lept to their feet and applauded every time Trump threatened Iran, or lauded Israel, in his State of the Union address. The Biden administration and Democratic Party leadership made no effort to reinstate Barack Obama\u2019s Iran nuclear agreement. It focused instead on sustaining the genocide in Gaza. It cheered Israel\u2019s decapitation of Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Kamala Harris in her feckless and tone deaf presidential campaign promised to continue funding<\/a> the genocide<\/a>, which alienated many voters, and labeled Iran our most dangerous enemy.<\/p>\n

Endless war is a bipartisan project.<\/p>\n

The flagrant interference by Israel in the American political system is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series \u201cThe Lobby,\u201d which Israel and its supporters blocked from being broadcast. Pirated copies can be watched on the website Electronic Intifada<\/a>. In the documentary, the leaders of the Israel lobby are captured on a reporter\u2019s hidden camera explaining how, backed by the intelligence services in Israel, they discredit and silence American critics and use huge cash donations to control the American electoral process and political system.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s death grip on our political system is also documented in \u201cThe Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy<\/a>\u201d by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you wander off the reservation and become critical of Israel, you not only will not get money, AIPAC will go to great lengths to find someone who will run against you,\u201d Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, says in the documentary. \u201cAnd they support that person very generously. The end result is you\u2019re likely to lose your seat in Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel flies hundreds of members of Congress, often with their families, to Israel for lavish junkets at seaside resorts. These Congress members run up individual bills that frequently exceed $20,000. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 attempted to restrict lobbyists from offering paid trips lasting more than one day to members of Congress. But AIPAC, which has never been forced to register as a foreign agent, used its clout to insert a clause in the act to exclude so-called educational trips organized by charities that do not hire lobbyists. The AIPAC-affiliated charity utilized to navigate this loophole is called the American Israel Education Foundation.<\/p>\n

The investment by Israel is worth it. The United States Congress in 2016 authorized a $38 billion per year defense<\/a> aid package from 2019-2028 for Israel. We squandered $ 4 to $ 6 trillion <\/a>on the futile wars Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East. Congress has, as well, authorized $ 21.7 billion in military aid to Israel to sustain the genocide.<\/p>\n

God knows the cost of this war, but it will likely be in the tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.<\/p>\n

We are back to where we were in 2003 with a war whose utopian goal is regime-change. It didn\u2019t work then. It won\u2019t work now.<\/p>\n

The same fatuous lies have been dredged up to justify this war, with U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff telling Fox News that Iran is \u201cprobably a week away\u201d from having the materials necessary to make a nuclear bomb.<\/p>\n

This has been Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby\u2019s mantra for three decades<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure how we are supposed to swallow this after Trump announced<\/a> last July, following U.S. air strikes, that \u201cAll three nuclear sites in Iran were completely destroyed and\/or OBLITERATED. It would take years to bring them back into service…\u201d<\/p>\n

One lie supersedes the next.<\/p>\n

Once again, we promise to bomb a country to liberate it, with Trump saying all he wants is \u201cfreedom for the people\u201d of Iran.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Israeli prime minister, like Trump, is calling on the Iranians to seize the \u201conce-in-a-generation opportunity\u201d to \u201ctake to the streets en masse, to complete the task of overthrowing the regime that is making your lives miserable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is your time to join forces to overthrow the regime, to secure your future,\u201d Netanyahu said.<\/p>\n

That every other attempt at regime-change in the Middle East resulted in disaster eludes them. This time, they promise, it will work.<\/p>\n

We may not have assembled a ground force, as Bush did in 2003 for the Iraq war, but once you open the Pandora\u2019s box of war, war controls you. You don\u2019t control it.<\/p>\n

American troops will likely be killed as Iran targets U.S. bases in the region. The Iranian navy has announced<\/a> it is shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, the world\u2019s most important oil chokepoint that facilitates the passage of 20 percent<\/a> of the world\u2019s oil supply. This will potentially double or triple the price of oil and devastate the global economy. Oil installations along with U.S. ships and military bases in the region will be hit.<\/p>\n

Iran has already fired missiles<\/a> at Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, Al-Salem airbase in Kuwait, Al-Dhafra airbase in the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and U.S. bases in Jordan. Explosions have been reported in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n

Thousands of innocents will die. Israel hit an elementary girls\u2019 school<\/a> on Saturday in Minab, a city in the Hormozgan province of southern Iran. Iran\u2019s Tasnim News Agency cited the Judiciary of Minab as saying that the death toll had risen to <\/a>108.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

An image of a girls\u2019 elementary school hit by a USRael airstrike on Sat 28 Feb in Minab, Iran.
Posted by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on X.<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

The steady losses, and a huge spike in oil prices, will compound the frustrations of Trump and his Israeli allies. These frustrations, like those during the two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, will ignite a protracted regional war.<\/p>\n

Iran, under sustained attack, could eventually fragment and splinter, sending millions of refugees over its border and igniting the chaos we engineered in Libya. But Israel, whose goal is to degrade the military capabilities of its neighbors, will get what it wants.<\/p>\n

We will be left with the mess.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

28 Feb 2026\u00a0–\u00a0Once again, the US is going to war for Israel. Once again, many will die for the Zionist state, including US service members. Once again, we will stumble blindly into a military fiasco. Once again, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":235173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[3287,417,554,100,3281,950,742,88,3925,767,475,2571,3924,818,1190,2159,880,99,249,2200,70,481],"class_list":["post-313806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spotlight","tag-anti-zionism","tag-bullying","tag-children","tag-direct-violence","tag-evil-empire","tag-invasion","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-khamenei","tag-middle-east","tag-netanyahu","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-peace-hoax","tag-proxy-war","tag-regime-change","tag-rogue-states","tag-state-terrorism","tag-structural-violence","tag-trump","tag-us-empire","tag-usa","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313806"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313811,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313806\/revisions\/313811"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}