As Jeanette Rankin once said, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”

Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran has started an earthquake—and war—with no winners save a few murderous old men who rule over their subjects with no thought for the people’s lives or safety. In a fight between fascist despots, the losers are all the peoples of Iran, Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East; the cause of global peace and disarmament; and peace-loving people across the world.

Now, the task of peace-loving people in the United States is to stop our own aspiring fascist despot from bringing the United States deeper into this war.

Click here to urge your Senators to say NO to war with Iran!

This Tuesday, Senator Tim Kaine introduced a War Powers Resolution into the Senate to stop Trump from bringing the US into a senseless war with Iran. The next day, a similar resolution was introduced in the House by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) to invoke the War Powers Act.

Because the Senate vote is privileged, it must come up for a vote on the floor—which could come at any moment. MAGA is split on this issue, and the American people do not want another senseless US war in the Middle East. We have a real chance to stop this. It is imperative that we contact our Senators as soon as possible and urge them to support Senator Kaine’s War Powers Resolution. Please make calls to your Senators today:

Murderous old men—the fascist Netanyahu government, MAGA war hawks, and their enablers in the US and international media—claim Israeli’s unprovoked and illegal attacks were necessary to prevent the imminent risk of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and using them to attack Israel. That is a lie. While Iran possesses nuclear enrichment facilities, there is no evidence they were pursuing or even seriously contemplating building nuclear weapons—and were they ever to begin doing so, this process would take many months, and likely years. In fact, Iran was engaging in serious, good-faith negotiations with the Trump administration to reach a nuclear peace agreement, which would have eliminated any risk of nuclear armament, and which had been widely reported to be making progress. The normalization of US-Iranian relations and the lifting of crippling sanctions would have set Iran on a path to greater prosperity and peaceful integration within the Middle East and world economy—and it was this that Israeli leadership could not tolerate. It was the threat of peace, not war, that motivated the maniacal Netanyahu regime to act.

We have been down this road before. Spurious claims about nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons possession were used to justify the US invasion of Iraq and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In both cases, the aggressor nations—the US and Russia—were the only ones who possessed dangerous, deadly stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and thus the only rea imminent threat. So too, today, with Israel. The notion of a “preemptive war” or “preventive war” is both illegal under international law and self-evidently nonsensical. Starting a war to prevent a war is like using gasoline to put out a gas leak.

The Netanyahu government’s unprovoked and murderous attacks send a message—not just to Iran, but to all other countries—that disarmament does not work, peace deals are a lie, and the only means to ensure your country won’t be arbitrarily attacked by a larger, aggressive power is, in fact, to acquire nuclear weapons. This makes it more likely that more regimes will do more to get access to or increase their stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Whatever short-term damage Israeli strikes may have done to Iranian military and nuclear facilities, the long-term damage to the cause of global nuclear disarmament and world peace is incalculably greater.

Murderous old men and their media enablers also claim that this war will topple the Islamic Republic and “liberate” the Iranian people. That, too, is a lie. Not only because it is painfully clear that neither the Netanyahu nor the Trump regime have any actual plan for or interest in supporting a post-regime Iranian Reconstruction. Not only because US-backed “regime change” efforts have proven a patent failure, across more than a century of coups and coup attempts, including the 1953 coup that ousted Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. It is also because the single thing that will most harm the efforts of the Iranian people to topple their oppressive autocratic regime is an unprovoked attack on Iranian soil from a hostile foreign power.

If Netanyahu (or Trump) genuinely wanted to support the Iranian people in democratic reform, attacking Iran unprovoked is the last thing they would or should do. The Iranian regime is despotic, deeply unpopular, and has been the subject of mass-scale peaceful resistance movements from the Iranian people themselves, from the 1999 and 2003 student protests to the 2009 Green Revolution, to the 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, and beyond. But attacks on sovereign Iranian territory and the killing of innocent Iranian civilians from a hostile foreign power will greatly weaken domestic protests, strengthen the regime, and inure it to criticism.

That’s because one—perhaps the only—thing wars are good for is shoring up the powers of despotic leaders. That’s as true of the despots in Iran as it is of the despots in Israel. And it is true of our own wannabe despot in the United States.

Now is a time for all peace-loving peoples to unite against the machinations of their murderous regimes. Down with despots everywhere, and for self-determination, sovereignty, and peace.

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