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8
Dearborn Says to Washington: Forget Campaigning, Just End the War and Genocide
One of many bloodied backpacks found in the rubble of a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, after the US missile attack of Feb. 28, 2026. Embroidery: @PritiGCox. Donald Trump’s illegal, increasingly unpopular war on Iran is sinking Republican prospects for winning the midterm elections, to the delight of Washington Democrats and liberal media. A couple of weeks before the US and Israel launched their blitzkrieg at the end of February, a Senate foreign-policy aide told Drop Site News that A substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats. Party leaders certainly have been acting as if they’re strategizing with one eye on the midterms. In a February 20 statement, titled “The Risks of Donald Trump and His Administration Dragging Us into War with Iran,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer supported the then-impending war—as long as it was done the right way. He complained only that “The administration has yet to articulate to Congress and the American people what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign.” For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.” On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep U.S. troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war. Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.” Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote. Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like? . . . Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.” As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party. And so it came to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts — the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.” “Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner! “This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself” Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices. Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran-regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to himsuggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments: If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government . . . you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you . . . proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform . . . Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At the Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.” By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89 percent.” Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war, The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences . . . They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security. . . This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself. “A Gift to Our Country” Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington. More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.” He wrote, “The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.” Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing I.C.E., increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare-for-all. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide — and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.” In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan . . . None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed . . . Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good health care or good schools.” Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past fifty years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home. Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill. +++ Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves. After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble. Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile. The post Dearborn Says to Washington: Forget Campaigning, Just End the War and Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Dearborn Says to Washington: Forget Campaigning, Just End the War and Genocide
One of many bloodied backpacks found in the rubble of a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, after the US missile attack of Feb. 28, 2026. Embroidery: @PritiGCox. Donald Trump’s illegal, increasingly unpopular war on Iran is sinking Republican prospects for winning the midterm elections, to the delight of Washington Democrats and liberal media. A couple of weeks before the US and Israel launched their blitzkrieg at the end of February, a Senate foreign-policy aide told Drop Site News that A substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats. Party leaders certainly have been acting as if they’re strategizing with one eye on the midterms. In a February 20 statement, titled “The Risks of Donald Trump and His Administration Dragging Us into War with Iran,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer supported the then-impending war—as long as it was done the right way. He complained only that “The administration has yet to articulate to Congress and the American people what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign.” For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.” On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep U.S. troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war. Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.” Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote. Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like? . . . Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.” As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party. And so it came to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts — the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.” “Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner! “This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself” Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices. Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran-regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to himsuggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments: If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government . . . you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you . . . proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform . . . Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At the Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.” By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89 percent.” Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war, The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences . . . They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security. . . This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself. “A Gift to Our Country” Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington. More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.” He wrote, “The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.” Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing I.C.E., increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare-for-all. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide — and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.” In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan . . . None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed . . . Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good health care or good schools.” Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past fifty years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home. Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill. +++ Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves. After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble. Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile. The post Dearborn Says to Washington: Forget Campaigning, Just End the War and Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Dearborn Says to Washington: Forget Campaigning, Just End the War and Genocide
One of many bloodied backpacks found in the rubble of a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, after the US missile attack of Feb. 28, 2026. Embroidery: @PritiGCox. Donald Trump’s illegal, increasingly unpopular war on Iran is sinking Republican prospects for winning the midterm elections, to the delight of Washington Democrats and liberal media. A couple of weeks before the US and Israel launched their blitzkrieg at the end of February, a Senate foreign-policy aide told Drop Site News that A substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats. Party leaders certainly have been acting as if they’re strategizing with one eye on the midterms. In a February 20 statement, titled “The Risks of Donald Trump and His Administration Dragging Us into War with Iran,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer supported the then-impending war—as long as it was done the right way. He complained only that “The administration has yet to articulate to Congress and the American people what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign.” For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.” On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep U.S. troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war. Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.” Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote. Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like? . . . Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.” As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party. And so it came to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts — the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.” “Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner! “This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself” Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices. Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran-regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to himsuggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments: If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government . . . you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you . . . proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform . . . Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At the Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.” By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89 percent.” Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war, The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences . . . They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security. . . This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself. “A Gift to Our Country” Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington. More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.” He wrote, “The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.” Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing I.C.E., increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare-for-all. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide — and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.” In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan . . . None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed . . . Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good health care or good schools.” Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past fifty years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home. Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill. +++ Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves. After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble. Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile. The post Dearborn Says to Washington: Forget Campaigning, Just End the War and Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
How Will Trump’s Supporters React to Seeing School Vouchers Program Increase Chinese Influence?
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair In September 2023, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stunned school choice advocates when he kicked out four private schools from the state’s school voucher program. The schools’ offense, according to the state’s announcement, was their “direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” which were seen as “an imminent threat to the health, safety, and welfare of these school’s [sic] students and the public.” The alleged “ties” were not explained in the announcement. What was surprising about the announcement was that Florida has long been regarded as being “number one in education freedom” by school choice advocates, and its largely unregulated voucher market, along with those of other states, has been described as the “wild west of school voucher expansions.” A report on the state’s announcement by WFTV explained that the governor’s decision was likely due to the for-profit owner of these schools, Spring Education Group, “controlled by Primavera Holdings Limited,” which is a reference to Primavera Capital, a private equity investment firm based in Hong Kong. Spring Education Group is one of the largest operators of private schools in the U.S., overseeing more than 200 schools in 19 states. The company’s schools are considered prestigious and include Stratford School, LePort Montessori Schools, Nobel Learning Communities, and BASIS Independent Schools. In a written statement to WFTV, spokespersons representing the four Florida schools, banned from the voucher program, stated, “We are regularly acknowledged as one of the best private schools in our area and have a track record of delivering outstanding educational outcomes, which is why parents choose us. Our schools are locally run, abide by local, state, and federal laws, and do not have ties to any government or political party.” Nevertheless, when the New York Post, a conservative tabloid owned by right-wing firebrand Rupert Murdoch, caught wind of this story from Florida, it reported that “[a] group of elite private schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn,” operated by BASIS Independent Schools, were sold to Spring Education Group in 2019. “Primavera’s chairman and CEO is Fred Zuliu Hu, who has previously been named as a one-time senior member of the Chinese Communist Party.” The article further said that “While BASIS schools tell parents in a disclaimer that its parent company, Spring Education Group, is controlled by Primavera, which it says, ‘is itself owned by Chinese persons residing in Hong Kong,’ the schools do not acknowledge the Communist link. Primavera dispute[s] that Hu is currently a Communist Party member.” But concerns about Spring Education Group and Primavera continued to be a flashpoint among conservative lawmakers and advocates in other states. In February 2024, Republican U.S. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote a high-profile letter to then-U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin expressing concerns about another company associated with Primavera Capital called Tutor.com. “Tutor.com is a long-standing provider of tutoring services to our service members and their families,” Cotton wrote, and its acquisition by “a Chinese-owned corporation,” along with the Princeton Review in 2022, concerned him. “Tutor.com collects personal data on users,” the senator said, “such as location, internet protocol addresses, and contents of the tutoring sessions.” That business arrangement, Cotton maintained, was akin to “paying to expose our military and their children’s private information to the Chinese Communist Party.” Cotton’s letter quickly caught the attention of multiple right-wing advocacy groups. In March 2024, Parents Defending Education, a conservative astroturf organization that accuses public schools and universities of spreading “transgender ideology” and liberal “indoctrination,” issued a “non-exhaustive list of school districts that give students access to Tutor.com.” (In 2025, Parents Defending Education rebranded to Defending Education.) The New York Post promptly amplified the concerns of Parents Defending Education, reporting that Tutor.com was assisting the Chinese government in “infiltrating American classrooms.” Picking up the New York Post’s conspiratorial language, another conservative group critical of public schools, Freedom in Education, “uncovered” evidence of Tutor.com facilitating “infiltration of Chinese spyware” in schools in Georgia. By December 2025, it was no longer “clear” if Primavera divested from Tutor.com or still owned shares, according to the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing media site funded by billionaire Paul Singer, a hedge fund manager and “major donor to Republican political candidates.” But, pointing to the connection between Primavera and Spring Education Group, the article stated, “There are also signs of [China’s] new approach to influencing elementary and high schools: just buy… [the schools]. … The expansion of groups like Spring Education into the American educational landscape comes as American youth are increasingly open to far left socialist economic ideology, as evidenced by the election of [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani.” Also in December, another news outlet in the right-wing media echo chamber, Texas Scorecard, warned readers of Primavera’s connections to the Spring Education Group and its ownership of 13 schools in the Lone Star State. The article was published around the time Texas debuted a $1 billion school voucher program. In other states, which like Florida have largely unregulated school voucher programs, state tax dollars are already flowing to private schools operated by Spring Education Group. In North Carolina, Spring Education Group operates eight schools, two of which are participating in the state’s voucher program (the other six are preschool-only programs, which are ineligible for North Carolina voucher money). Those two schools, Chesterbrook Academy Elementary and Middle School in Cary and Chesterbrook Academy Preschools and Elementary in Raleigh, received $106,778 and $49,475, respectively, in public funds in the 2024–2025 school year, according to state government reporting. Yet, despite the conservative movement’s fears about Chinese communist influence in America’s education system, many red state officials and advocacy groups are opting into a new federal program created by the Trump administration that may lead to huge financial payouts to education companies like Spring Education Group and Tutor.com and, in turn, their private investors, including Primavera Capital. Who’s Hu Conservative rumors about ties between Primavera and its founder, Fred Hu—who also goes by Fred Zuliu Hu, Zu Liu Hu, and Zuliu Hu on English language sites—to the Chinese Communist Party have some basis in fact. According to multiple websites, including Chinese ones that Our Schools translated into English with the help of researchers, an individual named Hu Zuliu [Fred Hu] served multiple terms, from 2008 through at least 2023, as a delegate in the Hunan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), economic sector. According to the CPPCC’s official website, “The CPPCC is an organization in the patriotic united front of the Chinese people, an important organ for multiparty cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and an important means of promoting socialist democracy in China’s political activities.” “In 2008, Hu Zuliu was elected as a member of the 10th Hunan Provincial Committee of the CPPCC, and in 2013, he was reelected as a member of the 11th CPPCC,” according to Primavera Capital’s Chinese-language website. The Berggruen Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank founded in 2010 by investor-philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen, describes Hu as having “advised the Chinese government.” Hu’s Columbia Business School bio describes him as the founder of Primavera Capital and a partner at Goldman Sachs Group, who also “served at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., and has advised the Chinese government on financial reform and macroeconomic policies.” An archived page from Primavera’s previous website describes the Chunhua Capital Group, Primavera’s native name, as “founded by Dr. Hu Zuli, a renowned economist and financial expert. Dr. Hu previously served as a partner and chairman of Greater China at Goldman Sachs.” Snooping on Students Republican concerns about Primavera’s involvement with Chinese government surveillance technology appear to have some validity. The financial group appears to have a penchant for investing in companies heavily involved in surveillance tech. According to Bloomberg, Primavera was one of eight “cornerstone investors” that committed to subscribe for $450 million in shares of Chinese artificial intelligence company SenseTime Group, Inc. In December 2021, SenseTime was placed on the U.S. Treasury Department’s investment blacklist for its role in surveillance technology deployed for monitoring ethnic Uyghur populations in the Xinjiang region of Western China. As the Washington Post reported, “The Treasury Department, which oversees the investment prohibition list, said SenseTime ‘has developed facial recognition programs that can determine a target’s ethnicity, with a particular focus on identifying ethnic Uyghurs,’ a persecuted Muslim minority population in China,” and “used digital surveillance technology to track Uyghurs’ movements and activities… to ‘create a police state in the Xinjiang region.’” China’s repression of Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority group, was seen as a crime against humanity by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2022. Another artificial intelligence company that Primavera has invested in, which has been accused of developing highly invasive surveillance technology, is Palantir. In May 2025, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration was spending hundreds of millions of federal dollars to install Palantir’s Foundry operating system in multiple federal agencies to “compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give… [the president] untold surveillance power.” According to an article in the Conversation by Nicole M. Bennett, who described herself as “a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies, and the U.S. federal government,” the Trump administration has employed another Palantir operating system called Gotham. Gotham, the article said, “is an investigative platform built for police, national security agencies, public health departments and other state clients” to “take whatever data an agency already has, break it down into its smallest components, and then connect the dots.” To be clear, no one has accused Spring Education Group of snooping on students. The company’s privacy notice states, “We do not make your Personal Information available for purchase or otherwise share your information with third parties in exchange for monetary compensation.” However, privacy advocates, parents, and teachers are expressing growing concerns about how edtech company platforms in schools collect and use student data and how that use constitutes a breach in student and educator privacy. So Primavera’s interest in both education and surveillance as hot investment properties is bound to raise questions. And any politician viewed as steering public funds to bad actors in the student privacy debate is likely to become a target for criticism. A Workaround to Voucher Regulations While concerns about Primavera’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party prompted conservatives to curtail the firm’s access to funds for public education, the Trump administration has opened the door to another potential pot of public money. Included in the One Big Beautiful Bill that Trump called for, and Republican lawmakers in Congress passed in 2025, was a provision establishing the first-ever federal school voucher program, known as the Educational Choice for Children Act(ECCA). Beginning in 2027, this tax-credit program allows individuals to receive up to a $1,700 annual, dollar-for-dollar, federal tax credit for donations to state-licensed school voucher providers, called scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). After SGOs receive donor funds, they cream some money off the top for administration and then give what’s left to families to pay for education expenses. Although formal guidelines are yet to be finalized, the law as written gives families broad leeway about what constitutes education expenses, which may include private school tuition, homeschool expenses, tutoring, transportation services, before- and after-school programs, and summer camp. Trump’s Department of Education calls this initiative “Education Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC).” Florida was among the first states to opt into the voucher program, declaring, in a January 2026 announcement from the governor’s office, “The newly enacted federal Education Freedom Tax Credit is an opportunity to further support education freedom.” Other Republican-led states joined Florida in opting into the program, and even some blue states have signed up, including Colorado and Virginia. Other states have been more skeptical of the program. In North Carolina, for instance, the state legislature voted to opt in, but the state’s democratic governor vetoed the legislation. Governors in both red and blue states in favor of adopting the program, such as outgoing Colorado Governor Jared Polis, have argued that the federal vouchers are “free money” that shouldn’t be turned down. What’s largely been left out of the discussion is how the new federal voucher program may undermine state control over existing voucher funding. In states that have rejected voucher programs, the federal program provides another way for school choice advocates to pry open the market. Meanwhile, for states with current voucher programs that include some regulatory control, the new federal voucher program may provide a workaround for education merchants to find new inroads to public money. “We know that not only is this a voucher scheme,” said Education Law Center’s litigation director Jessica Levin in an email, “but the aim of it is to expand vouchers nationwide, including into states that have repeatedly rejected voucher programs.” For instance, while North Carolina’s state regulations block Spring Education Group’s private preschools from receiving public money, the federal voucher program offers a workaround because the voucher money it dispenses can be used to pay for things like after-school programs and summer camps that Spring Education Group preschools operate in the Tar Heel State. In Texas and Florida, lawmakers who are kicking Islamic schools out of their state voucher programs over claims that the schools are linked to “terrorists” may find that opting into the federal voucher program will help these schools access public tax dollars. Because companies that provide tutoring services, like Tutor.com, may also be allowed to receive money from the federal voucher program, conservatives who have railed against Tutor.com’s connection to Primavera Capital and the Chinese government may see even more public funds going to these enterprises via the federal program. Yet, after Arkansas Senator Cotton raised an alarm about Tutor.com, there’s no evidence on record that he has objected to his state’s decision to take part in the federal voucher program. “Until the Treasury Department issues regulations,” said Levin, “we don’t know what leeway states will have to regulate the federal voucher program. So it doesn’t make sense for states wondering about that to opt in before the federal regulations are even proposed. However, based on the late 2025 request for comment documents from IRS/Treasury and the policies of the Trump administration regarding education privatization, it’s likely those regulations will be designed to provide little or no leeway for states to place restrictions on the SGOs that will hand out the vouchers.” ‘Free Money’ With Big Costs State leaders and education advocates who are not spooked by public dollars for education enriching investment firms connected to the Chinese Communist Party may object to the federal voucher program for other reasons. For instance, ECCA’s call on states to set up SGO voucher providers is expected to provide a way for private investors to reap a financial windfall from public funds meant for education. In anticipation of the program’s rollout, investment firms are hyping the profits to be made. One firm claims, “The SGO provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act offers a powerful opportunity to expand access to independent school education”—and, no doubt, profit as a result. A September 2025 blog post on the website of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP), a watchdog focused on the private equity industry, warned that the new federal voucher program will likely lead to greater involvement of private equity investment firms, like Primavera, in profiting from public services like education. Because the new program allows for services like transportation, PESP senior researcher Azani Creeks explained, it will likely result in public money profiting private transportation companies like First Student, “a school bus service provider owned by private equity firm EQT.” A report PESP published in 2022 found, “Private equity firms and the companies they own have promised to improve educational outcomes for struggling individual students and schools through new technology, personalized learning strategies, and resources for staffing and administration, but there is no conclusive data showing that school funding is better spent at private-equity owned companies than staying within the district.” In that report, PESP pointed to a particularly egregious example in the charter school industry of private equity profiteering at the expense of public services, where a combination of for-profit operators backed by private equity has resulted in elaborate business schemes and networks of interrelated companies that hide profiteering while doing little to improve the quality of services to the public. In a phone call with Creeks, she explained, “The point of policies like ECCA is to funnel public tax money into the private sector. But private equity investment in public services that impact the quality of people’s lives is inherently at odds with profit-making. For that reason, the new federal school voucher program needs strong guardrails.” Public school advocates who oppose the federal voucher program have provided other reasons why state officials should not opt in. Their arguments, such as those put forward by Public Funds Public Schools, emphasize the public policy negatives of vouchers, including how they tend to have harmful impacts on funding for public schools, worsen academic outcomes of students, and fund private schools that actively discriminateagainst students, disproportionately impacting students of color, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ students. In Congress, Democratic Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii are planning to introduce legislation called the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act that will repeal the K-12 federal tax credit voucher program included in the One Big Beautiful Bill. But if state officials who aren’t convinced to oppose federal school vouchers for public policy reasons, maybe the messy politics of the program will convince them that the supposed “free money” offered by the Trump administration actually comes at a very high cost. This article was produced by Our Schools. The post How Will Trump’s Supporters React to Seeing School Vouchers Program Increase Chinese Influence? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Existential Attrition: Iran’s Closure of the Strait of Hormuz
The Strait showing maritime political boundaries and shipping lanes – Public Domain “The geopolitical genie is out of the bottle: by capitalizing on geography to disrupt global trade, countries can strengthen their strategic position at relatively low cost.” – Alex Mills, The Atlantic Council, March 12, 2026 With each day of glorified actions against Iran, with each cloudy press session claiming supreme success through sheer force, the Trump administration is struggling to keep up appearances. Through an approach of existential attrition, the clerical regime in Tehran is now causing shocks and tingles in the global market, striking where influence is strongest: the petrol pump, the cash register, the hip pocket. Its missiles, drones or projectiles may not be able to reach the United States or Australia, but a note of panic is setting in. Even before shipping was attacked (threats sufficed), the Strait of Hormuz was already being emptied of traffic. Fearing losses, major shipping firms such as Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM ceased transiting cargo through the waterways. Since the war commenced on February 28, transits through the Strait have virtually stopped. This putative closure imperils the transfer of a fifth of the world’s oil supply, a fifth of the global trade in liquified natural gas, and some 13% of the global share in chemicals, including essential fertilisers. Freight rates for oil tankers, war risk insurance premiums and costs of marine fuel are all rising steeply. A social media post from Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi brimming with satisfaction captured the mood: “9 days into Operation Epic Mistake, oil prices have doubled while all commodities are skyrocketing. We know the US is plotting against our oil and nuclear sites in hopes of containing huge inflationary shock. Iran is fully prepared.” He also promised that Iran had “many surprises in store.” On March 11, a spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters resolutely declared that any vessel linked to Israel, the United States or their allies would be “considered a legitimate target”. He also rejected the effectualness of efforts to suppress price rises. “You will not be able to artificially lower the price of oil. Expect oil at $200 per barrel,” he warned. “The price of oil depends on regional security, and you are the main source of insecurity in the region.” An effort to halt the rise of the oil price was made with a decision by 32 member states of the International Energy Agency (IEA) to release 400 million barrels of oil. “This is a major action aiming to alleviate the immediate impacts of the disruption in markets,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol explained in his address. “But to be clear, the most important thing for the return to stable flows of oil and gas is the resumption of transit through the Strait of Hormuz.” Over March 11 and 12, in what seemed to be an effort to counter this move, the IRGC made good its word, attacking some six vessels, using projectiles and explosive-laden unmanned surface vessels. Targets included the Marshall Islands-flagged Safesea Vishu and the Malta-flagged Zefyros, both carrying fuel cargoes from Iraq. The Thai-flagged Mayuree Naree dry bulk vessel was hit by what was described as “two projectiles of unknown origin”. Mines have also been deployed to further complicate the prospect of transit. The response from President Donald Trump and his officials to the price rises has been one of unrelenting fantasy. “The recent increase of oil and gas prices is temporary,” stated White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, “and this operation [attacking Iran] will result in lower gas prices in the long term”. Energy Secretary Chris Wright was also unjustifiably confident that the price shocks would endure for a matter of “weeks, not months”. After attending a classified and seemingly confused briefing on the war on March 10, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut was left unimpressed. “I can’t go into more detail about how Iran gums up the Strait,” he revealed, “but suffice to say, right now, they don’t know how to get it safely back open.” This was “unforgivable, because this part of the disaster was 100% foreseeable.” The primary war goal of the administration, as Murphy understood, was “destroying lots of missiles and boats and drone factories.” Such visionaries. The Trump credo of estranged reality ignores the growing and enduring consequences of the strait’s closure and the war. A backlog of tankers on both sides of the waterway is growing. Ports are becoming congested with overstaying vessels. Production of oil and gas, impaired by Iranian attacks and continued closure, will have to resume in such states as Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Anas Alhajji, a global energy markets boffin, offers a grim analysis: “Ending the war does not mean ending the crisis. We have countries that literally shut down production because their storage is full. To bring back that oil to a pre-crisis level takes time. For [liquified natural gas] in particular, it takes a very long time.” Asked on whether vessels should still brave the journey through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump spoke with unfounded optimism. “I think they should. I think you’re going to see great safety”. The new round of strikes on shipping by Iran, initiated at a fraction of the cost of the US-Israel campaign against it, coupled with the inexorable rise of prices, suggests otherwise. In this regard at least, economics may well prove to be destiny. The post Existential Attrition: Iran’s Closure of the Strait of Hormuz appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Existential Attrition: Iran’s Closure of the Strait of Hormuz
The Strait showing maritime political boundaries and shipping lanes – Public Domain “The geopolitical genie is out of the bottle: by capitalizing on geography to disrupt global trade, countries can strengthen their strategic position at relatively low cost.” – Alex Mills, The Atlantic Council, March 12, 2026 With each day of glorified actions against Iran, with each cloudy press session claiming supreme success through sheer force, the Trump administration is struggling to keep up appearances. Through an approach of existential attrition, the clerical regime in Tehran is now causing shocks and tingles in the global market, striking where influence is strongest: the petrol pump, the cash register, the hip pocket. Its missiles, drones or projectiles may not be able to reach the United States or Australia, but a note of panic is setting in. Even before shipping was attacked (threats sufficed), the Strait of Hormuz was already being emptied of traffic. Fearing losses, major shipping firms such as Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM ceased transiting cargo through the waterways. Since the war commenced on February 28, transits through the Strait have virtually stopped. This putative closure imperils the transfer of a fifth of the world’s oil supply, a fifth of the global trade in liquified natural gas, and some 13% of the global share in chemicals, including essential fertilisers. Freight rates for oil tankers, war risk insurance premiums and costs of marine fuel are all rising steeply. A social media post from Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi brimming with satisfaction captured the mood: “9 days into Operation Epic Mistake, oil prices have doubled while all commodities are skyrocketing. We know the US is plotting against our oil and nuclear sites in hopes of containing huge inflationary shock. Iran is fully prepared.” He also promised that Iran had “many surprises in store.” On March 11, a spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters resolutely declared that any vessel linked to Israel, the United States or their allies would be “considered a legitimate target”. He also rejected the effectualness of efforts to suppress price rises. “You will not be able to artificially lower the price of oil. Expect oil at $200 per barrel,” he warned. “The price of oil depends on regional security, and you are the main source of insecurity in the region.” An effort to halt the rise of the oil price was made with a decision by 32 member states of the International Energy Agency (IEA) to release 400 million barrels of oil. “This is a major action aiming to alleviate the immediate impacts of the disruption in markets,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol explained in his address. “But to be clear, the most important thing for the return to stable flows of oil and gas is the resumption of transit through the Strait of Hormuz.” Over March 11 and 12, in what seemed to be an effort to counter this move, the IRGC made good its word, attacking some six vessels, using projectiles and explosive-laden unmanned surface vessels. Targets included the Marshall Islands-flagged Safesea Vishu and the Malta-flagged Zefyros, both carrying fuel cargoes from Iraq. The Thai-flagged Mayuree Naree dry bulk vessel was hit by what was described as “two projectiles of unknown origin”. Mines have also been deployed to further complicate the prospect of transit. The response from President Donald Trump and his officials to the price rises has been one of unrelenting fantasy. “The recent increase of oil and gas prices is temporary,” stated White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, “and this operation [attacking Iran] will result in lower gas prices in the long term”. Energy Secretary Chris Wright was also unjustifiably confident that the price shocks would endure for a matter of “weeks, not months”. After attending a classified and seemingly confused briefing on the war on March 10, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut was left unimpressed. “I can’t go into more detail about how Iran gums up the Strait,” he revealed, “but suffice to say, right now, they don’t know how to get it safely back open.” This was “unforgivable, because this part of the disaster was 100% foreseeable.” The primary war goal of the administration, as Murphy understood, was “destroying lots of missiles and boats and drone factories.” Such visionaries. The Trump credo of estranged reality ignores the growing and enduring consequences of the strait’s closure and the war. A backlog of tankers on both sides of the waterway is growing. Ports are becoming congested with overstaying vessels. Production of oil and gas, impaired by Iranian attacks and continued closure, will have to resume in such states as Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Anas Alhajji, a global energy markets boffin, offers a grim analysis: “Ending the war does not mean ending the crisis. We have countries that literally shut down production because their storage is full. To bring back that oil to a pre-crisis level takes time. For [liquified natural gas] in particular, it takes a very long time.” Asked on whether vessels should still brave the journey through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump spoke with unfounded optimism. “I think they should. I think you’re going to see great safety”. The new round of strikes on shipping by Iran, initiated at a fraction of the cost of the US-Israel campaign against it, coupled with the inexorable rise of prices, suggests otherwise. In this regard at least, economics may well prove to be destiny. The post Existential Attrition: Iran’s Closure of the Strait of Hormuz appeared first on CounterPunch.org.