April 1, 2026
Mel Gurtov
Mel Gurtov
A Hopeless US Proposal
Donald Trump thinks a 15-point plan will end the war with Iran. Seems like a hope and a prayer. Predictably, Iran rejected it out of hand and has put forward its own plan, which the US will surely reject. Negotiations are not taking place despite Trump’s claims otherwise. All that is happening is that intermediaries are moving back and forth on what looks like mission impossible. The war goes on—Israel and the US continue to strike Iran, Iran continues to retaliate, few ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and the US and world economies take increasingly big hits.
Let’s look at what the US and Iran are proposing. According to Foreign Policy magazine, “Under Trump’s proposal, Iran would commit never to pursue nuclear weapons,” dismantle its three main nuclear facilities, and surrender all enriched uranium to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Tehran would also suspend ballistic missile production; limit the rest of its missile program; reopen the Strait of Hormuz; and stop funding regional proxy groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.” If Iran agrees to the US plan, all sanctions on Iran would be lifted.
It’s easy to understand why Iran has rejected this plan. To start with, some parts of the plan appear to be the same as those put before the Iranians in failed negotiations that preceded Trump’s attack. Why he thinks Iran will accept them now is unclear. Iran has consistently rejected dismantling its nuclear program, stopping or giving up uranium enrichment, or limiting the range of its missiles. Perhaps Trump or his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, believe Iran has been so decimated militarily that it has no options. It does: controlling the Strait of Hormuz and sending missiles and drones to military and energy targets all around the Gulf, which it is still doing despite being “obliterated.”
No Way Forward and No Negotiations
The US proposal is also said to include a temporary cease-fire. Why would Iran agree to allowing the US and Israel time to refurbish their arsenals for a future attack? Iran’s foreign minister says, “a ceasefire without guarantees is a vicious cycle that only leads to the repetition of war.” Besides, would Netanyahu agree to a cease-fire when he has vowed to completely destroy Iran regardless of what the US does?
Iran’s plan is about as unrealistic as the US plan. According to Foreign Policy, the plan includes “the United States and Israel paying reparations for war damages, recognizing Iran’s sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, ending international sanctions on Tehran, and implementing a wider Middle East cease-fire that would protect Iran’s proxy groups.” Iran said that it would negotiate over the status of its nuclear enrichment capabilities but not its missile program. It maintained that the Strait of Hormuz would not reopen until a peace deal was secured, and even then, it would start charging tolls to ships that use the strait.
Beyond the proposals lies the question of negotiations. To hear Trump tell it, negotiations are ongoing and productive. The peculiarity here is that it’s the US which seems most determined to negotiate even though Trump has proclaimed victory. Iran, supposedly defeated, is less interested in dealing—and according to a number of experts, considers itself in the driver’s seat despite the destruction all around it. Why might that be? My guess is that the Iranians think Trump is increasingly desperate to stop the fighting. He has failed to achieve any of his objectives, the costs of the war for the US and many partners are rising fast, and the war has become a serious political liability for Trump and the Republicans.
A Very Dangerous Moment
Trump is increasingly being put in the worst possible predicament: either find a face-saving way out, keep bombing with no end in sight, or invade Iran. He has clearly discarded the first option and for now thinks (or hopes) relentless bombing will win the day. All Trump will say is “They’ll tell you, ‘we’re not negotiating,’” he said. “Of course, they’re negotiating. They’ve been obliterated.” And “in the meantime, we’ll just keep blowing them away, unimpeded, unstopped.” Or as Pete Hegseth pithily puts it: “We negotiate by bombing.” No wonder Iran is in no hurry to make a deal. There’s no incentive to negotiate.
Nevertheless, Trump’s inner circle keeps pretending the US is in good shape. Steve Witkoff, for instance, says there are “strong signs” that peace is a possibility, “Iran is looking for an off-ramp,” he says. Not Trump but Iran. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent thinks the world oil market is “well supplied” and that once the war is over, lower energy prices and less inflation will appear because there will be “absolute security.” Trump not only believes Iran will agree to his terms, he has thoughts about taking over its oil. “I mean, I wouldn’t talk about it, but it’s an option.” Again, the Venezuela fallacy.
Trump is clearly up against it. Not only are gas prices rising and inflation (according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) likely to hit 4%. Some Republicans in Congress are complaining about a lack of information about war plans. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is said to be on the verge of introducing a bill to authorize US military action as a way to draw out who supports and who doesn’t support the war. Republicans can’t look away any longer as another 7,000 troops are being sent to the Middle East and the Pentagon is seeking $200 billion to cover war expenses. Trump’s approval ratings, already very low before his order to attack Iran, are now in free fall. He’s losing, he’s desperate, and therefore he’s at his most reckless and dangerous.
Ramzy Baroud
The judgment on the Trump administration’s war on Iran is already largely settled across mainstream media, public opinion, and much of the analytical sphere.
What remains supportive of the war is limited to two predictable camps: official government discourse and the president’s most loyal supporters, along with entrenched pro-Israel constituencies.
Beyond these circles, the war is widely understood as reckless, unjustified, and strategically incoherent.
Among the wider American public, this conclusion is not abstract. It is shaped by growing unease, economic anxiety, and a mounting sense that the war lacks both purpose and direction.
Since the outbreak of the war on February 28, 2026, polling has consistently pointed in one direction. A Pew Research poll in late March found that 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict.
Another AP-NORC survey showed that six in ten Americans believe US military action against Iran has already “gone too far,” while even Fox News polling found 58 percent opposition.
These numbers confirm a broader trend that began early in the war and has only intensified. Reuters reported on March 19 that just 7 percent of Americans support a full-scale ground invasion.
In that same reporting, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they believe Trump is likely to pursue one anyway, highlighting a growing disconnect between policy and public will.
Days later, Reuters noted that Trump’s approval rating had dropped to 36 percent, with rising fuel prices and economic instability cited as key drivers.
The longer the war continues, the more its consequences are internalized by ordinary Americans, turning distant conflict into immediate economic pressure.
Among the American intelligentsia, opposition is no longer confined to traditional anti-war circles. It now spans ideological boundaries, including segments of Trump’s own political base.
Reporting from the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference, The Guardian observed that many MAGA supporters warned the war risks becoming another “forever war.”
This convergence is significant, reflecting not a passing disagreement but a deeper structural shift in public perception.
Yet mainstream media—from CNN to Fox News—has largely avoided confronting what many Americans already recognize: that the war aligns closely with the agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Within Washington itself, unease is also becoming more explicit. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that lawmakers from both parties are increasingly skeptical of the administration’s approach.
At the strategic level, the war’s foundational assumptions have already begun to unravel. Israel’s early calculations that escalation might trigger internal collapse in Iran have failed to materialize.
Iran’s political system remains intact, its leadership stable, and its military cohesion unbroken under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
At the same time, Tehran has demonstrated its ability to retaliate across multiple fronts, targeting Israeli territory and US military assets in the region.
Its geographic leverage over the Strait of Hormuz continues to exert pressure on global energy markets, amplifying its strategic position despite sustained attacks.
The structural reality is therefore unavoidable. Regime change in Iran would require a massive ground invasion, a broad coalition, and a prolonged occupation.
Even under such conditions, success would remain uncertain, as the experience of Iraq has already demonstrated with devastating clarity.
This raises the central question: why continue a war whose strategic premises are already collapsing?
Part of the answer lies not in strategy, but in psychology. A substantial body of political psychology research, frequently cited in relevant 2026 analyses, describes Trump’s leadership style as deeply narcissistic. Traits such as grandiosity, hypersensitivity to criticism, and an overriding need to project dominance are not incidental—they actively shape decision-making.
Trump’s rhetoric has long relied on humiliation, domination, and spectacle, framing politics as a contest of strength rather than negotiation.
Within this framework, escalation becomes a psychological necessity. To retreat risks appearing weak, while compromise risks humiliation.
For a leader whose identity is built on projecting strength, such outcomes are politically and personally intolerable.
This dynamic is reinforced by the broader culture of the administration, where senior officials have repeatedly relied on language such as “obliteration” and “total destruction.”
Such rhetoric, however, has not been matched by evidence of a coherent long-term strategy, exposing a widening gap between performance and planning.
At the same time, the administration’s fixation on masculine power—on dominance, strength, and spectacle—has contributed to a profound underestimation of its adversary.
Iran is not a fragmented state waiting to collapse, but a regional power with decades of experience in asymmetric warfare and strategic resilience.
Yet Trump appears to have operated under the assumption that American power alone guarantees outcomes, an illusion reinforced by past displays of military force.
Reuters reported in late March that Trump is now increasingly pressured to “end the war” quickly, as the administration confronts what it described as “only hard choices.”
The same report cited officials acknowledging that there is no clear exit strategy, leaving the administration caught between escalation and political fallout.
One official told Reuters that there are “no easy solutions” left, underscoring the depth of the strategic impasse.
Another added that any withdrawal would have to be framed carefully to avoid appearing as a defeat, reflecting the administration’s concern with optics as much as outcomes.
This is where the psychological dimension becomes decisive. Trump has constructed a political identity rooted in strength, dominance, and victory.
A defeat in Iran would not simply be a policy failure; it would represent the collapse of that identity. For a leader driven by narcissistic imperatives, such a collapse is existential, threatening not only his political standing but his relationship with his own base.
This is why some analysts—and even figures within Trump’s own orbit—have begun to float a theatrical exit strategy. As Reuters reported on March 14, White House adviser David Sacks stated bluntly that the United States should “declare victory and get out” of the war on Iran, calling for disengagement despite the absence of a clear strategic outcome.
Such a move would allow Trump to claim success while disengaging from an increasingly untenable conflict, preserving the image of strength even in the face of strategic failure.
But this reveals the deeper truth of the war. The “victory” being pursued is not military—it is psychological.
The US-Israeli war on Iran is therefore not only a moral and legal crisis. It is also a geopolitical catastrophe shaped, in no small part, by the psychology of a leader unwilling to confront the consequences of his own disastrous decisions.
Binoy Kampmark
Truth may well be the first casualty of war, but death, injury and environmental degradation are bound to be keeping up in the hit lists. Attacks on gas fields, oil refineries and petrochemical plants will always leave an impression once the conflict concludes. In the case of carbon emissions, the most challenging obstacle in collective efforts to stay the rise of the earth’s temperatures, the Iran War is doing much to throw everything out of kilter.
The gloomy modelling from the Climate and Community Institute shows that the first fortnight of the Iran War, which began on February 28 as a crime against peace pursued by Israel and the United States, produced some 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. To get a sense of proportion, the carbon pollution exceeded that of Iceland in one year. The institute, in arriving at such figures, considered the carbon emissions arising from destroyed homes and buildings, destroyed fuel, the fuel used in combat and support operations, equipment embodied carbon (equipment lost) and missiles and drones.
To give a sense of the granular detail, a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighter consumes roughly 5,600 to 6,500 litres of fuel during a single combat sortie lasting one-and-a-half to two hours. The emission of carbon dioxide during such a mission is approximately that of 14-17 tonnes, the lifespan of a conventional passenger vehicle. The company behind the production of the F-35 has also admitted that its sold products, in 2024, produced just under 14 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents.
The authors of the Climate and Community Institute report further note that carbon costs will only rise in sharp fashion if the war persists. Three reasons are postulated, and these do not even include such issues as the re-routing of commercial aviation traffic. Firstly, as US and Israeli arsenals suffer depletion, “embodied emissions of building new weapons, along with fuel used to deliver them to the region, will rise.” Secondly, the targeting of oil infrastructure in the region will result in the uncontrollable emission of fossil fuels, as what took place during the Gulf War. Thirdly, the deployment of more naval vessels by other states to the Middle East, including France and the United Kingdom, ostensibly to protect their interests, will increase “emissions via [a] ‘defensive’ posture.”
Things do not end there. The current obsession of the Trump administration’s pursuit of “energy dominance” will only see more fossil fuel production for reasons of energy security. Reconstruction in the aftermath of the war will also cause emissions. “Reconstructing infrastructure in the impacted region of 14 countries from Cypress to Azerbaijan – including homes, roads, hospitals, schools, oil and transport infrastructure – is not only costly but carbon intensive.” The authors note with grim awareness that the emissions arising from rebuilding Gaza and Lebanon after the conflict “will produce at least 24 times more than the emissions from the war alone.”
Other conflicts have also been appalling emitters. The hefty carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s campaign in Gaza arising from direct war activities, according to a multi-authored study published in April last year, exceeded the annual emissions of 36 individual countries and territories. The total emissions would increase to 41 lowest emitting countries and territories if Hamas’s tunnel network and Israel’s “Iron Wall” protective fence were also included. The authors arrive at a staggering figure of 32,275,089 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) when pre-conflict and post-conflict related construction activities are included. That final figure ranks higher than the annual emissions of 102 countries.
Broadly speaking, the Iran War has revealed how the continued reliance on fossil fuels is not only degrading in terms of environment but precarious in terms of security. “Fossil fuel dependency is ripping away national security and sovereignty, and replacing it with subservience and rising costs,” explains Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. To that end, renewable sources of energy must be pursued with greater vigour. “Meek dependence on fossil fuel imports,” he remarks, referring to European policy makers, “will leave Europe forever lurching from crisis to crisis.” Renewable energy, however, will “turn the tables. Sunlight doesn’t depend on narrow and vulnerable shipping straits.”
Brian Lee of Rethink Energy Florida builds on the theme with earnest seriousness, suggesting that “Energy security isclimate security.” This is not a novel pairing; any serious policy in that sense “would treat accelerating renewable energy development not as an environmental gesture, but as a national imperative.” Doing so would set “clear limits on the level of sea-level rise our coastal economies can endure as a second metric to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees C temperature increase limit – and align policy to stay below both.”
War has a nasty habit of suspending agendas and supplanting them with a murderous lunacy that becomes, for the duration of hostilities, dull and commonplace. Important, pressing topics get marooned along the way. When peace breaks out, those neglected topics return with a vengeance. Along with the staining criminality of those who have soiled the peace, climate change is exactly one of those things, something that will storm back to the fore with menacing consequences.
Daniel Falcone
How long will Gulf States bleed for war on Iran that the United States and Israel are waging? That’s a question a recent Newsweek article posed. According to the reporting, specialists from all six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states describe a “growing frustration with the U.S. approach to the war with Iran and a perception of Trump prioritizing Israel.”
What The Guardian has called a “worst nightmare,” the war has impacted the GCC states, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to such a degree that they are consumed with fury as they absorb the shock of a conflict they did not want. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranian attacks on energy infrastructure have placed particular pressure on regional economies. For the GCC economies, costs like these don’t have any corresponding political gains. The GCC’s bargain—American bases in exchange for defense and security—doesn’t look quite so beneficial at the moment.
Further, the GCC is a strategic hub of aviation, tourism, and investment, and these industries are suffering because of the war. The Gulf states were aware of the implications before the war started. Once Israeli struck Doha in September without any reaction from the Trump administration, it served as both the “turning point” and the writing on the wall.
According to Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, the GCC States were pulled into a losing battle. He has warned of getting dragged into the conflict. At the same time, he points out that “the GCC possesses a radical, unconventional, and highly effective tool to force an end to the hostilities: a collective and complete halt of all oil and gas exports.”
GCC Skepticism
Israeli tactics, in particular, have escalated the conflict. Israel has attacked, for instance, a desalination facility in Iran and struck 30 oil storage tanks, thus precipitating Iranian and proxy attacks aimed at comparable GCC infrastructure.
As a result, GCC economies have had to suffer the unintended consequences of the war. A huge percentage of the population in the Gulf states depends on desalinated water. The states are now livid over the U.S. posture for its carelessness and an apparent determination to force Iranians to finally dig in their heels and produce a nuke.
Israeli strikes on Iranian political leadership accomplish the same thing. As Jeffrey St. Clair has observed, Israel assassinated Iranian top security official Ali Larijani “to stop any negotiated end of the war and to drag the U.S. deeper into it. In Iran, it will inevitably give more power to the most reactionary forces in the country.”
As Henry Kissinger once said, “To be an enemy of America is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” Not surprisingly, GCC countries have lost trust in the United States and rewinding will be very difficult. The war has impacted interdependence and produced a “shadow of risk.” Tourism, banking, and data center construction will suffer not only short-term losses but long-term consequences because of the loss of U.S. credibility with its allies in its efforts to satisfy Netanyahu’s military ambitions. Companies like Amazon will not want to build any data centers only to be bombed again inside the year. Standard Chartered Bank recently had to evacuate and asked its Dubai employees to work from home.
The GCC is even questioning the legitimacy of U.S. bases. Even if the war ends soon, America has lost its reputation for providing reliable protection. In essence, GCC security issues of interdependence have only started.
GCC Optimism
The GCC is now raising some of the same questions as U.S. allies in Europe about the necessity to build an independent security capacity. “The conflict is accelerating the GCC’s push to diversify economic and defense ties away from exclusive reliance on the U.S., reinforcing a shift toward a more multipolar portfolio of partners,” observers Middle East expert Christopher Davidson. “At the same time, Gulf States are not abandoning Washington but are hedging by deepening relations with China, Russia, and other Asian powers in trade, finance, and arms. This reduces U.S. leverage over their economic strategies and nudges the security architecture toward a more transactional, multi‑supplier model.”
Concerning the consequences of Israel’s engagement in the region for GCC economies and regional stability, Davidson notes that,
Israel’s military actions, backed by the United States, have generated a perception in the Gulf that the region has been dragged onto the front lines, exposing their economies to shipping risks, higher insurance costs, and political backlash. As a result, the UAE and Bahrain (which signed the Abraham Accords) are likely to maintain normalization with Israel but shift toward quieter, less symbolic cooperation to manage domestic opinion and regional relationships, especially with Iran. This more discreet posture aims to preserve strategic benefits from Israel ties while limiting the economic and reputational spillovers of an unpopular war.
In terms of the GCC’s economic resilience in the face of intense geopolitical pressure, Davidson adds:
The GCC’s strong fundamentals, world‑class infrastructure, large sovereign wealth buffers, and relatively attractive regulatory environments—position their economies to remain resilient. In the long term, if the conflict delays or constrains Iran’s nuclear program, Gulf states could benefit from reduced security risks and more predictable investment conditions. They may also be well placed to capture future reconstruction contracts in Iran, should the regime soften or weaken, leveraging their capital and project‑delivery capacity to turn regional turmoil into opportunity.
HELEN BENEDICT
I’m writing this piece well into President Donald Trump’s new war with Iran, which, with the help of Israel, has already killed more than 2,000 civilians, including 175 schoolgirls and staff; displaced some 3.2 million people; and is costing the American taxpayer at least one billion dollars a day. All of which is tragically reminiscent of the last time a Republican president led the U.S. into a war on a river of lies and greed. I’m thinking, of course, about George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Weapons that don’t exist. Threats to this country that aren’t real. Liberation for a people that the U.S. will never win over. Freedom for women about whom nobody in power cares a jot. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.
I spent many years writing about the Iraq War, even though it took me some time to figure out how to begin. I was sickened by the Muslim-baiting that had been going on since the 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and disgusted with the Hollywood movies and legacy press articles glorifying our vengeful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while deifying our soldiers. I wanted to tell a different story. I just didn’t know how.
Then, in 2004, I came across the blog Baghdad Burning by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend. She was the first Iraqi I had ever read on the war, and she taught me that those in an occupied country tell a very different story than do the occupiers.
Back then, if Iraqi men showed up in American books, movies, or journalism at all, it was usually as an enemy or a clown. Meanwhile, Iraqi women were depicted as little more than incomprehensible black-clad figures hovering in the background or wailing over the dead. But Riverbend was none of those. She was a computer technician in a sophisticated city who sounded like an American college student. I was hooked.
Over the next few months, I read her blog religiously. Riverbend’s language and thoughts sounded no different than those of my own daughter, except that she was describing what it was like to live, hour-by-hour, through the overwhelming, heart-freezing violence of a U.S. bombing campaign and the occupation of her country.
Today, we can get the same sense of immediacy by reading or listening to brave civilians and journalists in Gaza, but during our post-9/11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, hearing any voice from the “other side” was rare. So, Riverbend’s blog was not only eye-opening, but it made readers like me feel as though we were experiencing the war right beside her. She wove the mundane moments of her days — jokes, lighthearted observations, conversations with her family — in with her terror at the falling bombs and her feelings about the United States as she watched us tear apart her country. Her blog was eventually collected into a book and published by The Feminist Press in 2005.
Soon, I began reading other Iraqi blogs, too, along with every translation I could find of Iraqi poetry and fiction. I also followed videos by Iraqis that were appearing online, telling stories remarkably different from those I was hearing here in the United States. Some of those Iraqi civilians did indeed want democracy, although they didn’t believe it could be forced on anyone by a foreign power or bombs. Some had been satisfied living under Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule. Many were too focused on their daily struggles to find food and avoid bombs to think about politics at all. But all of them, whatever their thoughts and opinions, were suffering horribly, not only from our bombs, but from wounds, illnesses, malnutrition, starvation, and threats of all kinds, as well as from bullying, kidnappings, rape, and murder at the hands of the gangs and militias our war had unleashed.
One of the most eye-opening of those Iraqi videos was made by an anonymous woman early in the war, who put on a burqa, hid her handheld camera under it, and drove around the countryside interviewing women about their struggles and poverty. As she explained, what she was doing was so dangerous that she had no doubt her video would only remain up on YouTube for a day or so. Sure enough, it quickly disappeared. I only hope that she didn’t disappear with it.
A Bloody Mess
President Bush’s war in Iraq quickly became a bloody mess. As I (and many others) documented, the U.S. might have toppled Saddam Hussein, but in the first five years of our war, we killed at least half as many Iraqis as he had in his 35 years of brutal dictatorship. By 2011, our war had slaughtered some one million Iraqis, orphaned at least a million children, and displaced four million people within or outside Iraq, according to body counts by The Lancet medical journal, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and others. In short, one of every five Iraqis was forced from his or her home: a chilling foreshadowing of what we have since seen in Gaza, and that we are now beginning to see in Iran and Lebanon.
The U.S. not only killed and displaced all those people; it bankrupted Iraq with sanctions, poisoned it with depleted uranium, destroyed its infrastructure and middle class, and dismantled its achievements. Before we invaded, Iraq had the best medical system in the Middle East, and women there had more rights than in any Muslim country other than Turkey, making up 50% of students and 40% of the workforce. By the time we left, all of that, including women’s rights, had been undone.
Today, women’s rights in Iraq have eroded even further and women are now relegated to second-class citizenship. Just this March 2nd, the most prominent women’s rights advocate in Iraq, Yanar Mohammed, was shot to death by men driving by on motorcycles. Nobody has claimed responsibility for her assassination, nor has anybody yet been arrested — and that was just one of many political assassinations there since our war.
While the U.S. war machine was busy destroying Iraq and we were hearing all too little from Iraqis themselves, Americans at home were being bombarded with ever more movies (think Hurt Locker and American Sniper, for instance), books, TV series, and news stories about the heroism of U.S. soldiers at war, as well as their traumas and struggles on returning home.
Harry Potter
Seeking relief from such a myopic view of war, I set out to meet Iraqis who had lived through the war themselves. I wanted to hear the other side, the side we were not telling. So, when I found out that several hundred Iraqis had been resettled in Albany, New York, on the special visas (called SIVs) reserved for those who had worked for two years or more as interpreters for the U.S. military or government officials, I decided to seek them out. That is how I came to meet several women I will never forget, among them a young poet named Nour, and a mother of three named Hala. (I’m withholding their last names for their safety.)
Nour told me she had been imprisoned and tortured in the city of Abu Ghraib at the age of 16 for writing a poem that Saddam Hussein didn’t like. After her release, she taught herself English and later became a translator for a freelance American journalist. In 2005, she and the journalist were kidnapped in the city of Basra and shot. The journalist was killed, but thanks to several surgeries, Nour survived and came to the U.S. with the help of his widow.
Nour and I met in New York City and had lunch a few times. Small and slight, with an angular face and haunted eyes, she was reserved and visibly fragile, but her bravery was unmistakable. She refused to be pitied and, in spite of all she had been through and the dangers she would face there, wanted more than anything in the world to go home.
Hala, the other unforgettable Iraqi woman I met, had fled Baghdad with her husband and children about a year before we met in 2010. The day I arrived at their apartment in a suburb of Albany, New York, he was at his job far away in New Jersey, work he had found only after 10 months of searching. But Hala, who was working as a substitute schoolteacher, was at home with her daughter, Hiba, who was 20, and her son, Mustafa, who had just turned nine. As I speak no Arabic, I was grateful that they were all fluent in English.
“Come in, come in,” Hala said when she opened the door, ushering me in with a smile and showing me to a chair in her immaculate, if somewhat bare, white living room. A round, energetic woman with a kind, if worn, face, she settled onto her sofa and sent her daughter to make the chai (tea). “Mustapha,” she said to her serious-eyed son, “this lady is a writer. She is from England.” (I am British and sound it, although I have lived in the U.S. for many decades.)
His eyes grew big. “You wrote Harry Potter!” he declared. It was not a question. I tried to disabuse him of the idea but he refused to believe me. “I’m a writer, too,” he said. “Want to see?” He ran out to fetch his book — a sheaf of stapled papers he had made in school. “It’s about bad GIs and good GIs.” On each page, he had drawn soldiers and a sky raining with bombs.
After we had settled down comfortably with our tea, Hala told me that she and her husband had both been engineers, a highly respected profession in Iraq, and had hated Saddam Hussein, but had lived a pleasant enough life. Her daughter Hiba had been studying to be a dentist, and their two young sons were in school. “Baghdad was beautiful to us then,” Hala told me wistfully. “Looking back now, it was like that movie Avatar, that world of paradise before the invasion.”
But then the U.S. did invade, their jobs disappeared, and money ran low, so her husband became an interpreter for U.S. officials. Soon afterward, Hala’s brother was killed in retribution. Then, their middle child was kidnapped and murdered (by whom they never knew). He was only 15.
“Every day for a year, Hiba dreamed that she went home and found her brother there,” Hala told me quietly, while Hiba listened without saying a word. “She could not eat or get up or get dressed.” So, in the end, they fled to Jordan to escape the violence and find Hiba therapy, eventually obtaining a visa to the U.S., where Hala and her husband hoped their children would be able to forge better and safer futures.
“And how is that going?” I asked.
“I like school,” Mustafa told me with confidence. But Hiba said she was mostly ostracized by the other students at her Albany college. Feelings against Iraqis ran high in those days — against all Arabs, in fact — and she was spared little of it.
“Some of them don’t like me because they know I’m an Arab and Muslim, and some because they think I’m Hispanic,” she said, her pretty face rueful, and with a shrug, she pushed her long hair over her shoulder. Her only friend, she added, was a young woman who had moved here from India.
The Visas That Are No More
Today, in Donald Trump’s America, neither Nour, Hala, nor any of the other Iraqi women and men I met would even be admitted to this country, no matter how much they sacrificed to help Americans and no matter how much they might be targeted at home for having done so. Indeed, the chances of any refugee finding asylum in the U.S. now are just about zero. The Trump administration has banned refugees, asylum seekers, or any immigrants from 75 countries — including Iraq.
In light of this, I look back with nostalgia on the time I spent with Riverbend, Nour, and Hala, when Barack Obama was still president and Donald Trump had yet to loom all too large in our lives. And I can’t stop thinking about what Hala said when I apologized for what my country had done to hers.
She looked at me and nodded. “Mustafa, come sit on my lap.” She motioned to her son. “Listen to this lady, so you will know that not all Americans wanted that war.”
He nestled into her lap, his sister sat on another chair, and they all gazed at me, waiting.
Disconcerted by such an unexpected responsibility, I took refuge in addressing Mustafa. Looking into his little face, I attempted to apologize on behalf not only of the United States, but of England, too, for destroying his country and killing his brother. And then, like an idiot, I began to cry.
Hiba handed me a Kleenex, but neither she nor her mother and brother cried with me. I was mortified. What did I want from them, weeping like this? It wasn’t my son and brother who’d been killed. It wasn’t my life that had been torn away. It wasn’t my country that had been ruined.
Yet they continued to be kind. After I had recovered and we had spoken for a few hours, I asked Hala, “How can you stand living here with your former enemy? Aren’t you angry at us Americans?”
She shook her head. “No, no, my friend.” She smiled at me kindly. “We lived under Saddam. We understand that there are people. And there are leaders. And that the two are not the same.”
I wonder, as we rain bombs down on the people of Iran today, if they would be able to find it in themselves to be quite so forgiving.
Donald Trump thinks a 15-point plan will end the war with Iran. Seems like a hope and a prayer. Predictably, Iran rejected it out of hand and has put forward its own plan, which the US will surely reject. Negotiations are not taking place despite Trump’s claims otherwise. All that is happening is that intermediaries are moving back and forth on what looks like mission impossible. The war goes on—Israel and the US continue to strike Iran, Iran continues to retaliate, few ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and the US and world economies take increasingly big hits.
Let’s look at what the US and Iran are proposing. According to Foreign Policy magazine, “Under Trump’s proposal, Iran would commit never to pursue nuclear weapons,” dismantle its three main nuclear facilities, and surrender all enriched uranium to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Tehran would also suspend ballistic missile production; limit the rest of its missile program; reopen the Strait of Hormuz; and stop funding regional proxy groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.” If Iran agrees to the US plan, all sanctions on Iran would be lifted.
It’s easy to understand why Iran has rejected this plan. To start with, some parts of the plan appear to be the same as those put before the Iranians in failed negotiations that preceded Trump’s attack. Why he thinks Iran will accept them now is unclear. Iran has consistently rejected dismantling its nuclear program, stopping or giving up uranium enrichment, or limiting the range of its missiles. Perhaps Trump or his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, believe Iran has been so decimated militarily that it has no options. It does: controlling the Strait of Hormuz and sending missiles and drones to military and energy targets all around the Gulf, which it is still doing despite being “obliterated.”
No Way Forward and No Negotiations
The US proposal is also said to include a temporary cease-fire. Why would Iran agree to allowing the US and Israel time to refurbish their arsenals for a future attack? Iran’s foreign minister says, “a ceasefire without guarantees is a vicious cycle that only leads to the repetition of war.” Besides, would Netanyahu agree to a cease-fire when he has vowed to completely destroy Iran regardless of what the US does?
Iran’s plan is about as unrealistic as the US plan. According to Foreign Policy, the plan includes “the United States and Israel paying reparations for war damages, recognizing Iran’s sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, ending international sanctions on Tehran, and implementing a wider Middle East cease-fire that would protect Iran’s proxy groups.” Iran said that it would negotiate over the status of its nuclear enrichment capabilities but not its missile program. It maintained that the Strait of Hormuz would not reopen until a peace deal was secured, and even then, it would start charging tolls to ships that use the strait.
Beyond the proposals lies the question of negotiations. To hear Trump tell it, negotiations are ongoing and productive. The peculiarity here is that it’s the US which seems most determined to negotiate even though Trump has proclaimed victory. Iran, supposedly defeated, is less interested in dealing—and according to a number of experts, considers itself in the driver’s seat despite the destruction all around it. Why might that be? My guess is that the Iranians think Trump is increasingly desperate to stop the fighting. He has failed to achieve any of his objectives, the costs of the war for the US and many partners are rising fast, and the war has become a serious political liability for Trump and the Republicans.
A Very Dangerous Moment
Trump is increasingly being put in the worst possible predicament: either find a face-saving way out, keep bombing with no end in sight, or invade Iran. He has clearly discarded the first option and for now thinks (or hopes) relentless bombing will win the day. All Trump will say is “They’ll tell you, ‘we’re not negotiating,’” he said. “Of course, they’re negotiating. They’ve been obliterated.” And “in the meantime, we’ll just keep blowing them away, unimpeded, unstopped.” Or as Pete Hegseth pithily puts it: “We negotiate by bombing.” No wonder Iran is in no hurry to make a deal. There’s no incentive to negotiate.
Nevertheless, Trump’s inner circle keeps pretending the US is in good shape. Steve Witkoff, for instance, says there are “strong signs” that peace is a possibility, “Iran is looking for an off-ramp,” he says. Not Trump but Iran. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent thinks the world oil market is “well supplied” and that once the war is over, lower energy prices and less inflation will appear because there will be “absolute security.” Trump not only believes Iran will agree to his terms, he has thoughts about taking over its oil. “I mean, I wouldn’t talk about it, but it’s an option.” Again, the Venezuela fallacy.
Trump is clearly up against it. Not only are gas prices rising and inflation (according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) likely to hit 4%. Some Republicans in Congress are complaining about a lack of information about war plans. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is said to be on the verge of introducing a bill to authorize US military action as a way to draw out who supports and who doesn’t support the war. Republicans can’t look away any longer as another 7,000 troops are being sent to the Middle East and the Pentagon is seeking $200 billion to cover war expenses. Trump’s approval ratings, already very low before his order to attack Iran, are now in free fall. He’s losing, he’s desperate, and therefore he’s at his most reckless and dangerous.
The judgment on the Trump administration’s war on Iran is already largely settled across mainstream media, public opinion, and much of the analytical sphere.
What remains supportive of the war is limited to two predictable camps: official government discourse and the president’s most loyal supporters, along with entrenched pro-Israel constituencies.
Beyond these circles, the war is widely understood as reckless, unjustified, and strategically incoherent.
Among the wider American public, this conclusion is not abstract. It is shaped by growing unease, economic anxiety, and a mounting sense that the war lacks both purpose and direction.
Since the outbreak of the war on February 28, 2026, polling has consistently pointed in one direction. A Pew Research poll in late March found that 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict.
Another AP-NORC survey showed that six in ten Americans believe US military action against Iran has already “gone too far,” while even Fox News polling found 58 percent opposition.
These numbers confirm a broader trend that began early in the war and has only intensified. Reuters reported on March 19 that just 7 percent of Americans support a full-scale ground invasion.
In that same reporting, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they believe Trump is likely to pursue one anyway, highlighting a growing disconnect between policy and public will.
Days later, Reuters noted that Trump’s approval rating had dropped to 36 percent, with rising fuel prices and economic instability cited as key drivers.
The longer the war continues, the more its consequences are internalized by ordinary Americans, turning distant conflict into immediate economic pressure.
Among the American intelligentsia, opposition is no longer confined to traditional anti-war circles. It now spans ideological boundaries, including segments of Trump’s own political base.
Reporting from the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference, The Guardian observed that many MAGA supporters warned the war risks becoming another “forever war.”
This convergence is significant, reflecting not a passing disagreement but a deeper structural shift in public perception.
Yet mainstream media—from CNN to Fox News—has largely avoided confronting what many Americans already recognize: that the war aligns closely with the agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Within Washington itself, unease is also becoming more explicit. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that lawmakers from both parties are increasingly skeptical of the administration’s approach.
At the strategic level, the war’s foundational assumptions have already begun to unravel. Israel’s early calculations that escalation might trigger internal collapse in Iran have failed to materialize.
Iran’s political system remains intact, its leadership stable, and its military cohesion unbroken under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
At the same time, Tehran has demonstrated its ability to retaliate across multiple fronts, targeting Israeli territory and US military assets in the region.
Its geographic leverage over the Strait of Hormuz continues to exert pressure on global energy markets, amplifying its strategic position despite sustained attacks.
The structural reality is therefore unavoidable. Regime change in Iran would require a massive ground invasion, a broad coalition, and a prolonged occupation.
Even under such conditions, success would remain uncertain, as the experience of Iraq has already demonstrated with devastating clarity.
This raises the central question: why continue a war whose strategic premises are already collapsing?
Part of the answer lies not in strategy, but in psychology. A substantial body of political psychology research, frequently cited in relevant 2026 analyses, describes Trump’s leadership style as deeply narcissistic. Traits such as grandiosity, hypersensitivity to criticism, and an overriding need to project dominance are not incidental—they actively shape decision-making.
Trump’s rhetoric has long relied on humiliation, domination, and spectacle, framing politics as a contest of strength rather than negotiation.
Within this framework, escalation becomes a psychological necessity. To retreat risks appearing weak, while compromise risks humiliation.
For a leader whose identity is built on projecting strength, such outcomes are politically and personally intolerable.
This dynamic is reinforced by the broader culture of the administration, where senior officials have repeatedly relied on language such as “obliteration” and “total destruction.”
Such rhetoric, however, has not been matched by evidence of a coherent long-term strategy, exposing a widening gap between performance and planning.
At the same time, the administration’s fixation on masculine power—on dominance, strength, and spectacle—has contributed to a profound underestimation of its adversary.
Iran is not a fragmented state waiting to collapse, but a regional power with decades of experience in asymmetric warfare and strategic resilience.
Yet Trump appears to have operated under the assumption that American power alone guarantees outcomes, an illusion reinforced by past displays of military force.
Reuters reported in late March that Trump is now increasingly pressured to “end the war” quickly, as the administration confronts what it described as “only hard choices.”
The same report cited officials acknowledging that there is no clear exit strategy, leaving the administration caught between escalation and political fallout.
One official told Reuters that there are “no easy solutions” left, underscoring the depth of the strategic impasse.
Another added that any withdrawal would have to be framed carefully to avoid appearing as a defeat, reflecting the administration’s concern with optics as much as outcomes.
This is where the psychological dimension becomes decisive. Trump has constructed a political identity rooted in strength, dominance, and victory.
A defeat in Iran would not simply be a policy failure; it would represent the collapse of that identity. For a leader driven by narcissistic imperatives, such a collapse is existential, threatening not only his political standing but his relationship with his own base.
This is why some analysts—and even figures within Trump’s own orbit—have begun to float a theatrical exit strategy. As Reuters reported on March 14, White House adviser David Sacks stated bluntly that the United States should “declare victory and get out” of the war on Iran, calling for disengagement despite the absence of a clear strategic outcome.
Such a move would allow Trump to claim success while disengaging from an increasingly untenable conflict, preserving the image of strength even in the face of strategic failure.
But this reveals the deeper truth of the war. The “victory” being pursued is not military—it is psychological.
The US-Israeli war on Iran is therefore not only a moral and legal crisis. It is also a geopolitical catastrophe shaped, in no small part, by the psychology of a leader unwilling to confront the consequences of his own disastrous decisions.
Truth may well be the first casualty of war, but death, injury and environmental degradation are bound to be keeping up in the hit lists. Attacks on gas fields, oil refineries and petrochemical plants will always leave an impression once the conflict concludes. In the case of carbon emissions, the most challenging obstacle in collective efforts to stay the rise of the earth’s temperatures, the Iran War is doing much to throw everything out of kilter.
The gloomy modelling from the Climate and Community Institute shows that the first fortnight of the Iran War, which began on February 28 as a crime against peace pursued by Israel and the United States, produced some 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. To get a sense of proportion, the carbon pollution exceeded that of Iceland in one year. The institute, in arriving at such figures, considered the carbon emissions arising from destroyed homes and buildings, destroyed fuel, the fuel used in combat and support operations, equipment embodied carbon (equipment lost) and missiles and drones.
To give a sense of the granular detail, a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighter consumes roughly 5,600 to 6,500 litres of fuel during a single combat sortie lasting one-and-a-half to two hours. The emission of carbon dioxide during such a mission is approximately that of 14-17 tonnes, the lifespan of a conventional passenger vehicle. The company behind the production of the F-35 has also admitted that its sold products, in 2024, produced just under 14 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents.
The authors of the Climate and Community Institute report further note that carbon costs will only rise in sharp fashion if the war persists. Three reasons are postulated, and these do not even include such issues as the re-routing of commercial aviation traffic. Firstly, as US and Israeli arsenals suffer depletion, “embodied emissions of building new weapons, along with fuel used to deliver them to the region, will rise.” Secondly, the targeting of oil infrastructure in the region will result in the uncontrollable emission of fossil fuels, as what took place during the Gulf War. Thirdly, the deployment of more naval vessels by other states to the Middle East, including France and the United Kingdom, ostensibly to protect their interests, will increase “emissions via [a] ‘defensive’ posture.”
Things do not end there. The current obsession of the Trump administration’s pursuit of “energy dominance” will only see more fossil fuel production for reasons of energy security. Reconstruction in the aftermath of the war will also cause emissions. “Reconstructing infrastructure in the impacted region of 14 countries from Cypress to Azerbaijan – including homes, roads, hospitals, schools, oil and transport infrastructure – is not only costly but carbon intensive.” The authors note with grim awareness that the emissions arising from rebuilding Gaza and Lebanon after the conflict “will produce at least 24 times more than the emissions from the war alone.”
Other conflicts have also been appalling emitters. The hefty carbon footprint of the first 15 months of Israel’s campaign in Gaza arising from direct war activities, according to a multi-authored study published in April last year, exceeded the annual emissions of 36 individual countries and territories. The total emissions would increase to 41 lowest emitting countries and territories if Hamas’s tunnel network and Israel’s “Iron Wall” protective fence were also included. The authors arrive at a staggering figure of 32,275,089 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) when pre-conflict and post-conflict related construction activities are included. That final figure ranks higher than the annual emissions of 102 countries.
Broadly speaking, the Iran War has revealed how the continued reliance on fossil fuels is not only degrading in terms of environment but precarious in terms of security. “Fossil fuel dependency is ripping away national security and sovereignty, and replacing it with subservience and rising costs,” explains Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. To that end, renewable sources of energy must be pursued with greater vigour. “Meek dependence on fossil fuel imports,” he remarks, referring to European policy makers, “will leave Europe forever lurching from crisis to crisis.” Renewable energy, however, will “turn the tables. Sunlight doesn’t depend on narrow and vulnerable shipping straits.”
Brian Lee of Rethink Energy Florida builds on the theme with earnest seriousness, suggesting that “Energy security isclimate security.” This is not a novel pairing; any serious policy in that sense “would treat accelerating renewable energy development not as an environmental gesture, but as a national imperative.” Doing so would set “clear limits on the level of sea-level rise our coastal economies can endure as a second metric to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees C temperature increase limit – and align policy to stay below both.”
War has a nasty habit of suspending agendas and supplanting them with a murderous lunacy that becomes, for the duration of hostilities, dull and commonplace. Important, pressing topics get marooned along the way. When peace breaks out, those neglected topics return with a vengeance. Along with the staining criminality of those who have soiled the peace, climate change is exactly one of those things, something that will storm back to the fore with menacing consequences.
How long will Gulf States bleed for war on Iran that the United States and Israel are waging? That’s a question a recent Newsweek article posed. According to the reporting, specialists from all six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states describe a “growing frustration with the U.S. approach to the war with Iran and a perception of Trump prioritizing Israel.”
What The Guardian has called a “worst nightmare,” the war has impacted the GCC states, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to such a degree that they are consumed with fury as they absorb the shock of a conflict they did not want. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranian attacks on energy infrastructure have placed particular pressure on regional economies. For the GCC economies, costs like these don’t have any corresponding political gains. The GCC’s bargain—American bases in exchange for defense and security—doesn’t look quite so beneficial at the moment.
Further, the GCC is a strategic hub of aviation, tourism, and investment, and these industries are suffering because of the war. The Gulf states were aware of the implications before the war started. Once Israeli struck Doha in September without any reaction from the Trump administration, it served as both the “turning point” and the writing on the wall.
According to Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, the GCC States were pulled into a losing battle. He has warned of getting dragged into the conflict. At the same time, he points out that “the GCC possesses a radical, unconventional, and highly effective tool to force an end to the hostilities: a collective and complete halt of all oil and gas exports.”
GCC Skepticism
Israeli tactics, in particular, have escalated the conflict. Israel has attacked, for instance, a desalination facility in Iran and struck 30 oil storage tanks, thus precipitating Iranian and proxy attacks aimed at comparable GCC infrastructure.
As a result, GCC economies have had to suffer the unintended consequences of the war. A huge percentage of the population in the Gulf states depends on desalinated water. The states are now livid over the U.S. posture for its carelessness and an apparent determination to force Iranians to finally dig in their heels and produce a nuke.
Israeli strikes on Iranian political leadership accomplish the same thing. As Jeffrey St. Clair has observed, Israel assassinated Iranian top security official Ali Larijani “to stop any negotiated end of the war and to drag the U.S. deeper into it. In Iran, it will inevitably give more power to the most reactionary forces in the country.”
As Henry Kissinger once said, “To be an enemy of America is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” Not surprisingly, GCC countries have lost trust in the United States and rewinding will be very difficult. The war has impacted interdependence and produced a “shadow of risk.” Tourism, banking, and data center construction will suffer not only short-term losses but long-term consequences because of the loss of U.S. credibility with its allies in its efforts to satisfy Netanyahu’s military ambitions. Companies like Amazon will not want to build any data centers only to be bombed again inside the year. Standard Chartered Bank recently had to evacuate and asked its Dubai employees to work from home.
The GCC is even questioning the legitimacy of U.S. bases. Even if the war ends soon, America has lost its reputation for providing reliable protection. In essence, GCC security issues of interdependence have only started.
GCC Optimism
The GCC is now raising some of the same questions as U.S. allies in Europe about the necessity to build an independent security capacity. “The conflict is accelerating the GCC’s push to diversify economic and defense ties away from exclusive reliance on the U.S., reinforcing a shift toward a more multipolar portfolio of partners,” observers Middle East expert Christopher Davidson. “At the same time, Gulf States are not abandoning Washington but are hedging by deepening relations with China, Russia, and other Asian powers in trade, finance, and arms. This reduces U.S. leverage over their economic strategies and nudges the security architecture toward a more transactional, multi‑supplier model.”
Concerning the consequences of Israel’s engagement in the region for GCC economies and regional stability, Davidson notes that,
Israel’s military actions, backed by the United States, have generated a perception in the Gulf that the region has been dragged onto the front lines, exposing their economies to shipping risks, higher insurance costs, and political backlash. As a result, the UAE and Bahrain (which signed the Abraham Accords) are likely to maintain normalization with Israel but shift toward quieter, less symbolic cooperation to manage domestic opinion and regional relationships, especially with Iran. This more discreet posture aims to preserve strategic benefits from Israel ties while limiting the economic and reputational spillovers of an unpopular war.
In terms of the GCC’s economic resilience in the face of intense geopolitical pressure, Davidson adds:
The GCC’s strong fundamentals, world‑class infrastructure, large sovereign wealth buffers, and relatively attractive regulatory environments—position their economies to remain resilient. In the long term, if the conflict delays or constrains Iran’s nuclear program, Gulf states could benefit from reduced security risks and more predictable investment conditions. They may also be well placed to capture future reconstruction contracts in Iran, should the regime soften or weaken, leveraging their capital and project‑delivery capacity to turn regional turmoil into opportunity.
HELEN BENEDICT
I’m writing this piece well into President Donald Trump’s new war with Iran, which, with the help of Israel, has already killed more than 2,000 civilians, including 175 schoolgirls and staff; displaced some 3.2 million people; and is costing the American taxpayer at least one billion dollars a day. All of which is tragically reminiscent of the last time a Republican president led the U.S. into a war on a river of lies and greed. I’m thinking, of course, about George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Weapons that don’t exist. Threats to this country that aren’t real. Liberation for a people that the U.S. will never win over. Freedom for women about whom nobody in power cares a jot. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.
I spent many years writing about the Iraq War, even though it took me some time to figure out how to begin. I was sickened by the Muslim-baiting that had been going on since the 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and disgusted with the Hollywood movies and legacy press articles glorifying our vengeful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while deifying our soldiers. I wanted to tell a different story. I just didn’t know how.
Then, in 2004, I came across the blog Baghdad Burning by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend. She was the first Iraqi I had ever read on the war, and she taught me that those in an occupied country tell a very different story than do the occupiers.
Back then, if Iraqi men showed up in American books, movies, or journalism at all, it was usually as an enemy or a clown. Meanwhile, Iraqi women were depicted as little more than incomprehensible black-clad figures hovering in the background or wailing over the dead. But Riverbend was none of those. She was a computer technician in a sophisticated city who sounded like an American college student. I was hooked.
Over the next few months, I read her blog religiously. Riverbend’s language and thoughts sounded no different than those of my own daughter, except that she was describing what it was like to live, hour-by-hour, through the overwhelming, heart-freezing violence of a U.S. bombing campaign and the occupation of her country.
Today, we can get the same sense of immediacy by reading or listening to brave civilians and journalists in Gaza, but during our post-9/11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, hearing any voice from the “other side” was rare. So, Riverbend’s blog was not only eye-opening, but it made readers like me feel as though we were experiencing the war right beside her. She wove the mundane moments of her days — jokes, lighthearted observations, conversations with her family — in with her terror at the falling bombs and her feelings about the United States as she watched us tear apart her country. Her blog was eventually collected into a book and published by The Feminist Press in 2005.
Soon, I began reading other Iraqi blogs, too, along with every translation I could find of Iraqi poetry and fiction. I also followed videos by Iraqis that were appearing online, telling stories remarkably different from those I was hearing here in the United States. Some of those Iraqi civilians did indeed want democracy, although they didn’t believe it could be forced on anyone by a foreign power or bombs. Some had been satisfied living under Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule. Many were too focused on their daily struggles to find food and avoid bombs to think about politics at all. But all of them, whatever their thoughts and opinions, were suffering horribly, not only from our bombs, but from wounds, illnesses, malnutrition, starvation, and threats of all kinds, as well as from bullying, kidnappings, rape, and murder at the hands of the gangs and militias our war had unleashed.
One of the most eye-opening of those Iraqi videos was made by an anonymous woman early in the war, who put on a burqa, hid her handheld camera under it, and drove around the countryside interviewing women about their struggles and poverty. As she explained, what she was doing was so dangerous that she had no doubt her video would only remain up on YouTube for a day or so. Sure enough, it quickly disappeared. I only hope that she didn’t disappear with it.
A Bloody Mess
President Bush’s war in Iraq quickly became a bloody mess. As I (and many others) documented, the U.S. might have toppled Saddam Hussein, but in the first five years of our war, we killed at least half as many Iraqis as he had in his 35 years of brutal dictatorship. By 2011, our war had slaughtered some one million Iraqis, orphaned at least a million children, and displaced four million people within or outside Iraq, according to body counts by The Lancet medical journal, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and others. In short, one of every five Iraqis was forced from his or her home: a chilling foreshadowing of what we have since seen in Gaza, and that we are now beginning to see in Iran and Lebanon.
The U.S. not only killed and displaced all those people; it bankrupted Iraq with sanctions, poisoned it with depleted uranium, destroyed its infrastructure and middle class, and dismantled its achievements. Before we invaded, Iraq had the best medical system in the Middle East, and women there had more rights than in any Muslim country other than Turkey, making up 50% of students and 40% of the workforce. By the time we left, all of that, including women’s rights, had been undone.
Today, women’s rights in Iraq have eroded even further and women are now relegated to second-class citizenship. Just this March 2nd, the most prominent women’s rights advocate in Iraq, Yanar Mohammed, was shot to death by men driving by on motorcycles. Nobody has claimed responsibility for her assassination, nor has anybody yet been arrested — and that was just one of many political assassinations there since our war.
While the U.S. war machine was busy destroying Iraq and we were hearing all too little from Iraqis themselves, Americans at home were being bombarded with ever more movies (think Hurt Locker and American Sniper, for instance), books, TV series, and news stories about the heroism of U.S. soldiers at war, as well as their traumas and struggles on returning home.
Harry Potter
Seeking relief from such a myopic view of war, I set out to meet Iraqis who had lived through the war themselves. I wanted to hear the other side, the side we were not telling. So, when I found out that several hundred Iraqis had been resettled in Albany, New York, on the special visas (called SIVs) reserved for those who had worked for two years or more as interpreters for the U.S. military or government officials, I decided to seek them out. That is how I came to meet several women I will never forget, among them a young poet named Nour, and a mother of three named Hala. (I’m withholding their last names for their safety.)
Nour told me she had been imprisoned and tortured in the city of Abu Ghraib at the age of 16 for writing a poem that Saddam Hussein didn’t like. After her release, she taught herself English and later became a translator for a freelance American journalist. In 2005, she and the journalist were kidnapped in the city of Basra and shot. The journalist was killed, but thanks to several surgeries, Nour survived and came to the U.S. with the help of his widow.
Nour and I met in New York City and had lunch a few times. Small and slight, with an angular face and haunted eyes, she was reserved and visibly fragile, but her bravery was unmistakable. She refused to be pitied and, in spite of all she had been through and the dangers she would face there, wanted more than anything in the world to go home.
Hala, the other unforgettable Iraqi woman I met, had fled Baghdad with her husband and children about a year before we met in 2010. The day I arrived at their apartment in a suburb of Albany, New York, he was at his job far away in New Jersey, work he had found only after 10 months of searching. But Hala, who was working as a substitute schoolteacher, was at home with her daughter, Hiba, who was 20, and her son, Mustafa, who had just turned nine. As I speak no Arabic, I was grateful that they were all fluent in English.
“Come in, come in,” Hala said when she opened the door, ushering me in with a smile and showing me to a chair in her immaculate, if somewhat bare, white living room. A round, energetic woman with a kind, if worn, face, she settled onto her sofa and sent her daughter to make the chai (tea). “Mustapha,” she said to her serious-eyed son, “this lady is a writer. She is from England.” (I am British and sound it, although I have lived in the U.S. for many decades.)
His eyes grew big. “You wrote Harry Potter!” he declared. It was not a question. I tried to disabuse him of the idea but he refused to believe me. “I’m a writer, too,” he said. “Want to see?” He ran out to fetch his book — a sheaf of stapled papers he had made in school. “It’s about bad GIs and good GIs.” On each page, he had drawn soldiers and a sky raining with bombs.
After we had settled down comfortably with our tea, Hala told me that she and her husband had both been engineers, a highly respected profession in Iraq, and had hated Saddam Hussein, but had lived a pleasant enough life. Her daughter Hiba had been studying to be a dentist, and their two young sons were in school. “Baghdad was beautiful to us then,” Hala told me wistfully. “Looking back now, it was like that movie Avatar, that world of paradise before the invasion.”
But then the U.S. did invade, their jobs disappeared, and money ran low, so her husband became an interpreter for U.S. officials. Soon afterward, Hala’s brother was killed in retribution. Then, their middle child was kidnapped and murdered (by whom they never knew). He was only 15.
“Every day for a year, Hiba dreamed that she went home and found her brother there,” Hala told me quietly, while Hiba listened without saying a word. “She could not eat or get up or get dressed.” So, in the end, they fled to Jordan to escape the violence and find Hiba therapy, eventually obtaining a visa to the U.S., where Hala and her husband hoped their children would be able to forge better and safer futures.
“And how is that going?” I asked.
“I like school,” Mustafa told me with confidence. But Hiba said she was mostly ostracized by the other students at her Albany college. Feelings against Iraqis ran high in those days — against all Arabs, in fact — and she was spared little of it.
“Some of them don’t like me because they know I’m an Arab and Muslim, and some because they think I’m Hispanic,” she said, her pretty face rueful, and with a shrug, she pushed her long hair over her shoulder. Her only friend, she added, was a young woman who had moved here from India.
The Visas That Are No More
Today, in Donald Trump’s America, neither Nour, Hala, nor any of the other Iraqi women and men I met would even be admitted to this country, no matter how much they sacrificed to help Americans and no matter how much they might be targeted at home for having done so. Indeed, the chances of any refugee finding asylum in the U.S. now are just about zero. The Trump administration has banned refugees, asylum seekers, or any immigrants from 75 countries — including Iraq.
In light of this, I look back with nostalgia on the time I spent with Riverbend, Nour, and Hala, when Barack Obama was still president and Donald Trump had yet to loom all too large in our lives. And I can’t stop thinking about what Hala said when I apologized for what my country had done to hers.
She looked at me and nodded. “Mustafa, come sit on my lap.” She motioned to her son. “Listen to this lady, so you will know that not all Americans wanted that war.”
He nestled into her lap, his sister sat on another chair, and they all gazed at me, waiting.
Disconcerted by such an unexpected responsibility, I took refuge in addressing Mustafa. Looking into his little face, I attempted to apologize on behalf not only of the United States, but of England, too, for destroying his country and killing his brother. And then, like an idiot, I began to cry.
Hiba handed me a Kleenex, but neither she nor her mother and brother cried with me. I was mortified. What did I want from them, weeping like this? It wasn’t my son and brother who’d been killed. It wasn’t my life that had been torn away. It wasn’t my country that had been ruined.
Yet they continued to be kind. After I had recovered and we had spoken for a few hours, I asked Hala, “How can you stand living here with your former enemy? Aren’t you angry at us Americans?”
She shook her head. “No, no, my friend.” She smiled at me kindly. “We lived under Saddam. We understand that there are people. And there are leaders. And that the two are not the same.”
I wonder, as we rain bombs down on the people of Iran today, if they would be able to find it in themselves to be quite so forgiving.
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