Tag: Marshall Plan

On Being Afraid of Iranians

Posted on by Scott Samuelson

by Scott Samuelson

Hannah Arendt: “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”

One of my early memories is lying awake at night, trying to discern through the sounds of the wind the creeping of an Iranian on the roof outside my bedroom window. For a few months, when I’d look both ways to cross the street on my walk to school, I’d scan less for oncoming traffic (my rural town had almost no traffic) than for a stampeding horde of Iranian college students.

I was six years old—just mature enough to pick up on the anxieties of the news. After footage of angry Iranians storming over fences under the banner of a severe bearded old man, Walter Cronkite would sign off each night by numbering how many days the Americans had been held hostage. I must have heard in passing the phrase “American embassy in Tehran,” but it entered my young mind like “city hall in Paducah.” For all I knew, the elementary school of Ainsworth, Iowa was going to fall next. Doesn’t our country have an army supposed to protect us? Why isn’t anyone doing anything? How can we let Iranians snatch up innocent Americans?

The best argument for the United States’ war against Iran (insofar as reason has anything to do with it) hews closely to my six-year-old self’s fears and demands. Don’t we have a mighty military? Why haven’t we done anything for the past five decades? We can’t let Iran have weapons, especially nuclear weapons, because Iran threatens the whole world with impunity.

Setting aside the pile of important procedural and strategic objections to the current war, let’s say—against all odds—that its ostensible goals are realized: the military power of Iran is obliterated, and the vicious ruling regime is eliminated. Obliterate and eliminate—and then what? Many years ago, in a discussion of disarmament talks, E.B. White wrote,

Every ship, every plane could be scrapped, every stockpile destroyed, every soldier mustered out, and if the original reasons for holding arms were still present the world would not have been disarmed. Arms would simply be in a momentary state of suspension, preparatory to new and greater arms.

If that’s true of disarmament talks, how much truer is it when another country has destroyed your stockpiles in an act of aggression? Read more »

Thursday, May 1, 2025

Masters of War

Posted on by Kevin Lively

by Kevin Lively

“What this country needs is a good war.”, my Grandfather declared in 2008 while we were gathered at his table in Buffalo with Fox News playing in the background, the TV lit up red with crashing market charts. “It’s the only thing that will fix the economy” he continued. No one pointed out that as these words were spoken, there were, put together, around 200,000 US troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, my grandfather was a good man, hard working, pious, and hardly prone to such statements. Yet, like many Americans who lived through the Great Depression, it was also deeply ingrained in his psyche that the event which led to prosperity during his adulthood, the greatness many are eager to return to, was also the bloodiest human driven catastrophe in history, WWII.

Hamburg, Germany after Allied bombing, left, and Levittown NY, in 1959 right

This is of course a widely accepted truism among US economists and historians, as the state department’s Office of the Historian will tell you. It is also part of the cultural fabric to extol the moral virtues of this particular war, given that it destroyed a regime which essentially defines the modern conception of evil. Of course, as with everything else in history, some of this triumphalist patting ourselves on the back is white-washed. It turns out there was more support in the USA for Nazism before the war than is often remembered, including in the business arrangements of the Bush dynasty’s progenitor. This should not be too surprising given that leading medical journal editors in the USA were urging that the public be persuaded on moral grounds to adopt similar eugenics policies as the Nazis enforced in the 1930s.

In any case, the other accepted truism about this turn of events is that America, as the victorious industrial superpower, realized that its isolationism had only helped lead to the calamity. Therefore, like it or not, it must shoulder the burden of power, stand against the rising communist threat to make the world safe for democracy, and establish the Pax Americana which we have enjoyed since.

As with any good myth, much of this is true. Read more »