I began TomDispatch in response to President George W. Bush's decision to invade Afghanistan in the (all too literal) wake of the 9/11 attacks on my city, New York, and on Washington, D.C. Now, here we are, almost a quarter of a century later, with another American president -- and you know just who I mean -- having launched yet another war in the Greater Middle East, an ongoing air assault on Iran under the mild rubric Operation Epic Fury, with ground troops possibly to follow. (One anonymous White House official was quoted recently as saying, "There has been no decision to send ground troops at this time, but President Trump wisely keeps all options at his disposal." Wise indeed!)
Excuse the exclamation points, but talk about not learning lessons! Yikes! And imagine that Donald Trump arrived back on the scene in Washington in 2025 as "THE PEACE PRESIDENT." (NO SMALL LETTERS FOR HIM, OF COURSE!) We're talking about the president who, in his election night victory speech in 2024, insisted that "I'm not going to start wars, I'm going to stop wars." We're talking about the president who, above all else, has yearned for (and bitterly complained about not getting) a Nobel Peace Prize.
And now, well, it's war, war, war, and more war- and just to catch the mood of this moment, the Pentagon has asked for a modest extra $200 billion (and yes, that "modest" is indeed meant as a -- grim -- joke!) to fund its ongoing Iran operations. As Secretary of (most distinctly) War Pete Hegseth recently put it, "Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys."
Obviously!
And with all of that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Eric Ross take you into an all-American twentieth- and twenty-first-century world of war, war, war, and more of the same. Tom
Blowback 2026
The Price of Empire and the Costs of War on Iran
By Eric Ross
What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated U.S. military adventurism in the Middle East amount to? Some of the toll is already clear. Washington has squandered billions of dollars on a reckless war of aggression against Iran. A merciless campaign of aerial bombardment has driven millions from their homes. American and Israeli airstrikes have rained destruction on 10,000 civilian sites and already killed more than 3,000 people in Iran and Lebanon. Among the dead are more than 200 children, many killed in a U.S. strike on a girls' school, a war crime that evokes the grim precedent of such past American atrocities as the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam or the 1991 Amiriyah shelter bombing in Iraq.
The latest war has also dealt a potentially fatal blow to our already battered democratic institutions. It's a war neither authorized by Congress nor supported by the public. Instead, it was launched by a president who refuses to submit to the law or heed the will of the people, claiming in true authoritarian fashion that he is the law, and that he alone embodies the popular will.
Such democratic backsliding has, however, been decades in the making, a predictable result of longstanding imperial impunity. Yet we may rapidly be approaching a point of no return. Even George W. Bush, in launching his catastrophic wars of choice in the region, sought to manufacture consent and present the case before the United Nations. Today, there is neither the pretense of legality nor of legitimacy.
The costs associated with this latest criminal war, measured in human lives; the misappropriation of national resources; and the erosion of the rule of law will only continue to mount. Yet there is also a less visible, less immediate price tag for such wars. If the history of American interventions in the region offers any guide, the full bill will likely not become apparent for months, years, or even decades. When it finally arrives, however, it will carry a familiar name: blowback.
For that reason, it's important at this moment to recall the lessons Washington appears determined to forget. From Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq to Libya, the record is unmistakable. Yet as long as the historical amnesia that grips this country's political establishment remains unchallenged, the same cycles of escalation and reprisal will undoubtedly persist in the years to come, threatening to once again draw the United States (and much of the world) ever deeper into the abyss of forever war.
Oil and the Engine of Empire
While the post-9/11 "war on terror" is often invoked as the starting point of U.S. militarism in the Middle East, the roots of conflict there stretch back nearly a century. The violence and instability unleashed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented less a rupture with the past than a continuation of long-established patterns of U.S. policy. The seeds of the forever wars had, in fact, been planted decades earlier in the oil-rich soil of the region.
Direct American involvement began in the previous century in the years between the First and Second World Wars. By that point, petroleum had become not merely a valuable commodity but a strategic necessity for sustaining a modern industrial economy. The vast oil reserves discovered in the United States had propelled the American economy to global prominence and played a decisive role in fueling the Allied war effort during World War I. Yet policymakers in Washington understood that domestic reserves were finite. As petroleum became synonymous with power, economically, militarily, and politically, the United States increasingly turned abroad to secure new sources.
The Middle East emerged as a critical frontier in that search, drawing the region ever more tightly into the orbit of an expanding American empire. In 1933, Standard Oil of California secured an exploratory concession with the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The agreement created the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), laying the groundwork for the 1945 U.S.-Saudi oil-for-security partnership that would become central to Washington's future influence over the region's geopolitical order.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
