The Uses of Evil: The Choice of War.

They voted to fix a broken system and got another war instead.

I hear the word evil thrown about a lot. It gets used like it settles an argument. It’s not new. We’ve been calling people and countries and ideas evil for quite some time. The Soviet Union was evil. Communism was evil. Saddam was evil. Gaddafi was evil. Castro was evil. The Ayatollahs are evil. And, of course, Iran is evil. That’s supposed to be the end of the conversation.

It seems to me that the word evil is really just a precursor, an excuse we use as justification for evil actions of our own. We name the evil out there so we don’t see it in ourselves. That’s exactly what is happening with this immoral and illegal war against Iran and the assassination of their leadership, which is also illegal. All this is justified because after all, they were evil.

Already hundreds of Iranians and 3 US servicemembers are dead. We killed the Supreme Leader. We killed his family. We killed his top military officials. We killed over 200 people, including 118 students at a girls’ school. Because Trump and Netanyahu chose to go to war with Iran. A sovereign nation. The pretense was nuclear weapons, but negotiations were actively happening. Iranian diplomats were in Switzerland agreeing to never stockpile enriched uranium. We did this without a vote in Congress. Without a declaration of war. Without an imminent threat.

I don’t want to go on a deep rant about the history of the Middle East and the West and the British Empire in that region. But we need to look at Iran because it tells you everything about the pattern.

Iran has been trying to become a democracy for over a hundred years. They had a Constitutional Revolution in 1906. They fought for self-governance through two World Wars. And in 1951 they elected a prime minister named Mohammad Mossadegh. Wildly popular. He moved that country forward. Created things like social security and other social safety nets. Expanded workers’ rights. And to fund it he nationalized their greatest resource, their oil. Oil that had been controlled by the British through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. We know them today as BP.

Same story you can hear in Venezuela. Same story in Saudi Arabia. Same story in Iraq, in Kuwait, across the Middle East really. Anywhere oil was found, that oil meant your people didn’t matter.

So MI6 and the CIA worked diligently to overturn this prime minister and install the Shah of Iran. Who was, you couldn’t have guessed it, a brutal dictator. He tortured. He maimed. He created a secret police force called SAVAK that went around silencing political dissidents. He suppressed religious identity and religious practices. He suppressed so many freedoms. And he did all of this with American weapons, American money, and American approval for 26 years.

When the revolution came in 1979 we acted shocked. We called them evil. But we made them. Not their theology. That’s theirs. But the rage and the resentment and the turn toward fundamentalism as an identity against Western domination? We helped build every brick of that.

If that sounds familiar it’s because it is. It’s the reality of America that Trump was describing in his campaigns. The reality that resonated so broadly and so deeply. The shithole America. The elites screwing you over. That’s what happened in Iran. It’s just a different country with a different religion. But it’s the same tool the ruling elite have been using for centuries. Same thing that happens in West Virginia. In the Coal Belt. In steel mill towns of yore. They install leadership. They extract your resources. They take your money. They take your things. They take your opportunity. And it leads to a real breakdown.

Think about drug addiction in Appalachia. The crime. The generational illness of opportunity. Then put that on the Middle East. Much like Appalachia, these folks turn to their religion for solace. For comfort. And often, like in the US with the right wing, they’re radicalized. The source of that rage comes from injustice. From a casual disregard for humanity. The mechanics are the same whether you’re in eastern Kentucky or Tehran. Install your people. Extract the resources. Discard the population. When they react, call them the problem.

So America. We recently decided the system isn’t working. That the cost of living had gotten too much. That the elites decided they could take too much. That they could be relatively open with their desire to take our resources, take our money, and even be relatively open pedophiles. Groceries are up 26% since the pandemic. Ground beef is up 17% in just the last year. Coffee up almost 19%. Daycare costs up nearly 40%. Seven out of ten Americans say raising a child is unaffordable. Credit card debt has hit $1.2 trillion. People are drowning. We decided this was too much.

That was the mandate. Fix this. Make life affordable. That’s what people voted for. And instead of fixing any of it, instead of lowering a single grocery bill or building a single thing, we went right back to murdering and killing and assassinating and warring. A war with Iran. A military seizure of Venezuela’s president. ICE agents shooting American citizens in Minneapolis. 73,000 people in immigration detention, the highest ever. A $170 billion enforcement machine being built across the country. None of which puts food on anyone’s table or lowers anyone’s rent. People voted to fix a broken system and got another war instead.

Donald Trump won twice telling Americans their country was broken. That was the whole pitch. America is on the wrong path. The system is rigged. The elites have taken everything. Your towns are hollowed out. Your jobs are gone. Your kids can’t afford to live. It worked because it was largely true.

But once the bombs drop, once wars start, you’re either on our side or the other. That honesty about your country isn’t allowed anymore. If you say the same things that got Trump elected, you’re not a patriot anymore. You’re a traitor. You have to support the mission now.

It’s very hard for people to understand that being on the side of America means being against these wars. Being against this way of behaving. Being for a new way of being America, both at home and abroad. I can say that this illegal war where we’re killing schoolchildren is something I absolutely oppose as an American and I think it’s patriotic as hell to say so. But if I say that, I’m the bad guy. Same people who ran on “America is a disaster” now need you to stand and cheer for the disaster they’re creating.

Either Americans have the right to demand better from their government or they don’t. That right doesn’t go away because somebody decided to start bombing another country.

I racked my brain to understand why we’d be doing this now. A lot of times you hear “it’s complicated.” I think that’s used to put a veil over things that aren’t particularly complicated. It’s only complicated because there are so many different groups that want to invade and destabilize Iran for their own reasons. But the big picture isn’t hard to see.

Follow the oil.

China gets half its crude imports through the Strait of Hormuz. China buys over 80% of Iran’s oil exports. Venezuela, whose president we helicoptered out and kidnapped in January, holds the largest proven oil reserves on earth and was another major supplier to China. We’ve put a boot on the throat of China’s energy supply right at the moment they’re trying to become the world’s dominant industrial power.

China isn’t just making cheap stuff anymore. They’re building fully automated factories that run with no workers and no lights. They call them dark factories. They installed more industrial robots in a single year than the rest of the world combined. Producing a smartphone every second in plants run by AI. Building the machine tools of the future. The robotics. The renewable energy. The advanced manufacturing. They’re embarking on a generational transformation.

They’re working to get off foreign oil entirely. Working to turn coal into liquid to make carbon fiber and other materials. Going all in on solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal. Not just because they want to save the planet, though it may have something to do with it. Because they know their future depends on energy independence. Their ability to grow crops and feed their people depends on it. They understand that to be strong, to be themselves, they must be independent.

That’s something America never seems to learn. That interdependency on the entire world, an interdependency on one chemical, say petroleum, creates a monster. It removes your ability to say “we won’t do that because it’s immoral.” Because the choices seem stark. Do the immoral thing and continue life as a nation as you know it. Or don’t, and make some adjustments. For whatever reason our leaders have never decided, nor have we, to do the hard work of transitioning from a dependent nation to one with more independence. More energy and manufacturing capacity. One that can stand on its own two feet and make moral decisions based on who we want to be as a nation. Not based on what we need to do to make sure the malls get open and have good prices.

I say all this because I think it’s important to understand where we are, how we got here, and why we keep falling down the same pits over and over and over. Why we keep making the same horrendous decisions, the same immoral decisions, again and again.

That’s why A Fight Worth Having exists. Why I did Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress. Why I worked for Bernie. Why I worked with AOC. I’ve been trying, like so many others in this country, to help us go down a different path. One built on community and creation instead of destruction and violence and war.

This country is in great disrepair. Structurally and emotionally. Our infrastructure. Our economy. Things need to be fixed. Things need to be built. Things need to be done. I know we want to go fishing on the weekends and hang out in the evenings and just go about life as normal. The problem is we’re in a moment where the generations before us didn’t do the work needed to sustain a good quality of life. They didn’t do the work necessary to keep this nation afloat. We’re the generation that has to do it now.

But we’ve got a great opportunity ahead of us. We can see the immorality of where we’re headed. We know there’s a need to improve our lot in life. And we have robotics and AI and advanced manufacturing. Scientific innovations and discoveries. What we need to do is harness those and deploy them for ourselves and the world. We need to think about how we can export opportunity and joy and comfort instead of bombs and trauma and death. We need to learn to do that here at home as well. Learn to lift ourselves and each other up instead of tearing down and stepping on people to do better. It’s a big challenge, but it’s a huge opportunity. I hope.

And that hope is what this is about. Making sure that we, the people, own some of what our society builds in the future. That’s the Mission for America. That’s American Equity. And that’s what we’re here to do.

Corbin Trent