Who Is Threatening Our Way of Life?

We are told to fear the Iranians. We are told that they hate us because we're free.

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Even though the president has declared that it’s over, our war of choice and aggression with Iran may not be over. The Iranians have decided they will keep the Strait permanently closed for Israeli vessels and charge reparations for anyone flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Going through this, I keep coming back to the Iraq war. The same phrases that were used then are being used now. “Axis of evil.” “Weapons of mass destruction.” “Nuclear weapon.” “Number one state sponsor of global terror.” There’s a profound effort on behalf of the media and institutional Democrats and Republicans to convince us that Iran is the greatest threat to our safety and to our livelihoods. Most Americans don’t buy it. Very few Americans go to bed worrying about Iran.

The administration’s framing is that this is essentially just an escalation of 47 years of Americans being killed by Iranians. Here’s what’s interesting about that.

All of the folks Iran is backing, from Hezbollah to the Yemeni resistance fighters to Hamas to others, are not attacking people in the West. They’re not blowing anything up in the United Kingdom or Spain or Western Europe or Canada or Mexico or the United States. The only Americans they have killed were there in their region. Now, that doesn’t make those killings okay.

We are told about a long history of Iranian violence, that the Iranians have killed Americans for decades. So has Israel. In 1967, Israel killed many Americans in an attack on a boat. So have the Saudis. They were tied to the big one. 9/11. Where 3,000+ Americans were killed, all civilians, police officers, and firemen. Not one of the people who attack us on September 11th came from Iran. Of the 19 hijackers, 15 of them were from Saudi Arabia, one from Egypt, 2 from the UAE, and 1 from Lebanon.

But wait there’s more, the commission that investigated 9/11, found that the hijackers had connections to the Saudi government. Look through various attacks on American troops and you see many are connected to Saudi Arabia and their Wahhabist Sunni extremists. Iran fights against those folks. Iran directly fights against ISIS and Al-Qaeda too. Why bring it up? Because we are being lied into a war yet again. We are being told to hate and kill yet again.

What does it mean when we hear that Iran is the “#1 global sponsor of terror?” Ironically, it doesn’t mean that their attacks are global. They are overwhelmingly regional and often targeting ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Sunni extremists. The thing that makes them especially intolerable to us, however, are their attacks on Israel. My point is that it’s not exactly a global terror operation.

The definition of terrorism requires that you be stateless. You can’t be a terrorist and a state. Which is why they say the Iranians are sponsors of terrorism rather than terrorists themselves. Can’t break that rule, because then of course we would be terrorists. America’s killed hundreds of thousands of civilians across the planet. We have helped the Israelis in a genocide. We have helped the Israelis in their war of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, where land is being seized and civilians massacred.

I took my time but here’s what I really want to get to.

Who is actually threatening Americans’ way of life? Who is affecting our ability to afford our day-to-day lives? Not the Iranians. Who is impacting our future, our children’s future, our grandchildren’s future? Not the Iranians. Not even the Saudis. Not terrorists. Not jihadis. Not Islam.

It’s the elite in this country. Political elite, economic elite, media elite, who have lost the capacity to understand that they can’t just continuously squeeze us for more and more. It’s corporations. It’s greed. That’s who’s actually doing it.

The Iranians aren’t the reason we can’t afford housing. The Iranians aren’t the reason healthcare is on track to bankrupt us. The Iranians aren’t the reason our kids are going to inherit a country that can’t make the things it needs to function. The people doing that to us are us. Or some of us. They live here. They work in our newsrooms and our boardrooms and our halls of government. And every time they get us to look at Iran, or Iraq, or whoever is next, it’s another year we don’t look at them.

If you include the damage that was done to American bases in the Middle East, we’ve already dumped at least $65 billion into this war. More than a billion a day for a 62-day war. And what do we have to show for it? Moral high ground? A safer world? More solid alliances? More productive capacity? None of the above.

It’s time for a new crop of folks to start taking leadership in this country. People that see a different path towards prosperity, a different path towards American power and the responsibility of that for its own people and for the globe. That’s why I started a fight worth having, a super PAC dedicated to finding and supporting candidates across this country that are running for Congress and have interest in a renewed vision for this country.

You can check out more here at afightworthhaving.com. Our list of candidates will be posted very soon. Luckily, there’s already more than 40 of them that are on the right track.

Corbin Trent