Fifty Reasons Not To Go To War With Iran

1. There are over 80 million men, women, and children in Iran. Bombing them would be mass-murder.
2. If the U.S. government and its allies bomb Libya and Iran when their governments choose not to have nuclear weapons, you can forget about North Korea and the rest of the world choosing not to have nuclear weapons.
3. The longer the world has nuclear weapons, and the more countries that have them, the greater the likelihood of nuclear war.
4. We now know that even a small nuclear war can block out the sun, kill crops, and starve everyone on earth who survives.
5. Bombing people makes those who survive and many who care about them very angry, which is why the “war on terrorism” has predictably increased terrorism.
6. Bombing people kills many, injures more, traumatizes even more, enrages even more, creates huge numbers of refugees, and destabilizes the region bombed.
7. Bombing Iran will produce anti-U.S. and anti-Western and anti-Israeli terrorism.
8. Bombing Iran risks direct war between the United States and nuclear governments including Russia.
9. If you think people want to be bombed because of shortcomings and evil deeds of their governments, you’re not actually thinking at all; you don’t want to be bombed because of the shortcomings and evil deeds of your government.
10. If bombing nations made people better off and created human rights, earth would be a paradise by now.
11. Bombing countries is illegal under the Kellogg-Briand Pact without exceptions, and regardless of whether Congress “authorizes” it. Another country bombing you would be a crime regardless of which parts of its government “authorized” it.
12. Bombing countries is illegal under the United Nations Charter with two narrow exceptions, and regardless of whether or not the U.S. Congress does or does not do anything.
13. One of those exceptions is when the U.N. Security Council “authorizes” a war. It has not done so in this case and certainly will not. And doing so wouldn’t get you around the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
14. The other exception is “defense,” but if anything is not defense it is the bombing of a far smaller country half-way around the world that has not attacked or even threatened to attack your country.
15. Attempts to provoke Iran into attacking U.S. military forces near Iran (or to disguise some U.S. forces as Iranian and have U.S. forces shoot at each other, as Vice President Dick Cheney once proposed) does not result in an Iranian attack on the actual United States or any legal ability to claim “defense.”
16. Israel is not a U.S. state.
17. The Israeli government has been threatening, provoking, and lying about Iran for decades, which are not defensive behaviors.
18. Saudi Arabia is not a U.S. state.
19. The Saudi government has been threatening, provoking, and lying about Iran for decades, which are not defensive behaviors.
20. Iraq is not a U.S. state. It is the smoldering ruin of a previous war launched on almost identical and wholly dishonest pretexts.
21. Not only waging war is a crime, but threatening war is a crime under the United Nations Charter. The United States has been threatening war on Iran for decades, and any attack would follow that string of criminal actions.
22. The idea that the government of Iraq or Israel or some other nation could invite the U.S. government to wage war against Iran in and from its territory does not exist in written law and would not legitimize yet another war in the eyes of the world.
23. Gallup polling finds that in most countries out of 65 surveyed, people’s top choice as the greatest threat to peace in the world is the United States government. This needs to be countered, not exacerbated.
24. It is hard to find anyone in the United States, and even in the U.S. government, who can even name every current U.S. war, much less every minor military action the U.S. military is engaged in. This is a sign that something has spiraled out of control.
25. Including recent U.S. wars on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Iraq, the United States military has, just since World War II, killed or helped kill some 20 million people, overthrown at least 36 governments, interfered in at least 84 foreign elections, attempted to assassinate over 50 foreign leaders, and dropped bombs on people in over 30 countries. In many cases, these actions have undone democracy. In none have they created or “spread” it.
26. A nation possessing prohibited weapons is no legal, moral, or practical justification for war. If every lie about Iraq in 2002-2003 had been true, it would have been no justification for bombing Iraq. The United States did and still does possess nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and that doesn’t justify anyone bombing the United States.
27. The very same people who told lies about Iraq are telling almost identical lies about Iran. They’re counting on you to have no memory, no sense of judgment, no ability to resist fear mongering and fluttering flags. They’re counting on you to fall in line and obey like a drooling idiot.
28. In 2003, Iran proposed negotiations with the United States with everything on the table, including its nuclear technology, and the United States refused. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. government started angling for a war.
29. War supporters said the United States urgently needed to attack Iran in 2004, 2007, 2015. It did not attack. The claims turned out to be lies. Even a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 pushed back and admitted that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
30. The United States gave Iran nuclear energy technology and encouraged its use.
31. Iran was attacked with chemical weapons by Iraq, in part provided by the United States, and refused to use similar weapons in response.
32. Iran’s Muslim leader has forbidden the use or possession of weapons of mass destruction.
33. The CIA gave Iran slightly and obviously flawed plans to build a nuclear bomb, as part of an effort to frame Iran, and the man who blew the whistle on that to Congress, Jeffrey Sterling, was sent to prison as a reward.
34. The United States has imposed sanctions on Iran that have denied it green energy technologies and caused significant human suffering.
35. It is one of the worst possible ways to blame victims when a government imposes sanctions that create deprivation, blames the suffering country for suffering, and justifies war as a result.
36. Sanctions were used as a step toward war in the case of Iraq, and many in the U.S. government have been pushing for war on Iran since 1979.
37. These include lots of nasty old war mongers who do things like sing the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” changing the lyrics to “Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran.” If we let them bomb Iran they will nevershut up.
38. The United States has been lying about Iran having a nuclear weapons program for decades, as well documented by Gareth Porter and other journalists.
39. The 2015 Iran nuclear agreement was not necessitated by anything Iran did. Iran agreed to tougher inspections than any other country on earth has ever agreed to, and those inspections have established that the agreement was not necessitated by anything Iran did.
40. The agreement was an alternative to war, which many in the U.S. Congress and media were clamoring for and demanding urgently. The failure to launch the war then or on any of the previous occasions when it was supposedly urgently needed has resulted in nothing but further evidence that there is no need for a war.
41. The White House has made clear that it wants to manufacture any possible excuse to abandon the agreement.
42. Eventually, after numerous broken agreements, the nations native to North America stopped making or believing in agreements with the U.S. government. The nations of the world will do the same, if the United States refuses to abide by its commitments.
43. Iran’s government is deeply flawed, but not in comparison with governments the United States arms and funds and supports.
44. The U.S. government facilitates weapons sales from the United States to 73% of the world’s dictatorships, and gives military training to most of them.
45. There is no correlation between where wars happen and where human rights are abused or democracy lacking or threats to world peace emanating.
46. There is no correlation between where wars happen and population density or resource scarcity or religion or ideology.
47. There is a strong correlation between where wars happen and where fossil fuels are produced.
48. There is a strong correlation between which nations launch wars and which nations import fossil fuels.
49. There is a strong correlation between which nations launch wars and which nations’ people accept war as a legitimate tool of public policy.
50. There is a strong correlation between where the United States launches wars and where that small number of nations remains that have no U.S. military bases and accept no economic dictates from the United States.