Friday Homestead Dispatch
Week Number Fifty-Nine
“War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse…. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.”
—Hawkeye, M.A.S.H.
Yes, the atrocities committed under the regime of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his security forces have been widely documented, not just from the massacres during the 1980s, but also recent killings of protesters across the country.
The United States killing the leaders of a sovereign country, who posed no imminent threat to our population, has put us once again in the position of being the top cop of world affairs. Consequences be damned. Saber rattling at its height.
There are atrocities across the globe—Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Belarus, not to mention the Palestinians—continually. Why Iran? Why now? Is Netanyahu pulling the strings?
Besides the lack of imminent threat, Jennifer Rubin writes of three other conclusions of *rump’s blunder:
— If Trump meant to achieve actual regime change — and certainly called on Iranians to rise up — he inexcusably baited civilians to take action without any capability or desire to assist them. No country has ever achieved regime change, as opposed to regime decapitation, through bombing. Furthermore, those civilians will have to face the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, who have sworn to defend the regime, no matter the cost.
— Neither Trump nor the Iranians (if they want a truce) know when and how to stop this. Trump has suggested multiple timeframes, including “far longer” than 4-5 weeks.
— To no one’s surprise (in part because Americans do not know why we are at war) Trump’s war is incredibly unpopular. (https://www.gelliottmorris.com/cp/189665026) If meant to divert from Trump’s other unpopular moves — e.g., a pedophile coverup, inflation-boosting tariffs, cuts to healthcare, unleashing a secret police to terrorize Americans — he should have chosen something voters actually wanted. Public opposition is likely to intensify as Americans experience the results of Trump’s self-inflicted economic disaster.
Then there’s the deeper question of how is it that Congress does nothing to put the brakes on an insane man (and his staff) to declare a war without congressional authorization. And not to mention the mess this country is in right now with no foreseeable solutions for the American populace.
From the Capital Hill Reader:
Did you know that in Iran, if a father rapes and impregnates his daughter, she must then carry the baby to term or get put in prison for murder.
Oh wait, that’s Texas!
Timothy Snyder, an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, writes that we are at war now, a war that is transparently one of a series of masculinity contests. Our American strongman is strong because he is stronger than the other strongmen. He can abduct Maduro. He can assassinate Khamenei. He is performing relative strength, at huge cost to others.
It’s another question, of course, as to whether any of this makes the United States stronger. The use of force in this way is obviously illegal in terms of both international and domestic law. Breaking international and domestic institutions will tend to make the United States as a country weaker (https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman) rather than stronger.
The strongman is strong, in other words, because of the law of transitivity. If you accept at a certain point that he is stronger than you, then you are accepting that you are weaker than him. You are joining in the collective creation of the strongman. But you are also scripting your future behavior. In any confrontation with the strongman you must be weak. You must serve his strength and, if confronted directly by it, accept ritual humiliation.
Another side of this ugly gold coin is that U.S. troops are being told that President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth. I had a little vomit-like taste in my mouth after reading that.
This was revealed by a non-commissioned officer (NCO) who wrote to the MRFF (Military Religious Freedom Foundation) that their commander “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has enshrined evangelical Christianity at the uppermost levels of the U.S. military, airing monthly prayer meetings throughout the Pentagon. Last year, the Pentagon confirmed to me that Hegseth attends a weekly White House Bible study. It’s led by a preacher who says God commands America to support Israel.
A couple reasons I am still on Facebook is to promote my work (I can get 60-120 views on Facebook and 1-2 views on Bluesky and/or Instagram) and to read writers such as Jim Wright and Michael Jochum.
Jochum writes this week:
Shock, Awe, the Sacrifice of the Many, and the end of the world as we know it
I am sixty-seven years old.
In those sixty-seven years, through Vietnam’s shadow, through the Cold War’s anxiety, through Iraq, Afghanistan, and every “limited engagement” sold as necessary, I have never seen the world this precariously balanced between arrogance and annihilation. Human life now feels negotiable. Disposable. Collateral damage in a spectacle of “shock and awe” branded like a reality television special. Operation names. Patriotic graphics. Studio lighting. Meanwhile, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters are pulled from rubble.
If reports are even partially accurate about the bombing of a school in southern Iran, if even a fraction of those children killed were little girls who woke up that morning expecting math class instead of missiles, then we are staring at something more than war. We are staring at moral collapse.
And make no mistake: this is not humanitarian intervention. This is not reluctant defense. This is ego weaponized. This is a president who has never demonstrated patience for nuance deciding he understands Middle East geopolitics better than diplomats, generals, and historians who have devoted their lives to studying it.
War has always been, as Clausewitz wrote, “the continuation of politics by other means.” In America, it has too often become the continuation of ego by other means. A branding exercise. A distraction. A flex. A way to dominate the news cycle while the human toll accumulates quietly in hospital corridors and under concrete slabs.
We have seen this movie before.
Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq.
We did not “win.” We bled. We buried our young. We destabilized regions. We created vacuums filled by something worse. Killing a leader, even an evil one, does not end an ideology. It often radicalizes it. Regime change is not accomplished by dropping bombs and declaring victory from behind a podium.
Iran will not fold because we demand it. Retaliation will not arrive with a press conference. It will arrive asymmetrically, patiently, unpredictably. Terror networks do not require parades. They require time.
And American soldiers are already paying the price. Families are receiving knocks at the door that begin with, “We regret to inform you…” Those words echo across generations.
For what?
An oil corridor? A geopolitical favor? A legacy headline? A distraction? History will sort motives out later. The graves arrive first.
What terrifies me most is the absence of restraint. The absence of demonstrated imminent threat made public. The existence of negotiations that reportedly were still underway. There was time. There were options. There were off-ramps.
Instead, we chose ignition.
And once lit, wars do not behave. They escalate. They metastasize. They pull in actors who were not originally on the stage. They create unintended consequences that echo for decades.
Iran’s leadership is brutal. That is not in dispute. But brutality does not grant us strategic wisdom. You do not outmaneuver fanaticism by feeding it martyrdom.
Meanwhile, the planet warms. Regions edge toward uninhabitability. Scarce resources tighten. Competition intensifies. And instead of global cooperation to prevent collapse, we rehearse twentieth-century warfare with twenty-first-century weapons.
Sometimes I stand by the Pacific at my home in Mexico and look at the vast, indifferent ocean. I think about how small we are. How brief. How miraculous this planet is. And I wonder whether we deserve it at all.
We possess the intelligence to feed billions, to stabilize climate systems, to educate every child. Yet we default to aggression as if it were inevitability rather than choice.
The Few profit. Defense contracts swell. Political narratives harden. And the Many, always the Many, bury their children.
If this becomes protracted, and history suggests it will, the cost will not be measured in slogans. It will be measured in folded flags, in missing limbs, in empty desks in elementary schools, in trauma that does not end when headlines fade.
I would love to be wrong. I pray I am wrong.
But ego-driven war rarely produces peace.
It produces graves.
And the people paying for this fury are not sitting in gilded offices.
They are digging through rubble.
And Wright posts this:
I want a law that says the US Government has to spend the same amount of money to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and heal the sick as they do on missiles and bombs and bullets.
I want a law that says Congress must match every Defense dollar with two dollars for public education, no vouchers, and the money can’t used to fund private or religious schools.
I want a law that requires Congress to match every war expenditure with equal funding for national parks and clean energy. For every warship, every stealth fighter, they have to build a bridge or repair a road, or build a public library.
I want a law that says for every dollar that goes to a Defense Contractor, Congress must invest an equal dollar in small business -- small business that cannot be owned or associated with any member of Congress, the White House, or the Court.
I want a law that requires the Department of Veterans Affairs to fully fund, maintain, and staff Veterans hospitals and veterans support centers nationwide BEFORE the Department of Defense is allowed to start a war.
I want a law that requires every elected official to either provide two members of their immediate family for military service on the front lines, or they must go themselves.
I want a lot of things.
Right now, I’d settle for a government that isn’t murdering people.
As Bryan C. Del Monte says, I don’t know what’s more delusional here. The idea of unconditional surrender, or the belief that we have allies in this conflict?
I, as a pawn on the state, national, and world chessboard, have little recourse but to share what I think on this platform and stand up at protests with the hope that large numbers of people will also rise up to make a difference.
And to vote.
Which brings us to the mid-terms, which are essential this year (they’ve been ESSENTIAL every two years but millions of people apparently think not). According to U.S. News, close to 90 million people did NOT vote. Arizona had a 64% turnout rate.
Joyce Vance reports that in the Texas primary last Tuesday, Democratic voters in Dallas and Williamson Counties, Texas, had their work cut out for them if they wanted to vote. They had to figure out, on the day of, where their polling places were. That’s because the local Republican parties backed out of the years-long tradition of holding joint primaries, and that information wasn’t communicated widely. One voter reported showing up at his polling place and being sent somewhere else, a 15-minute drive away, only to be told to return to the original location. This is just flat-out voter suppression— designed to deny people their right to vote.
Voting is a right, not a privilege. Increasingly, Republicans, frequently motivated by the leader of their party, feel free to treat it like a privilege, one that exists only for them. I hate the advice I’m about to give, because it should be easy for every qualified American to vote, but the reality is, we are going to have to work hard and fight to be able to exercise that right this year. That means:
— Advance planning so you can register to vote, stay registered, vote, and make sure your vote is counted.
— Using your financial resources to obtain, and if you can, help others get the ID they need through groups like VoteRiders.
— Getting involved with your local League of Women Voters to help spread advance education about polling places and voting requirements in your community.
The time to figure out where you’re going to plug in is now. There are lots of groups who will warmly welcome you. Sharing information with friends and family is critically important, and something each of us can to do make sure everyone is up to date or important details like changes in polling places.
In Arizona, thus far, we have mail-in ballots. You can also track your vote. Make sure to mail your ballet back early in November and track it.
And don’t forget that tomorrow morning, now starting at 8am, is the weekly gathering of folks protesting Juan Ciscimani’s support of all things *rump at Pima and Swan in Tucson.
And now…
