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YESTERDAY’S ceasefire on the US/Israel-Iran front can only be welcomed if it holds. Like far too much of breaking news these days, it was first announced on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account, with the US president predictably implying it was a personal success.
This came after America had joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s crusade to achieve what Israel could not, by using B-2 bombers to rain ‘bunker-buster’ bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Trump claimed that the sites had been obliterated, but there was no immediate independent evidence, and Monday’s Israeli attack on Fordow raises further questions.
The ceasefire announcement followed shortly after Iran had retaliated by lobbing a few missiles towards the US’s Al Udeid base in Qatar, which may or may not be a coincidence. Iranian missiles have also been getting through Israeli Iron Dome defences. Anyhow, the idea of regime change proposed and attempted by the US/Israel appears to be on the back burner for now. It proved not quite as simple as one of the incipient CIA’s earliest operations in 1953, when it succeeded in toppling the democratic Mossadegh government, reinstating the wretched Shah, and paving the way for the 1979 revolution that was hijacked by the clergy.
Iran was just one among the targets of American imperialism, which dates back to the decades immediately after it defeated the British colonialists, and then the Spanish empire. Mexico was an early target in the decades following US independence, and the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, plus much of Arizona, Colorado and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming were acquired in the mid-19th century, alongside the annexation of Texas, which Mexico saw as a rebel province.
The early 20th century was also peppered with US interventions and acquisitions, sometimes far from American territory, but mostly in Central America and various Pacific islands. The Philippines was an Asian anomaly, and since then the US has preferred satellite states to colonies. Pakistan apparently was a willing contender as soon as it emerged in 1947, asking for $2 billion from the US.
The US is accustomed to open-ended wars.
The US was uninterested at the time, but shortly afterwards intervened in neighbouring Iran, followed by its overthrow of a democratic government in Guatemala, and then a deep plunge into subverting democratic aspirations wherever the opportunity arose.
It would require reams to delve into the trajectory of American crimes against humanity, beginning with the genocide against Native Americans that established the colonial-settler state to the domestic and international depredations that the US continues to power or endorse, from the war against decency within America to the unending genocide in Gaza.
I am driven time and again to the remarkable oration 58 years ago in which Martin Luther King refused to hold back from denouncing “my own government” as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. Depressingly little has changed. King spoke precisely a year before he was assassinated by a MAGA-style white supremacist, before some of the worst atrocities in Indochina under the Nixon-Kissinger clique — and decades before the outrages his nation perpetrated in Angola, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or elsewhere.
“If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam,” King declared in 1967. “We are called,” he added, “to speak for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls ‘enemy’, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less than our brother.”
Referring to Vietnam, he lamented the “women and children and the aged” who “watch as we poison their water and “must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas … They wander into towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running on the streets like animals. They see children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food.” This serves as a reminder of the ways in which Gaza is Vietnam redux.
“The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve,” King correctly conceded, adding: “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit”, and that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social uplift is approaching spiritual death”.
The “fierce urgency of now” that King invoked may yet transform our tomorrows. Going back much further, when Shakespeare announced that “All the world’s a stage/ And all the men and women merely players”, he probably did not envisage a platform for bad actors devoted to denying King’s dream of transforming “the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood”. One can only dream.
Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2025
