By David Swanson
davidswanson.org
Charlottesville City Council voted Monday evening to adopt a resolution opposing war on Iran and urging passage by Congress of Sen. Tim Kaine’s privileged resolution.
The City Council re-affirmed the position it had taken in 2012 in passing a resolution against war on Iran.
The latest threat of war on Iran is particularly Trumpian, but it has also been in the works for decades. Many in the U.S. government have wanted to attack Iran since 1979, and the Shah’s son has been waiting that long for the United States to put him in power.
Iran was on the Pentagon’s target list in 2001. There was a huge push for war on Iran in 2007 that was stopped in large part by public pressure. There was another huge push in 2015, blocked by the nuclear agreement that is usually misunderstood as having restrained Iran rather than the United States.
Now Congress has refused to impeach for wars and threats of nuclear war, has stripped out of the National Defense Authorization Act the ban on war on Iran that was contained in the House version, has given Trump more military funding even than he asked for — and numerous Congress Members of both parties accused Trump of weakness toward Iran last week.
Trump’s latest act of war is murderous, reckless — possibly puting the race to war beyond Washington’s control — and predictable. It is also criminal, violating Iraqi laws against murder and war, violating the United Nations Charter, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the U.S. Constitution.
The normalization of murder bestowed on us by the Obama years will not end well and must urgently be reversed. Congress must not only specifically and redundantly ban this particular war, but it must also impeach for this and similar more significant offenses than Russiagate and Ukraine.
It must also end the sanctions and hostility toward Iran, withdraw troops from and make reparations to the region for the past 17 years of destruction, end weapons sales to the Middle East, and commit to abiding by the rule of law. Without this sort of reversal, we risk a catastrophe that will make the endless wars that have led up to it look insignificant.
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