John Drysdale (British, 1926 – 2016), “Boys on a Toy Car”, London, 1958.
Boys on a Toy Car
Vashti Bunyan
Vashti Bunyan
Watch Rick Steves “Iran”
By Rick Steves
“It’s just good style to get to know people before you bomb them.”
That’s what I said 18 years ago when people asked me, “Why are you producing this TV show?” It was 2008, and President Bush was threatening to go to war with Iran. So, I did the best thing I could to bolster peace — I produced a public television special designed to humanize and better understand the people of Iran.
Well, it’s 2026 now, and the USA under Trump has stepped into a void. What our country just did in Iran is like someone blowing up Mar-a-Lago to kill our leader…or blowing up the Kremlin to kill Russia’s. Or the equivalent in Quebec City, Havana, Taipei, or Sacramento. Regardless of how much you hated Khamenei, we’ve entered a new frontier in a world where long-established norms are crumbling. And who’s gone rogue? Pick up a flag and look in the mirror.
Sure, there are people dancing in the streets in Iran — just as there would be if our president ended up dead under a pile of rubble, too. But Americans who are gleeful today don’t really understand Iran any more than those who were fixated on (or titillated by) Ted Koppel’s 444 days of the Iran hostage crisis 45 years ago.
The world’s a messy place. But that’s no excuse. As an American taxpayer, I believe that every US bomb that falls and every bullet that flies has my name on it. In the last year, our president (who won votes by promising to keep America out of wars and is now famously agitating for a Nobel Peace Prize) has dropped bombs on seven foreign countries — and each of those bombs has your name on it, too…including the one that just recklessly decapitated a nation of 90 million people in a war-torn corner of our world.
I want freedom for the Iranian people as much as anyone. And I know that, with ICE-like forces, their government has killed thousands of protesters…thousands of Renée Goods and Alex Prettis. But I also know that, sometimes, patience and stability are preferable to saber-rattling, bombast, and chaos.
If you don’t think you understand Iran (or even if you do), and you would like to gain some context for its current misery, this show is for you. Rather than debate the issues of the day, it was designed to help you simply appreciate the rich culture and endearing humanity of this long-suffering nation. I doubt you’ll be traveling to Iran anytime soon. So, let this be your opportunity to join me on a vicarious trip there and to get to know and better understand a people that, since that 2008 trip, have held a special place in my heart.
Why attack Iran?
Our Authoritarianism and Our Corruption
By Timothy Snyder 2/28/26
How do understand the war with Iran? We must get away from the propaganda and ask why this might be happening, in light of the facts that we do know.
These facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.
From the United States, the most plausible angle of view is domestic politics, not foreign policy. Wars are a tool of undermining and undoing democracies. Given that we have multiple examples of this from both modern and ancient democracy, and given the behavior of Trump and his allies in general, this must be an interpretive method for these attacks.
The relationship between foreign war and domestic authoritarianism can take two basic forms: 1) we must all rally because there is a war and everyone who oppose the war is a traitor; 2) we must hold elections under specific conditions favorable to the party in power. This is utterly predictable and should be easy to halt and indeed to reverse.
The American propaganda about our foreign policy motivations is impossible to believe as such. But it does lead us, indirectly, to the second possible interpretive framework: personal corruption.
The claim that Iran was about to build a nuclear weapon has not been established. It is all the odder as a justification for war given that this administration has already claimed many times to have destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
The second American propaganda point is that the regime must be changed. This too is very strange, since opposition to regime change wars was supposed to be a core tenet of MAGA.
But who might be directly interested in Iranian regime change? Who has given it more thought than Washington? Insofar as there was any sort of foreign policy involved here, I suspect that it was that of countries that the Trump administration considers to be its allies in the region.
The basic structural feature of regional politics is a rivalry between Iran on the one side and Gulf Arab states plus Israel on the other. Given that this structural feature is a far more durable element of politics than the wavering and contradictory statements of the Trump administration, it is a good place to start. And where does it lead?
It leads to personal politics or rather personal gain. Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis.
Gulf Arab states who oppose Iranian power have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family. The United Arab Emirates invested in a family firm. The Saudis have provided numerous de facto gifts. And sometimes the gifts have been simply gifts. The Qataris gave Trump a jet. The list is very long.
And now — we are using military force to take the side of precisely the countries who have enriched Trump and his family. This backdrop must at the very least be stated in the reporting of the war. Along with the subversion of democracy, personal corruption provides a second interpretive framework.
None of this is a defense of the murderous regime in Teheran. The Iranian government has been engaged in the mass murder of peaceful protestors. The scale of that slaughter has not really sunk in. One can certainly imagine ways of addressing Iranian authoritarianism and corruption. We could combine a patient campaign of pressure and sanctions with support for the opposition and proposals to help address growing ecological problems such as the horrifying lack of water that stands behind much of political opposition in the country. Unfortunately, nothing like this is on offer, or could be on offer, from the Trump administration. All that it has to offer is its own authoritarianism and corruption.
A war is a time when we will be told not to ask questions. But a war is actually when questions must be asked. And they must be asked in light of what we already know. The presumption created by the surrounding evidence is that this war could very well be about (1) subverting US democracy, (2) enriching the president, or both. These are presumptions, not proof — but they provide the solid lines of inquiry as we learn more about the war.
War does not create a clean slate where suddenly we have to believe the absurd just because a leader says it. On the contrary, war provides the opportunity to see the core of the absurdity and the destruction that is being offered to us.