On February 28, the US and Israel attacked Iran. This came at a time when the US and Iran were in the middle of negotiations regarding the latter’s nuclear program and enrichment limits. Iran had described the talks as “a good start” and said they had “really advanced, substantially”. But just as they’ve done in the past, the US regime and the Zionist entity used talks as cover, then struck the very party across the negotiating table.

As of Tuesday, March 3, at least 787 people have been killed across Iran, according to the Iranian Red Crescent. The deadliest single attack was directed at an elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan Province, killing at least 180 young girls aged 7–12. They had just been dropped off by their parents; some were playing in the courtyard. Another strike hit a sports hall in Lamerd, Fars Province, where teenage girls were attending volleyball classes; Iranian media cited local officials saying at least eighteen civilians were killed. Most notably, the initial attack killed Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, along with his daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. Iran declared forty days of mourning, with hundreds of thousands pouring into the streets of Tehran after confirmation of his assassination. Solidarity demonstrations were reported elsewhere in the region, including in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.

Iran answered with a series of strikes against military and other strategic targets in Bahrain (the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the Juffair area), Kuwait (Ali al-Salem Air Base and Kuwait International Airport), Qatar (Al Udeid Air Base and an early-warning radar installation), Saudi Arabia (Riyadh and the Eastern Province, including the King Abdulaziz Air Base), and Iraq (near Erbil International Airport). It also launched strikes in the occupied Palestinian territory, including Beit Shemesh and the Tel Aviv area. Iran’s attacks left at least eleven people dead in Israel and killed six US soldiers.

Endless holocausts

In the first 60 days of 2026, the US bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its president and first lady, imposed a lethal oil blockade on Cuba, and now started a war against Iran.

This is without counting the at least 45 airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean since August 2025, which have killed at least 151 people. Nor does it include the ongoing destabilization efforts in countries from Haiti to Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the recent threats against Mexico, Colombia, and Greenland.

Since taking office on January 20, 2025, the Trump administration has bombed seven countries – Venezuela (Dec 2025; Jan 3, 2026), Nigeria ( Dec 25, 2025), Somalia (2025 – strikes intensified from Feb 2025), Syria (Dec 19, 2025), Iran  Jun 22, 2025; Feb 28, 2026), Yemen (Mar–May 2025), and Iraq (Mar 13, 2025). And only it took 345 days.

The speed of this latest hyper-imperialist offensive marks a qualitative shift in US aggression, and the rhetoric has turned openly colonialist. In its nearly 250-year existence, the US has undertaken at least 400 military interventions since 1776.

In “Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire”, David Michael Smith estimates the US has been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least 54 million people in its wars abroad from 1945 to 2020. On Smith’s accounting, once you widen the frame to include what he calls “domestic social murder” and extend the timeline across the full history of the empire, the toll approaches 300 million.

This short century alone, the violence has been apocalyptic. Stephanie Savell of the Costs of War project at Brown University estimates that since 2001 the post-9/11 wars waged by the US and its allies have contributed to at least 4.5–4.7 million deaths (direct and indirect) in post-9/11 war zones. That’s approximately 1.08 human beings killed every three minutes for about 24–25 years.

Taken together, we are talking about death on a civilizational scale. Hundreds of millions whose hopes and aspirations will never come to be, whose beauty and imagination humanity has been deprived of. Poems we will never hear, art we will never see. Entire cultures extinguished or cut short for profit.

This is in addition to the dozens of coups against democratically-elected governments, the unilateral coercive sanctions regime it imposes across much of the world (which affects nearly one-third of the world’s population), the counter-revolutionary wars it has financed all over the world, and the obscene levels of pollution its trillion-dollar-a-year war machine continues to release into the atmosphere, hurtling us faster and faster into irreversible climate catastrophe.

The US-led imperialist block is a threat to humanity. Not only in the lives it takes, but in the possible futures it forecloses. The survival of capitalism depends on the coerced underdevelopment of most of the peoples of the planet and the stunting of human potential. We will never know what humanity could have achieved without this barbaric machine holding it back for the past half a century, but we know full well what awaits us if we don’t stop it.

Child sacrifice

The attack against the Iranian elementary school came as a shock to many, but history teaches us that violence against children has been a function of imperialism since the first butchers of capitalism stepped off their boats to bring “civilization” to the “savage” Americas. From the millions slaughtered in the first centuries of conquest, to the millions ground into dust in the long age of extraction (which, in many parts of the Global South, continues unabated), to the millions more killed in war after the so-called “humanitarian” war in this century.

Indeed, for imperialists, the tenderness of children is nothing more than the cost of doing business. And sometimes it is worse than indifference. As the Epstein files have made plain, for some members of the ruling class, the violation of children is mere sport. It should surprise no one that a class that engages in near-industrial levels of child abuse (and allegedly writes gleefully about it in correspondence) would deliberately bomb children, especially since they have been doing exactly that for the past two years, livestreamed for the world to see (UNICEF has reported “more than 50,000 children” killed or injured in Gaza since the genocide began).

Now or never

Humanity is at a decisive moment. The era of the “rules-based order” is over. It should now be clear to all that for the empire, negotiations are theater, international law applies to all but one, and endless war is the only policy. Dignity is not compatible with imperialism. It is the organized foreclosure of human potential – enforced by sanctions, blockades, and bombs. Should the people fail to act, millions more will be butchered, their tattered remains placed at the fetid altar of capital.

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