By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 5, 2026

Can You please oppose the war on Iran for one of the following 47 reasons? By oppose I do not mean that you claim you oppose it, as if you were a Democrat in Congress hoping to drive down Trump’s approval ratings by keeping the war going while claiming to supposedly oppose it. By oppose I mean try to stop: pressure the media and Congress, educate the public, hold a rally, make a phone call, join a flotilla, sign a petition, start an organization, create a work of art, hand out flyers or banners, disrupt an event, sit in front of a Congressional office door, boycott a media outlet, create a media outlet, climb a bridge in Washington, D.C., call the International Criminal Court every hour, write a book, write a bumpersticker, do SOMETHING. For one of these reasons:

1. The war hasn’t brought human rights to Iran or the United States or anywhere else, quite the reverse.

2. The war has killed thousands of men, women, children, and infants.

3. The war has wounded many thousands of men, women, children, and infants.

4. The war has traumatized, made homeless, impoverished, made ill, or otherwise devastated millions of men, women, children, and infants.

5. The war has demolished priceless cultural and historical treasures.

6. The war has rained oil on people’s homes, dumped it into the sea, and burned it in huge quantities through attacks on oil infrastructure.

7. The war has devastated land, water, and air through its use of weapons as well as its destruction.

8. Those toxic weapons have been developed and tested all over the world, including near you.

9. The war has flushed away many billions of dollars and done a great many billions of dollars worth of destruction, to Iran, to U.S. bases in nearby countries, to non-U.S. parts of those countries, and to ships at sea.

10. The war has helped to distract from the other evil, genocidal wars underway in the region, in Gaza and Lebanon, not to mention wars in further off locations like Sudan.

11. The war has not only distracted from the climate crisis but insidiously persuaded people that any reduction in the mad pace of oil consumption is a danger instead of a benefit.

12. The war has allowed the pro-war media and the pro-nothing Congress to firmly entrench the lie that a president can legally wage an illegal war for 60 or 90 days.

13. The war has allowed the pro-war media and the pro-nothing Congress to firmly entrench the lie that an illegal war would be OK were Congress to authorize it.

14. The war has done further damage to the idea that the United Nations or its Charter or the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court or the Geneva Conventions exist as something more than tools for unfairly constraining smaller nations.

15. The war has further normalized lunacy, as we have moved from a national uproar to barely a squeak when Trump threatens to commit total genocide against a nation against which he is already engaged in mass slaughter.

16. The war has further blunted awareness and concern over the risk of nuclear Armageddon, as the question is knowingly left in the hands of the aforementioned lunatic.

17. The war has put perhaps a final nail in the coffin of the impeachment process (or the 25th amendment) as something that might be engaged in for motivations other than political partisanship.

18. The war has created a precedent of permitting the supreme international crime for honest reasons, including the theft of oil, the pursuit of profit, the conquest of power and riches, and sadistic glee.

19. The war has been launched and continued, under a variety of mutating excuses, without any clear public rejection of the core dishonest reasons that had been used to build up to it for decades and to sell it in recent years and months. Belief in the myth of a nuclear threat from Iran has outlasted the war and even been promoted as an argument to use in so-called opposing the war, the argument that the war is no good because the fictional threat remains, because the destruction has been insufficient.

20. If anything could move Iran to actually pursue nuclear weapons, it was this war.

21. The war has involved — as did the recent attack on Venezuela — incredibly risky military attacks in close proximity to nuclear facilities, establishing a precedent that could prove apocalyptic.

22. The war was, according to the U.S. Secretary of State, begun because Israel had threatened to begin it and predicted attack on U.S. bases in retaliation. This creates the precedent of openly allowing a foreign government to order the U.S. military into war.

23. It also establishes the precedent of allowing the presence of U.S. bases to require a war to supposedly protect the bases that were supposedly put there to protect you.

24. Those U.S. bases have been destroyed.

25. Trump has lied to you about the destruction of those bases.

26. You were never asked if you wanted those bases in the first place.

27. No lessons have been learned, and Trump is now asking Congress for money to rebuild the bases.

28. Instead of halting sanctions on Iran and dozens of other countries, the war has expanded murderous illegal sanctions to include an illegal blockade of a waterway to which the U.S. government has no legal claim, plus the illegal mining of that waterway by Iran, and a vicious cycle of threats and attacks with no non-apocalyptic end in sight.

29. The open corruption and war profiteering has reached new heights in this war, with no shame so much as hinted at, as money is funneled to family members, and official profit both from stock ownership and from simply gambling on events.

30. War enmity has been further entrenched by this war as the one remaining acceptable form of bigotry in liberal society, with hatred of Iran joined in apparent harmony with opposition to Trump.

31. Morality has been made into something of a joke, with the slaughter of a hundred children met with complaints about the stock market or the price of gasoline, and the deaths of Iranians treated in corporate media as on a par with the deaths of Palestinians or Russians or livestock.

32. We’ve been heavily pushed to object to the war’s impact on gas, jet fuel, fertilizer, and so forth, while being told that we are not capable of caring about human lives, even though we are perfectly capable of caring about Iranian lives and would demonstrate that fact dramatically if told that the suffering in Iran were due to a hurricane, and even though the serious concerns around fertilizer and gas are precisely concerns about human lives around the world. If you need gas to get to work and can’t buy medicine because you’re buying gas, what is that?

33. The war and questions of its financial cost serve to distract from the monstrous proposal to increase military spending in the U.S. government from $1 trillion every year to $1.5 trillion every year.

34. This:

35. Every war serves to persuade people of the normality of war, and the acceptability of dumping our money into more wars. Eventually, these wars will kill us all, if we don’t change course. But in the meantime, as the chart above suggests, it’s the choice of what not to spend the money on that kills the most people.

36. Every war for freedom and democracy erodes our freedoms and democracy. We now have a U.S. president declaring it treasonous to say he’s not winning a war that he is painfully obviously not winning.

37. Iranian women killed in this war are not more free now.

38. Iranian women not killed in this war are not more free now.

39. Opponents of this war who are allowed to voice their so-called opposition on U.S. airwaves disproportionately want to focus the U.S. death machine on antagonizing China.

40. China is focused on investing in wind and solar which cannot be blockaded in a waterway, while the United States pisses away more billions on wars, meaning that U.S. government officials obsessed with competing with China by doing everything possible to fail at competing with China will see ever more reason for a war on China.

41. We might brush off the idea that China is winning the war on Iran, that a massive push is underway for a war on China, but remember that many in Washington pushed for a war on Iran from 1979 to 2026, that we prevented that war several times when it had almost been launched, that it took sitting a truly demented ghoul on the throne in the White House to finally get the war launched, but launched it is, and its inevitability is being recorded in our newspapers.

42. This war, with help from the sabotaging of Russian pipelines, the overthrowing of Venezuela, the aggression in the Arctic, etc., is turning the United States into a specialized dealer of weaponry and fossil fuels, which will make converting the United States to sustainable energy all the more difficult.

43. This war will serve as an argument in right-wing, Israeli minds that when their power is threatened they can begin another U.S. war.

44. This war will serve as an argument in left-wing, pro-violence, anti-imperialist minds that Iran has no choice but greater militarism.

45. The alternative of a reverse arms race has become more necessary and harder for people to imagine.

46. The alternative of diplomacy has become more necessary but virtually impossible for the U.S. government to engage in due to the inability of anyone else to believe it.

47. The alternative of unarmed civilian protection, creative nonviolent resistance, the rule of law, and moral persuasion has been made into a laughingstock almost single-handedly by the person alive today who perhaps most merits the title of laughingstock.

Which is why I’m stopping at 47.

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