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War With Iran - Read by Eunice Wong
This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor
Text originally published May 26, 2025
Full text:
War opens a Pandora’s box of evils that once unleashed are beyond anyone’s control. The warmongers who ordered the strikes by U.S. bombers on Iranian nuclear sites have no more of a plan for what comes next in Iran than they had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria. European allies, whom Israel and Trump have alienated with these air assaults, are in no mood to cooperate with Washington. The Pentagon, even if it wanted to, does not have the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran -- the only way Iran might be subdued. And the idea that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is viewed by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counter force to the Iranian government is ludicrous. In all these equations the 90 million people in Iran are ignored just as the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were ignored. They will not welcome the United States and certainly not Israel as liberators. They may hate the regime, but they will resist. They don’t want to be dominated by foreign powers. A war with Iran will be interpreted throughout the region as a war against Shiism. Soon there will be retaliation. Lots of it. It will come at first with desultory missile strikes and then attacks carried out by elusive enemies on ships, military bases and installations. Steadily it will grow in volume and lethality. The death toll, including among the some 40,000 soldiers and Marines stationed in the Middle East, will mount. Ships, including aircraft carriers, will be targeted. We will, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, begin to lash out with a blind fury, fueling the conflagration we began. Those who lured us into this war know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate. Blinded by hubris, believing their own hallucinations, they have learned none of the lessons of the last two decades of warfare in the Middle East. A war with Iran will be a self-defeating and costly quagmire, one more nail in the rotting edifice of the empire.
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Photos
IRAN-US-ISRAEL-CONFLICT
A banner bearing a painting that represents various categories of the Iranian society is deployed against the facade of a building in Tehran, with a message that reads in Farsi: " we are all soldiers of Iran", on June 22, 2025. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges, a former Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times and best selling author of 'Empire of Illusion', stands next to a window for a portrait, Princeton, NJ, November 2010. Hedges is also the author of 'Death of the Liberal Class' and is a columnist for Truthdig. (Photo by Oliver Morris/Getty Images)
President Trump Addresses Nation After US Bombs Iranian Nuclear Sites
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 21: U.S. President Donald Trump delivers an address to the nation from the White House on June 21, 2025 in Washington, D.C. President Trump addressed the three Iranian nuclear facilities that were struck by the U.S. military early Sunday. (Pho
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