For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians
At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.”
On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep US troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war.
As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet.
Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.”
Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote.
Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like?... Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.”
As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party.
And so it came to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts—the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.”
“Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner!
“This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself”
Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices.
Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to him suggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments:
If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government... you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you... proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform...
Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At The Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.”
By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89%.”
Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war:
The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences... They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security... This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself.
“A Gift to Our Country”
Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington.
More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim-American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.”
He wrote:“The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.”
Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed.
It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.
El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human, and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare for All. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide—and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.”
In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan... None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed... Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good healthcare or good schools.”
Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past 50 years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home.
Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.
* * *
Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves.
After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble.
Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile.
