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US Warship Downs Iranian Drone, Heightening Risk of 'Illegal and Catastrophic War'
"Demanding talks while surrounding the other side with a massive armada of warships and F-35s is not diplomacy, it is piracy," Phyllis Bennis of Institute for Policy Studies, told Common Dreams.
Feb 03, 2026
Amid recent reports that war is "imminent," the US military shot down an Iranian drone on Tuesday as it approached the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, according to a US official who spoke with Reuters.
Central Command spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins told the Associated Press that the drone “aggressively approached” the Lincoln with “unclear intent," and kept flying toward the aircraft carrier “despite de-escalatory measures taken by US forces operating in international waters."
It came after another tense encounter earlier in the day, during which the US military said Iranian forces "harassed" a US merchant vessel sailing in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Lincoln is part of an "armada" that President Donald Trump on Friday said he'd deployed to the region in advance of a possible strike against Iran, which he said would be "far worse" than the one the US conducted in June, when it bombed three Iranian nuclear sites.
After initially stating his goal of protecting protesters from a government crackdown, Trump has pivoted to express his intentions of using the threat of military force to coerce Iran into negotiating a new nuclear agreement that would severely limit its ability to pursue nuclear enrichment, which it has the right to do for peaceful means.
"Shifting justifications for a war are never a good sign, and they strongly suggest that the war in question was not warranted," Paul R. Pillar, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University, said in a piece published by Responsible Statecraft on Tuesday.
Other international relations scholars have said the US has no grounds, either strategically or legally, to pursue a war, even to stop Iran's nuclear development.
For one thing, said Dylan Williams, vice president of the Center for International Policy, Trump himself is responsible for ripping up the old agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which required Iran to limit its enrichment of uranium well below the levels required to build a nuclear weapon in exchange for relief from crippling US sanctions.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which was tasked with regularly inspecting Iran's nuclear facilities, the country was cooperating with all aspects of the deal until Trump withdrew from it, after which Iran began to once again accelerate its nuclear enrichment.
"There was 24/7 monitoring and no [highly enriched uranium] in Iran before Trump broke the JCPOA," Williams said. "Iran’s missile program and human rights abuses surged after he broke the deal."
Daniel DePetris, a fellow at Defense Priorities, marveled that "there is an amazing amount of folks who still think bombing Iran's nuclear program every eight months or so is a better result for the United States than the JCPOA, which capped Tehran's nuclear progress by 15-20 years."
With the Lincoln ominously looming off his nation's shores, Iran's embattled supreme leader, the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned on Sunday that "the Americans must be aware that if they wage a war this time, it will be a regional war."
Trump responded to the ayatollah by saying that if “we don’t make a deal, then we’ll find out whether or not he was right.”
Despite stating their unwillingness to give up their nuclear energy program, which they say is legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), Iranian envoys have expressed an openness to a meeting with US diplomats mediated by other Middle Eastern nations in Turkey this week.
On Monday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote on social media that he had instructed diplomats "to pursue fair and equitable negotiations, guided by the principles of dignity, prudence, and expediency."
Trump is also pushing other demands—including that Iran must also limit its long-range ballistic missile program and stop arming its allies in the region, such as the Palestinian militant group Hamas, the Lebanese group Hezbollah, and the Yemeni group Ansar Allah, often referred to as the "Houthis."
Pillar pointed out that Iran's missile program and its arming of so-called "proxies" have primarily been used as deterrents against other nations in the region—namely, US allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. With these demands, he said, "Iran is being told it cannot have a full regional policy while others do. It is unrealistic to expect any Iranian leader to agree to that."
That said, Pillar wrote that "President Trump is correct when he says that Iran wants a deal, given that Iran’s bad economic situation is an incentive to negotiate agreements that would provide at least partial relief from sanctions," which played a notable role in heightening the economic instability that fueled Iran's protests in the first place.
But any optimism that appeared to have arisen may have been dashed by Tuesday's exchange of fire. According to Axios, Iran is now asking to move the talks from Turkey to Oman and has called for a meeting with the US alone rather than with other nations present.
Eric Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, said: "This is exactly the kind of miscalculation—or intentional escalation, by hawkish bureaucrats aiming to scuttle talks—that can drag us into an illegal and catastrophic war in Iran."
Under the United Nations charter, countries are required to believe they are under imminent attack in order to carry out a strike against another sovereign nation.
In a comment to Common Dreams, Phyllis Bennis, the director of the New International Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, emphasized the massive difference between the US and Iran's military capabilities and actions.
"There is no question of Iran having equal military capacity to that of the US," she said. "Its military has never been anywhere close to the size, financing, or power; its own military capacity, and that of most of its allies in the region, were severely damaged in the Israeli-US attack last June. However the Iranian drone was 'acting,' the real escalation has been that of the United States."
"Sending what Trump called his 'massive armada' to threaten Iran stands in complete violation of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the threat or use of force," she continued. "That is the real 'escalatory' action. The US needs to pull back its warships, warplanes, and troops, and engage in serious diplomacy. Demanding talks while surrounding the other side with a massive armada of warships and F-35s is not diplomacy, it is piracy."
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American Garbage
We consume far beyond our means because our military keeps enough of us feeling secure, and we have such a large military because we consume far beyond our means.
Feb 01, 2026
I learned one of my most valuable lessons about US power in my first year as a Brown University doctoral student. It was in anthropology professor Catherine Lutz’s seminar on empire and social movements. I’d sum up what I remember something like this: Americans consume one hell of a lot—cars, clothes, food, toys, expensive private colleges (ahem…), and that’s just to start. Since other countries like China, the United Kingdom, and Japan purchase substantial chunks of US consumer debt, they have a vested interest in our economic stability. So, even though you and I probably feel less than empowered as we scramble to make mortgage, car, or credit-card payments, the fact that we collectively owe a bunch of money globally makes it less likely that a country like China will want to rock the boat—and that includes literally rocking the boat (as with a torpedo).
In classes like that one at Brown, I came to understand that the military power we get from owing money is self-reinforcing. It helps keep our interest rates low and, in turn, our own military can buy more supplies (especially if President Donald Trump’s latest demand for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget goes through!). Our own debt somewhat ironically allows this country to continue to expand its reach, if not around the globe these days, at least in this hemisphere (whether you’re thinking about Venezuela or Greenland). Often when I splurge on a fancy Starbucks latte or a new pair of shoes, I think about how even critics of US military hegemony like me help prop up our empire when we do what Americans do best—shop!
To put this crudely, we consume far beyond our means because our military keeps enough of us feeling secure, and we have such a large military because we consume far beyond our means.
American Trash and the Politics of Consumption
And boy, can we shop! As of August 2025, US consumer debt ballooned to nearly $18 trillion and then continued to rise through the end of last year.
Here’s one consequence of our consumptive habits: We Americans throw a lot of stuff out. Per capita, we each generate an average of close to two tons of solid waste annually, if you include industrial and construction waste (closer to one ton if you don’t). Mind you, on average, that’s roughly three times what most other countries consume and throw out—much more than people even in countries with comparable per capita wealth.
Reminders of our waste are everywhere. Even in my state, Maryland, which funnels significant tax dollars into environmental conservation, you can see plastic bags and bottles tangled in the grass at the roadside, while the air in my wealthy county’s capital city often smells like car exhaust or the dirty rainwater that collects at the bottom of your trash can. Schoolchildren like mine bring home weekly piles of one-sided worksheets, PTA event flyers, plastic prizes, and holiday party favors. Even the rich soil of our rural neighborhood contains layers of trash from centuries of agricultural, household, and military activity, all of which remind me of the ecological footprint we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren.
Not all of us create or live with garbage to the same degree.
To our credit, some of us try to be mindful of that. In recent years, three different public debates about how to fuel our consumptive habits (and where to put the byproducts) have taken place in my region. Residents continue to argue about where to dispose of the hundreds of thousands of tons of our county’s waste (much of it uneaten food) that’s currently incinerated near the scenic farmland where I live. Do we let it stay here, where it pollutes the land and water, not to mention the air, and disturbs our pastoral views? Or do we haul at least some of the residual ash to neighboring counties and states, to areas that tend to be poor majority-minority ones? While some local advocacy groups oppose the exporting (so to speak) of our trash, it continues to happen.
A related dispute has taken place in an adjacent county that’s somewhat less wealthy but also majority white. That debate centers on the appropriate restrictions on a data center to be built there that will store information we access on the internet and that’s expected to span thousands of acres. How far away need it be from residents’ homes and farms? Will people be forced to sell their land to build it?
While many of our concerns are understandable—I’m not ready to move so that we can have a data center nearby—it turns out that some worries animating such discussions are (to put it kindly) aesthetic in nature. Recently, a neighbor I’d never met called me to try to enlist our family in a debate about whether some newcomers, a rare Indian-American family around here, could construct a set of solar panels in a field along a main road, where feed crops like alfalfa can usually be seen blooming in the springtime.
My neighbor’s concern: that the new family wanted to use those fields for solar panels to supply clean energy to their community (stated with emphasis, which I presumed to denote the Asian-Americans who would assumedly visit them for celebrations and holidays). Heaven forbid! She worried that the panels would disrupt the views of passersby like us and injure a habitat for the bald eagle—ironic concerns given how much of a mess so many of us have already made renovating our outbuildings, raising our dogs and chicken flocks, and chopping down trees that get in the way of our homes or social gatherings.
Many such concerns are raised sincerely by people who care deeply about land and community. However, the fact that, to some, solar panels are less desirable than the kinds of crops that look nice or feed our desire for more red meat should reframe the debate about whose version of consumption (and garbage) should be acceptable at all.
Indeed, not all of us create or live with garbage to the same degree. Compared to white populations, Black populations are 100% more likely and communities of Asian descent 200% more likely to live within 6 miles of a US Superfund site (among America’s most polluted places). Such proximity is, in turn, linked to higher rates of cancer, asthma, and birth defects.
Nor do whites suffer such impacts in the same ways. According to an analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency—and let’s appreciate such an analysis while we still have access to it, since the Trump administration’s EPA just decided to stop tracking the human impact of pollution—Black Americans live with approximately 56% more pollution that they generate, Hispanic Americans experience 63% more than what they create, and—ready for this?—white Americans are exposed to 17% less than they make.
Military Contamination
Our military, far from being just another enabler of unequal consumption and suffering, contributes mightily to the waste we live with. In the US, hundreds of military bases are contaminated by so-called forever chemicals, such as PFAS, in the drinking water and the soil. We’re talking about chemicals associated with cancer, heart conditions, birth defects, and other chronic health problems. The civilian populations surrounding such bases are often low-income and disproportionately people of color. Of course, also disproportionately impacted are the military families and veterans who live and work around such bases, and tend to have inadequate healthcare to address such issues.
An example would be the Naval Submarine Base in New London, where my family spent a significant amount of time. Encompassing more than 700 acres along the Thames River, that base was designated a Superfund site in 1990 due to contamination from unsanctioned landfills, chemical storage, and waste burial, all of which put heavy metals, pesticides, and other toxic substances into the environment.
Rather than bore you with more statistics, let me share how it feels to stand on its grounds. Picture a wide, deep river, slate gray and flanked by deciduous trees. On the bank opposite the base, multifamily housing and the occasional restaurant have been wrought from what were once factories. After you pass the guard station, a museum to your left shows off all manner of missiles, torpedoes, and other weaponry, along with displays depicting the living spaces of sailors inside submarines, with bunks decorated with the occasional photo of scantily clad White women (presumably meant to boost troop morale).
To your right, there are brick barracks, office buildings, takeout restaurants, even a bowling alley, and submarines, their rounded turrets poking out of the water. Along roadways leading through the base, old torpedoes are painted in bright colors like children’s furniture and repurposed as monuments to America’s military might. The air smells like asphalt and metal. Signs of life are everywhere, from the seagulls that swoop down to catch fish to the sailors and their families you see moving about in cars. It’s hard to comprehend that I’m also standing on what reporters have called “a minefield of pollution… a dumping ground for whatever [the base] needed to dispose of: sulfuric acid, torpedo fuel, waste oil, and incinerator ash.”
Empire of Waste
When I say that our military produces a lot of garbage, I don’t just mean in this country. I also include what it does abroad and the countries like Israel that we patronize and arm. Last summer, I corresponded with anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, who spent more than a year documenting the human casualties and costs of what the Israeli military and other Israelis have done in Israeli-occupied Palestine. That includes the mass dumping of garbage there from Israeli territories and the barricading of Palestinian communities from waste disposal sites, all of which have led to environmental contamination.
I think progressives would do well to consider how important it is that our signs, our social media posts, our political speeches, and even our patterns of consumption send a message—that many are welcome here, skin color, pronouns, and even specific brands of left-wing ideology be damned.
For example, Stamatopoulou-Robbins visited the 5,000-person Palestinian village of Shuqba, surrounded by open land on all sides and controlled by the Israeli government. Nearby cities and settlements dump waste, including X-ray images, household appliances, broken electronics like cell phones, industrial waste, wrecked vehicles, and car parts right in its neighborhood. One young man told Stamatopoulou-Robbins that he and his wife couldn’t have a baby because of the toxic environment. Many others, he told her, experienced the same problem, along with higher-than-average rates of cancer and respiratory and skin problems. His story, Stamatopoulou-Robbins wrote me, was one of many similar tales in Shuqba, tales that multiplied across the West Bank, where Israeli settlements and trucks from Israel, as she put it, “regularly dump their wastes in proximity to Palestinian residential areas and farmland.”
Her research drives home how we experience pollution all too often depends on who we are. I’m a case in point. My family and I pride ourselves on being the first to inhabit our sprawling rural property since the family whose ancestors built a home on it in 1890 and passed it down to two subsequent generations. In 2020, when we initially came to look at it, we couldn’t afford the asking price. However, the older couple who, in the end, sold it to us wanted a family in the house who would raise children there as they had. As they put it flatteringly, we were a “salt-of-the-earth” family (and the feeling was mutual).
Trash and Belonging
Nowadays, the news abounds with references to who is a “real” American, and who belongs beyond our borders. References to purity and contamination apply not just to our growing piles of waste but to human beings, too. Consider candidate Donald Trump’s promise, at a 2023 campaign rally, to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” or his claim that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and other Somali immigrants are nothing less than—yes—“garbage.”
And it’s true that what (or who) we consider garbage, and what (or who) we tolerate in our field of vision matters. My family recently renovated an old cabin behind our house to serve as an office for me to see my psychotherapy patients in person. The idea was that the veterans and military families who come to me for help with trauma, many of whom themselves are lower-income people of color, would have a peaceful place to process it.
As we demolished an outer wall to add a bathroom to my new office, something fell out of that wall: an old paper advertisement for black licorice candy (“Licorice Bites”) that depicted a Black baby, eyes wide in the stereotypical fashion of Jim Crow Era ads, trying to crawl away from an alligator, its mouth gaping open. Good thing, I thought, that it hadn’t fallen out of that drywall when a patient of mine was there. The experience, while fleeting, reminded me of writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’s point that Americans so easily minimize foreign genocides because we’ve done such a striking job of burying (in the case of my house, literally!) the atrocities of slavery, the segregated world that followed it, and their role in our country’s expansion.
Whoever put it there, that ad in my cabin wall—just like local gossip about that Indian-American family—is a reminder of who belongs and who doesn’t in this country. Like an Egyptian pyramid filled with a pharaoh’s possessions, remnants of American lives remind us of how some of us are kept sick, intimidated, and belittled, while feeding the appetites of others.
In the meantime, I think progressives would do well to consider how important it is that our signs, our social media posts, our political speeches, and even our patterns of consumption send a message — that many are welcome here, skin color, pronouns, and even specific brands of left-wing ideology be damned. Who is “of this earth” is questionable at best.
We should also ask why pictures denigrating Black people and half-naked women, and monuments to weaponry, so excite the patriotic souls of enough Americans that it’s easy to find them throughout our land. We cannot continue to allow the other side’s exclusionary ideals to dominate today’s political messaging.
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US Military Told Mideast Ally That Trump Attack on Iran is 'Imminent': Report
"This isn’t about the nukes or the missile program. This is about regime change," a former senior intelligence official told Drop Site News.
Jan 30, 2026
Senior officials in the US military have told a key Middle East ally that President Donald Trump may strike Iran as soon as this weekend, as part of an operation that may seek to decapitate the Islamic Republic's government, according to a report published Friday by Drop Site News.
While the Trump administration reportedly envisions attacks against nuclear, ballistic, and other military sites around Iran, a former senior US intelligence official who is acting as an informal advisor to Trump told the outlet: "This isn’t about the nukes or the missile program. This is about regime change."
As Iran has been roiled by the largest wave of protests since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Trump has repeatedly threatened to launch strikes, which he has claimed would be in retaliation for the nation's security forces killing demonstrators.
While counts vary widely, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported Friday that Iranian security forces have killed more than 6,000 protesters in a brutal crackdown that has largely quelled the unrest seen earlier this month.
According to the senior official, who has worked as a consultant for Arab governments, Trump's war planners hope that a strike on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would galvanize Iranians to return to the streets and eventually deliver a knockout blow to their government.
He said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long sought to push the US to engage in direct conflict with Iran, “is hoping for an attack,” and is “assuring Trump that Israel can help put in place a new government that is friendly with the West.”
In the Oval Office on Friday, Trump told reporters that the US has a “large armada, flotilla, call it whatever you want, heading towards Iran right now." He said that the armada was "larger than Venezuela," referring to the buildup of ships leading up to the US invasion of the Latin American country earlier this month to overthrow its president, Nicolás Maduro.
According to Drop Site, two senior intelligence officials from an unnamed Arab country said they received word that a US attack could come “imminently," potentially as soon as Sunday.
Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia, Iran’s military spokesperson, in an interview on Iranian TV on Thursday, said that a strike against Iran would likely play out very differently from the one launched in June against three Iranian nuclear sites. Iran's response was limited: an attack on a single US military base in Qatar, which it telegraphed beforehand.
“If such a miscalculation is made by the Americans, it will certainly not unfold the way Trump imagines—carrying out a quick operation and then, two hours later, tweeting that the operation is over,” Akraminia said.
“The scope of war will certainly extend across the entire region, he added. "From the Zionist regime to countries that host American military bases, all will be within range of our missiles and drones.”
Trump has said "time is running out" for Iran to come to the table to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with the United States, one with much more stringent restrictions than the one the president ripped up in 2018.
According to the New York Times:
US and European officials say that in talks, they have put three demands in front of the Iranians: a permanent end to all enrichment of uranium and disposal of its current stockpiles, limits on the range and number of their ballistic missiles, and an end to all support for proxy groups in the Middle East, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis operating in Yemen.
As the Times pointed out, "Notably absent from those demands... was any reference to protecting the protesters."
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated on Friday that Tehran would “welcome negotiations that ensure Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear activity” and that it would not “negotiate anything related to our conventional arms, including missiles. This is something we cannot risk.”
He said Iran would not agree to any deal that halts uranium enrichment on its soil, which it has said it has the right to pursue under the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). "We do not want to enter into any kind of negotiation that is doomed to failure and can then be used as another pretext for another war," he told Al-Monitor.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday, Trump said Iran “wants to make a deal” but did not elaborate on what that meant. “We’ll see what happens. I can say this: They do want to make a deal."
Mohamed ElBaradei, former director general of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, has condemned Trump's threats.
"The continued unilateral threats of a military strike against Iran in the absence of any clear and present danger and in violation of international law, bring to mind the same grim scene before the illegal and immoral Iraq war with its lies and horrifying consequences," he wrote on social media. "Human life and regional destruction don’t seem to matter."
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