Vox Populi:

We cannot afford to slip into despair. We must push back against militarism everywhere, at every turn.

As news broke that the United States and Israel had launched war on Iran, two posts kept showing up over and over on my social media feeds. One was from the Israeli military’s official account, which stated an oft-repeated phrase: “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

The other was a video from the Iranian city of Minab, where the first reports of casualties were emerging. The joint U.S.-Israeli attack had hit a girls’ elementary school; the death toll kept ticking higher and higher. At the time of publication, Iranian authorities said 108 people, mostly schoolchildren, had been killed in the strike, with many more injured.

Plenty has been written, in Truthout and elsewhere, about the totally incoherent justifications for this war, the illegality of it, the potential for regional disaster, the joke it has made of the very idea of diplomacy. All of this was and continues to be true, and all of it is important to raise. But more than anything, we in the U.S. need to reckon with the fact that so much of our state wealth, capacity, and technology goes toward burying children in rubble. 

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