Raúl Castro is certainly not a criminal, regardless of how desperately the Trump administration attempts to portray him as one. He is a revolutionary who dedicated his life to the struggle against dictatorship, foreign domination and capitalist exploitation in Cuba. The renewed threats surrounding a possible U.S. arrest warrant against him are nothing more than another act of imperial arrogance by a state that has spent more than sixty years trying to suffocate the Cuban Revolution through blockade, sabotage, economic warfare and permanent political aggression.
Washington’s hypocrisy is difficult to overstate. The same United States that invaded countries, organized coups, armed reactionary forces and destroyed entire societies in defense of its geopolitical interests now attempts to present itself as a defender of “justice” and “democracy.” The same political establishment that finances wars, supports collective punishment and openly backs criminal regimes across the world suddenly claims moral authority when it comes to revolutionary Cuba.
The United States also has a long history of protecting and legitimizing violent anti-Castro extremists operating out of Miami–individuals and networks tied to sabotage, bombings and decades of terrorist aggression against Cuba. That same political establishment now attempts to lecture the world about “justice” and “democracy.”
Raúl Castro belongs to the historic generation that overthrew the Batista dictatorship–a regime of repression, corruption and total subordination to U.S. economic interests. Together with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and thousands of Cuban revolutionaries, that generation transformed Cuba from a playground of American corporations and mafia interests into an independent country that guaranteed healthcare, education, literacy and dignity to millions of ordinary people.
This is the real reason Cuba has been targeted for decades. As Fidel Castro once famously said,
They can never forgive us for having made a socialist revolution under the very nose of the United States.
For more than sixty years, the United States has attempted to break the Cuban Revolution by every possible means. Economic strangulation, diplomatic isolation, assassination plots, destabilization campaigns and endless sanctions were all meant to force Cuba back into dependency and submission. Yet Cuba endured. Despite enormous difficulties, socialist Cuba achieved social gains that remain out of reach for large sections of the population even inside the wealthiest capitalist countries.
Donald Trump and the increasingly reactionary forces surrounding him represent the most aggressive face of contemporary American imperialism. Their obsession with Cuba has nothing to do with “human rights.” Cuba remains a target because it represents a historic act of defiance–a small country that resisted the power of the United States and survived. That reality continues to infuriate the imperial establishment in Washington.
The campaign against Raúl Castro is therefore not simply directed against one individual. It is an attack against the entire historical legitimacy of the Cuban Revolution. It seeks to criminalize anti-imperialist struggle itself while erasing the long record of violence, intervention and domination carried out by the United States across Latin America and the wider world.
But there is a historical memory that imperialism cannot erase so easily.
Millions of people across the world still view the Cuban Revolution as a symbol of sovereignty, resistance and international solidarity. Whatever debates may exist around Cuba’s path, one fact remains undeniable: the Revolution broke the chains of foreign domination and proved that even a small nation could stand against imperial power without surrendering.
No matter what happens, Raúl Castro will remain part of that glorious history. On the other hand, the architects of sanctions, aggression and imperial domination will remain part of the long historical record of imperialism, oppression and violence.
Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
Anwar Iqbal, Washington, May 23, 2026 Updated about 4 hours
WASHINGTON: A recent report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) says the United States lost or damaged 42 military aircraft during Operation Epic Fury, the 40-day military campaign against Iran that began on February 28, 2026.
The report, released last week and circulated by several US media outlets on Friday, is believed to be the most detailed public accounting so far of US aircraft losses in the conflict. However, the Pentagon has not yet issued its own comprehensive assessment.
In the report, CRS researchers said they compiled the figures from news reports, official Pentagon statements, and announcements by US Central Command (Centcom).
The report notes that the Department of Defence — now also using the title “Department of War” under an executive order issued in September 2025 — has not publicly provided a full list of losses from the campaign.
During a congressional hearing on May 12, Acting Pentagon Comptroller Jules W. Hurst III said that the estimated cost of US military operations against Iran had risen to $29 billion. He said much of the increase came from “repair or replacement costs for equipment.”
The aircraft losses listed in the CRS report include fighter jets, refuelling aircraft, helicopters, surveillance planes, and drones.
Among the most serious incidents were the loss of four F-15E Strike Eagle fighter aircraft. Centcom said three of the aircraft were accidentally shot down by friendly fire over Kuwait on March 2. All six crew members survived after ejecting safely. A fourth F-15E was reportedly shot down during combat operations over Iran on April 5, although both crew members were later rescued.
The report also cited damage to an F-35A stealth fighter caused by Iranian ground fire during operations over Iran in March.
An A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft was lost after being hit by enemy fire on April 3. According to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, the pilot ejected safely before the aircraft crashed.
The CRS report also described significant losses among support aircraft.
Two KC-135 aerial refueling aircraft were involved in an incident over friendly airspace on March 12. One crashed in Iraq, killing all six crew members on board, while the second made an emergency landing. Five additional KC-135 tankers were damaged in an Iranian missile and drone strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
One E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control aircraft (AWACS) was also damaged during the same attack. Later reports said the aircraft had been parked on an unprotected taxiway.
Special operations forces also suffered losses. Two MC-130J Commando II aircraft supporting a rescue mission for a downed F-15E were reportedly intentionally destroyed on the ground in Iran after they became unable to leave the area. Their crews were evacuated safely.
An HH-60W Jolly Green II rescue helicopter was damaged by small-arms fire during rescue operations inside Iran.
The largest losses involved unmanned aircraft. According to the report, the US military lost 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones during the campaign. Another MQ-4C Triton surveillance drone crashed in what a US Navy document described as a mishap.
The CRS said the reported losses could raise major questions for Congress about military readiness, replacement costs, and the ability of the US defence industry to replace aircraft quickly during a prolonged conflict.
The report also warned that the losses may reveal growing risks for US aircraft operating in heavily contested airspace and could force the Pentagon to reconsider tactics, deployment strategies, and future procurement plans.
From left, President of the Eurogroup Kyriakos Pierrakakis, German Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister of Finance Lars Klingbeil, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, French Finance Minister Roland Lescure, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, Canada’s Finance and National Revenue Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, Japan’s Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama, Italian Finance Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti, European Commissioner for Economy and Productivity, Implementation and Simplification Valdis Dombrovskis pose for a family photo at the G7 finance meeting in Paris, Monday, May 18, 2026. [AP Photo/Thibault Camus]
US President Donald Trump menaced Iran with another military onslaught on Tuesday, declaring, “We may have to hit them one more time.” Just hours after claiming to have “paused” an imminent resumption of the bombardment of Iran, Trump asserted that the US military was “locked and loaded,” and that he could make a decision on whether to attack by early next week.
Trump’s gangster-like threats are the authentic voice of world imperialism, which is determined to impose colonial chains on Iran and the entire region as part of the new redivision of the world among the major powers that is already well underway. The communique released by the G7 finance ministers yesterday after two days of consultations in Paris underscored this fact, with all members signing on to a statement that blamed the victim of the criminal US/Israeli war of aggression for the economic disaster it has produced.
The finance ministers and central bankers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US insisted that “a swift return to free and safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz and a lasting resolution to the conflict are imperative.” While not uttering a word about the unprovoked onslaught on Iran launched as negotiations were still ongoing on 28 February or the thousands of Iranian civilians slaughtered by indiscriminate American and Israeli bombing, the G7 finance ministers, displaying typical imperialist double-standards, hypocritically began their main communique with the statement, “We are united in our condemnation of Russia’s continued brutal war against Ukraine and escalatory actions aimed at undermining collective efforts to broker peace.”
The glaring inconsistency of the imperialists’ moral outrage manages to consistently coincide with the global predatory interests they are pursuing. American imperialism is determined to regain the domination over Iran it lost following the 1979 revolution as part of a drive to consolidate its hegemony over the energy-rich Middle East by sidelining its rivals, above all China. The European imperialists have endorsed the war because they hope to secure their own share of the spoils with a revival of the barbaric methods associated with colonialism and because they require continued US support for their war against Russia.
The governments supposedly engaged in “collective efforts” to “broker peace” are in fact the chief protagonists in a rapidly escalating third world war. Trump travelled to Beijing last week to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in what was billed as a summit to stabilise relations between the world’s two largest economies. But behind the diplomatic niceties, the American financial oligarchy for which Trump speaks has no intention of permitting China’s steady economic rise at the expense of the US and is openly preparing for war with China.
Trump’s failure to reach any substantive agreement in Beijing is now being followed just days later with another round of threats on the part of Trump to exterminate Iran, which not coincidentally is one of China’s most important oil suppliers.
The erratic outbursts by Trump and frequent explosions of militarist violence are indications of US imperialism’s weakness, not its strength. For the past 35 years, Washington has sought under successive administrations to offset its precipitous economic decline by deploying brutal military force. This uninterrupted series of wars has only deepened American imperialism’s crisis, both by aggravating social tensions to the breaking point and exacerbating the rivalries between the imperialist powers as they compete to secure markets, raw materials, cheap labour and strategic influence under conditions of a worsening world capitalist breakdown.
Imperialism—whether of the American or European variety—can offer no way out of this crisis other than by further escalating wars.
Trump’s threats to resume the war on Iran have been punctuated with discussions on whether he will order an invasion of Cuba, which the White House is now absurdly accusing of playing host to Iranian military advisers and possessing 300 drones supplied by Russia and Iran. Military operations on the Caribbean island aimed at toppling the Castroite regime would mark the second US-led “regime change” operation in Latin America in less than six months, following January’s invasion of Venezuela to abduct President Nicolas Maduro and try him as a common criminal in a New York courtroom. Trump may be plotting a parallel scenario to seize the 94-year-old Raul Castro, who will reportedly soon be indicted in a US court.
In Europe, the continent’s imperialist powers are fuelling the war on Russia—a nuclear-armed power—with reckless abandon. Germany in particular has taken the lead in assisting Ukraine to develop drone technology and supplying it with long-range weaponry capable of hitting targets deep inside Russia. Kiev has felt emboldened over recent weeks to strike high-rise residential buildings in Moscow and energy infrastructure. These provocative acts of aggression, which have only increased after the Kremlin’s threat earlier this year to bomb manufacturing facilities in NATO countries, are designed to produce a retaliatory strike by Russia that can be exploited as justification to expand the war.
The European imperialist powers are subordinating all of society’s resources to waging war, with Germany approving €1 trillion for war spending and all NATO members committing to allocating 5 percent of their GDP for the military. The destruction of public services and worker rights needed to fund this mad rearmament drive is being justified with hysterical anti-Russian propaganda.
Carsten Breuer, the top commander of the German Armed Forces, declared in a joint interview with his British counterpart in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Russia—which has proven incapable after four years of war to conquer even half of Ukraine’s territory—could attack a NATO country by 2029. Europe’s rearmament drive is not only aimed at Russia, but is motivated at the most fundamental level by the ruling class’ recognition that US imperialism—long an ally—is now a rival in the struggle to carve up the world among the major powers.
The sharpening of inter-imperialist antagonisms and acceleration of a third world war confirm that the same basic features of capitalism identified by Lenin in his analysis of imperialism apply today with full force. Lenin wrote at the height of the bloody slaughter of World War I, “Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.”
This understanding was central to Lenin’s conception of the epoch as one of wars and revolutions, i.e., not only a period of imperialist reaction, but one in which crisis-ridden capitalism had created the objective conditions for the working class to offer a socialist road out of the impasse.
The same capitalist contradictions propelling all of the imperialist powers to engage in world war are driving the only social force that can stop this catastrophe into struggle: the international working class. The US-instigated war on Iran has already, within less than three months, triggered sharp spikes in energy, fuel and food prices. Strikes and protests have involved workers across continents, from the ongoing national strikes against price rises in Kenya and Bolivia, to Monday’s one-day national strike that hit wide swathes of the Italian economy against war and the Gaza genocide.
The intensification of the class struggle demonstrates the urgency of the fight to build an international anti-war movement on the basis of a revolutionary socialist programme. The initial anger among workers expressed in the strikes must be developed into conscious opposition to imperialist war, linking the fight to defend jobs and living standards with the struggle against imperialist barbarism and the capitalist system that is its root cause. This movement must end the domination of society by the financial oligarchy and its relentless quest for profit and plunder by setting as its goals the conquest of political power by the working class and the socialist transformation of society.
Professor Graham Allison’s concept has influenced the way scholars and leaders think about competition between global powers.
By Nora Delaney
Fall 2025
HOW SHOULD LEADERS AND POLICYMAKERS THINK about relative shifts in power between countries? Are there principles from history that countries can look back to that help understand geopolitical tensions when countries increase their political and economic power? These are the questions that help us navigate conflicts and understand prospects for peace.
Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and former Kennedy School dean, has argued that we can take a lesson from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BCE when the rising city-state of Athens challenged the dominant existing power of Sparta. Thucydides wrote, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
Allison has looked to Thucydides and his exploration of the tensions between a rising and established world power to understand the relationship between China and the United States. In his 2017 book “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap?,” Allison argues that history shows many instances where rising powers challenge established ones, and often these situations end in war—though not always. Allison’s Thucydides’ Trap has since become an influential metaphor in international relations as experts think about the friction between China and the United States—and ways that they might avoid devastating conflict. The Institute for National Strategic Studies and the National Defense University Press, for example, published analyses interpreting the Thucydides Trap in the context of U.S.–China dynamics. Allison’s analysis has also generated attention in China. President Xi Jinping frequently uses it to identify the challenge today’s two great powers face; for example, in his meeting with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer in October 2023, he said “The ‘Thucydides Trap’ is not inevitable, and Planet Earth is vast enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the United States.” Indeed, during Allison’s quarterly visits to China, Xi and key members of his team have engaged him directly to explore opportunities for escaping the Thucydides Trap.
Allison chairs the Harvard China Working Group that includes faculty from across the university and is pursuing ongoing work at the Kennedy School that grapples with the nature and future of U.S.-China competition. The rivalry between the United States and China, Allison has argued, encompasses four key areas that he and his colleagues at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs have researched and reported on: rivalry in economics, technology, military power, and diplomacy. These reports were originally prepared as part of a package of transition memos for the Trump-Biden transition after the November 2020 election.
Allison and others at the Belfer Center and the Kennedy School continue to lead in our understanding of the ways the United States and China compete and cooperate as world powers.
Note: Greg Maybury is a writer and blogger from Australia. He has compiled the following historical information and presented it in a condensed form for all. It is of paramount importance to comprehend the savage and murderous colonialism of France in Africa, and the information he has gathered is verifiable.
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Another slice of our past narrative missing from those not-so-reliable tomes that we call history books. Fact check this mes cheries. ===
France gathered 400 Muslim scholars and beheaded them. In 1917 AD, during the occupation of Chad. In 1852, when France entered the city of Laghouat in Algeria, it killed two-thirds of its population in a single night and burned them alive.
France occupied Algeria for 132 years. In the first 7 years after their arrival, the French eliminated 1 million Muslims, and in the last 7 years before their departure, they eliminated 1.5 million Muslims. The French historian Jacques Gorky estimated that the total number of Muslims killed in Algeria from France’s arrival in 1830 to its departure in 1962 was 10 million.
France occupied Tunisia for 75 years, Algeria for 132 years, Morocco for 44 years, and Mauritania for 60 years.
When France entered Egypt during its famous campaign, French soldiers on horseback entered mosques and raped free women in front of their families. They drank wine in the mosques and turned them into stables for their horses.
It is strange to see some people boasting about and defending French civilization, forgetting all its dark history. This is France; remind them of its history.
When France entered the city of Aghwat (Laghouat) in Algeria in 1852, it burned two-thirds of its inhabitants to death in just one night.
France conducted 17 nuclear tests in Algeria between 1960 and 1966, resulting in an unknown number of deaths estimated between 27,000 and 100,000 and the effects persist to this day.
When France left Algeria in 1962, it left behind 11 million landmines more than the total population of Algeria at the time.
France occupied Algeria for 132 years. In just the first seven years of their occupation, they massacred one million Muslims, and in the last seven years, they martyred another 1.5 million Muslims.
France is the fourth largest holder of gold reserves in the world, with 2,436 tons of gold stored at the Bank of France, even though France has no active gold mines.
In contrast, Mali one of the world’s largest gold producers with 14 official gold mines has no gold reserves of its own.
Similarly, the Republic of Congo, which ranks seventh among gold-producing countries, also has no gold reserves in its central bank.
As the war with Iran drags on, now suspended in a ceasefire as the combatants attempt to organize negotiations, the Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz has a harsh assessment of the results so far. According to Stiglitz, President Donald Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran was a ‘calamitous’ mistake, the consequences of which have been war crimes, death, and the destruction of the global economy.
“No decision is more important than waging war against another country. Yet the United States has done exactly that without even a nod to its own system of checks and balances and reasoned deliberation,” writes Stiglitz. “The disastrous result is now clear: America is once again embroiled in a Middle East war that has already cost thousands of lives — mostly civilians — and in which it has almost certainly committed multiple war crimes.”
What’s more, Stiglitz asserts that the longer the war lasts, “the greater the damage will be. But even if the war ends quickly, the effects will linger. After all, critical supply chains have already been disrupted, and oil and gas production facilities destroyed. Most estimates suggest that repairs will take years.”
The economic damage comes on the heels of Trump’s tariffs, which, along with the war, have contributed to rising inflation. With the world “already facing an affordability crisis that US policies have made worse, the risk now is that central bankers everywhere will either raise interest rates or at least slow the pace at which they were lowering them.” As a result, what economic gains were made as the world recovered from COVID have been lost.
This is going to exacerbate the affordability crisis, which will in turn worsen the housing and credit situation. At the same time, “Trump’s regressive tax cuts for billionaires and corporations now in force, the US has less fiscal space to buffer the disruptions he has caused.” What’s more, “Trump’s claim that the US will benefit as a net oil exporter is nonsense. Yes, Exxon will benefit, but US consumers pay prices that are set globally — and that have risen substantially.” So Americans will pay at the pump while big oil sees soaring profits. Stiglitz says there is little cause for optimism, concluding, “Yet another nail has been added to the coffin of the peaceful, borderless world that our forebearers sought to build after World War II. Under Trump, the country that laid the foundations of that world is now dismantling it… And with democracy in the US in such a weakened state, the human errors and their consequences are piling up fast.”
The US-Israeli war on Iran has given Gulf monarchies fresh cover to deepen repression, criminalize dissent, and tighten their grip over every version of reality that falls outside the state line.
Since 28 February, the US and Israel have been waging war on Iran, with consequences that reach far beyond the battlefield. Across the Persian Gulf, governments have seized on the conflict to expand repression at home.
Under the pretext of combating “disinformation” and “rumors” on social media, Gulf states have launched sweeping arrest campaigns against hundreds of citizens and residents, making clear that any expression outside the official narrative can now be treated as a “security threat” or even the “voice of the enemy.”
Calls not to photograph or publish footage did not arrive as casual advice. Interior ministries across the Gulf issued them as official warnings. At first glance, the arguments appeared plausible: avoid panic, protect national security, deny useful information to the enemy. Within days, however, these directives became the basis for a much broader campaign of repression, one that moved quickly from warnings to prosecutions.
The Gulf states have imposed a near-total blackout on the flow of information, claiming that independent content could spread fear, aid the enemy militarily, or amount to treason. In practice, the war on Iran has become a ready-made excuse to criminalize speech.
Bahrain: From emergency measures to mass arrests
Manama justified its tightening security measures through a series of official statements. The Interior Ministry’s Civil Defense Council announced a ban on gatherings “in order to maintain compliance with public safety responsibilities in light of the blatant Iranian aggression against Bahrain.” What appeared to be a response to regional escalation quickly turned into cover for a far broader crackdown.
Authorities arrested more than 260 citizens on charges including “misuse of platforms” and “sympathy for Iranian aggression.” According to human rights sources, three of those detained were women. Authorities also published photographs of detainees in an effort to shame them publicly.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), the arrests went far beyond any legal framework. On 4 March, dozens of men stormed the home of Munir Mirza Ahmed Mushaima. Some wore black uniforms and white helmets, while others were in civilian clothing. They arrested him without presenting a warrant, accusing him of running a social media account that contained “illegal content.”
The crackdown has not been limited to Bahraini citizens. Residents of various nationalities have also been arrested for filming, posting, or reposting videos related to attacks on the country. Bahrain’s Public Prosecution has even asked courts to impose the death penalty on people accused of “spying with the enemy.”
The campaign has also turned deadly. Mohammad Mohsen Mousavi, who was arrested in mid-March, reportedly showed signs of torture on his body during funeral preparations. The Interior Ministry responded by defending his detention and accusing him of links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The UAE and Saudi Arabia move to monopolize the narrative
Abu Dhabi has followed Bahrain’s path closely. Since the outbreak of the war on Iran, restrictions on the movements of citizens and residents, as well as on what they can post online, have sharply increased.
The Public Prosecution warned X users against circulating images or videos from attack sites. These measures followed months of tighter digital censorship linked to tensions with Saudi Arabia over Yemen.
Authorities in Abu Dhabi alone have reportedly arrested more than 100 people, including foreigners, on charges of filming, publishing videos, or spreading “inaccurate information.” The State Security Agency also announced that it had dismantled a network allegedly “funded and managed” by Hezbollah and Iran. Officials claimed the network was planning to destabilize the country’s financial system.
Content creators have also come under pressure. Authorities now require prior approval before influencers or public figures can post, even when discussing routine issues such as hotel overcrowding or the effects of the war on daily life.
According to UAE sources, prosecutors circulated lists of accounts accused of publishing “illegal content offensive to the state and its leadership.” Dozens of accounts were blocked on X, including “Elon Trades,” after it posted a video showing a fire at Dubai’s Fairmont Hotel that drew more than one million views.
Outside of the UAE, several prominent accounts reported receiving notices from X informing them that their profiles had been blocked inside the Gulf state following requests linked to Emirati authorities.
Among them were Yemeni lawyer Mohammad al-Maswari who insisted that his posts were “based on rejecting the division of Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and Libya, and any support for terrorist militias”; Egyptian presenter Osama Gaweesh; Al Jazeera‘s Yemeni affairs editor Ahmed al-Shalafi, who received a message from the UAE Public Prosecution, “with charges of insulting state institutions, inciting hatred and sedition, and other charges”; and Doha-based academic Marc Owen Jones, whose work focuses on digital repression and authoritarianism in the Gulf. Their cases suggest that the crackdown is no longer limited to those inside the country, but is increasingly targeting critics abroad as well.
Saudi Arabia has taken a similar route. In early March, state agencies launched a media campaign under the hashtag “#التصوير_يخدم_العدو” – “filming serves the enemy” – to frame any attempt to document strikes as a threat to national security.
Riyadh crafted a campaign designed to portray cameras and mobile phones as weapons in enemy hands. The government also circulated memos banning what it called “infringing content,” “anonymous videos,” and “rumors,” while urging the public to rely exclusively on official sources.
The result was a tightly controlled media environment in which the state monopolized the narrative and criminalized any attempt to challenge it.
Saudi authorities have not publicly announced arrests linked to the war, but Saudi sources tell The Cradle that several citizens and residents have been detained. Those arrested reportedly include Sheikh Hassan Al-Mutawa, the preacher of Al-Khader Mosque in Al-Rabiiya on Tarut Island in Qatif governorate.
Kuwait and Qatar widen the dragnet
As the war escalated, Kuwait issued Law No. 47 on “Counter-Terrorism” on 15 March 2026. The text of the law includes broad and vague language that can easily be used to restrict freedoms.
Article 1 defines a “terrorist act” as any act aimed at spreading fear among the population or endangering public safety. Such wording leaves the law open to broad interpretation and allows authorities to treat almost any form of dissent as a security offense.
Kuwaiti authorities later announced the arrest of dozens of alleged Hezbollah members, including Kuwaiti and Lebanese nationals, accusing them of plotting attacks and threatening the country’s sovereignty. At the same time, the Interior Ministry warned against publishing any photos or information related to strikes, claiming they could destabilize public opinion.
Authorities also detained several Kuwaitis and foreigners, including content creator Badr al-Husseinan. He was charged with broadcasting false news, harming national interests, and misusing a phone after posting a satirical video about the hardship people faced during the war.
On 14 April, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called for the release of US-Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, who had been detained for more than six weeks over social media posts linked to the war.
Authorities accused him of spreading false information, harming national security, and misusing a mobile phone after he shared footage of a US fighter jet crash near a military base in Kuwait. CPJ said the material was already public and verified, describing his detention as part of a wider campaign to silence scrutiny and tighten control over the narrative.
Qatar has adopted many of the same measures. Since the beginning of the war, the Interior Ministry has banned the publication of photos and videos related to attacks inside the country, describing them as threats to national security.
The Department of Combating Cyber Economic Crimes announced the arrest of more than 300 people of different nationalities over the circulation of what it described as “misleading” videos and information.
One of those detained was Egyptian teacher Mohamed Tawhid, who lived in Doha. Tawhid commented on the breaking news broadcast by Al Jazeera in March about a drone attack on Al-Udeid Air Base. Quoting the Qatari Defense Ministry, the report said the attack had been intercepted.
Tawhid replied: “You are idiots who protect those who do not protect you.” He deleted the comment soon after posting it, but was arrested shortly afterward.
Screenshot of Egyptian teacher Mohamed Tawhid’s now-deleted X post, which was one of the main reasons behind his arrest by Qatari authorities.
Rumors also circulated that Jordanian researcher Fatima al-Samadi had been arrested. A source later denied the reports, but confirmed that she had come under pressure and temporarily deactivated her accounts before returning online.
Israeli spyware and the Gulf security state
At the time of writing, there is still no conclusive evidence linking spyware such as Pegasus, developed by Israel’s NSO Group, or Graphite, developed by Paragon Solutions, to the latest arrest campaigns across the Gulf.
Still, the possibility cannot be dismissed. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain have all previously been linked to Pegasus use against dissidents under the banner of “national security.”
In February, a Paragon Solutions employee briefly posted an image on LinkedIn that appeared to show details from the Graphite spyware interface. Before it was deleted, the image reportedly revealed operating logs, encrypted messaging data, and other technical details.
The Paragon employee’s now-deleted LinkedIn image that showed the Graphite control panel on the screen in the background.
There is no documented use of Graphite in the Gulf so far. Yet the history of Gulf states purchasing Israeli spyware and using it against dissidents means the possibility remains very real. Graphite can reportedly exploit security vulnerabilities without requiring the target to click a malicious link or interact with the device in any way. The absence of official confirmation does not mean such tools are not being used.
The Gulf states have shifted from claiming to defend national security to building systems of permanent repression. They have exploited the war on Iran to expand prosecutions under labels such as “combating disinformation,” “preventing rumors,” “treason,” and “sympathy with the enemy.”
What is taking shape is not a temporary wartime response, but a deeper transformation in the meaning of security itself. Across the Gulf, governments are imposing the official narrative by force and treating any alternative version of events as a punishable offense.
The repression machine continues in war as in peace.
Has the war on Iran given Gulf governments a new pretext to suppress dissent?Yes, the war is being used to justify a major expansion of repressionGulf states are reacting to real security threats, not targeting dissentThe crackdown began long before the war, but the conflict accelerated itRepression varies from one Gulf state to another
A memorial for the victims of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school bombing is on display on March 28, 2026, in Tehran, Iran.
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The first casualty of war is the truth.
This truism — understandably repeated at the outset of each new U.S. war — is proving itself once again.
With all evidence pointing toward U.S. responsibility for the February 28 bombing of Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, President Trump claimed that the attack “was done by Iran.” In spreading this blatant misinformation, Trump was not in fact shattering presidential norms — rather, he was continuing a White House tradition.
Back in 1945, in a public statement announcing the U.S.’s atomic bomb strike on Japan, President Harry Truman falsely described the city of Hiroshima as “an important Japanese Army base.” In fact, the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians. The bomb targeted thousands of schoolchildren, including nearly 6,000 who died as part of a service patrol near the center of Hiroshima. In Nagasaki, more than 1,400 students and teachers at Shiroyama Elementary School were killed.
But like most students attending U.S. schools after World War II, I was taught that dropping the atomic bombs saved lives.
Radical economist Costas Lapavitsas discusses the crumbling of the dollar-backed world system and what could be next. By C.J. Polychroniou , Truthout
March 25, 2026
Long before George W. Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, dubious claims and outright lies served as pretexts for the U.S. to launch major wars. A jingoistic fervor following an explosion on the battleship USS Maine prompted the Spanish-American War in 1898. In 1964, LBJ cited a “phantom battle” to push the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing military intervention in Vietnam.
Trump stands out mostly because he made little effort to sell his lies before going to war. In his prime-time address on April 1, 2026, he retroactively offered his first attempt to justify the war, claiming without evidence that Obama’s nuclear deal made Iran a greater threat and that Iran was on the cusp of aiming missiles at “the American homeland.”
Long before George W. Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, dubious claims and outright lies served as pretexts for the U.S. to launch major wars.
Calling truth a casualty of war may imply, however, that truth survives between wars. But the reality is that militarism and the warfare state are sustained by lies which stretch over decades. The ideology of American exceptionalism is driven by the myth that U.S. intervention plays a unique role in spreading freedom and democracy around the globe. Keeping the public uninformed and miseducated has been a key tactic to tamp down dissent.
The most common and continuous form these lies take is omission, erasing the pattern of U.S. war crimes from military records, history textbooks, and public memory. This record of erasure has proven so effective that many of those speaking out against war crimes do not seem to understand the degree to which they, too, have been miseducated. Chastising the Trump administration’s response to the school bombing, The New York Times’s David Wallace-Wells recoiled at the notion of a mass civilian massacre being “treated by U.S. officials as the normal cost of waging war.”
That civilian massacres have been a regular feature of warfare under Democratic and Republican administrations throughout U.S. history has apparently been lost on Wallace-Wells and countless others. Racism and xenophobia play a crucial role in this erasure, as they are used to rally support for war while devaluing the millions of nonwhite lives lost in pursuit of U.S. interests. As General William Westmoreland said bluntly during the Vietnam War, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner.”
In this way, war-related lies have been integral to the formation of our national identity.
Trump stands out mostly because he made little effort to sell his lies before going to war.
This is particularly true for the series of wars stretching across East, Central, and West Asia since the late 19th century that I researched for my book, American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism. Rudyard Kipling’s invocation of “the white man’s burden” in his 1899 call for the U.S. to colonize the Philippines was unmistakably racist. But in its time, it was meant to be instructive: Waging the “savage wars of peace” required Americans to shed their “childish” innocence and embrace the brutish nature of imperial power.
The message was sadly taken to heart by U.S. troops in the Philippines, where lynching, torture, concentration camps, and mass murder became all too common. Some atrocities continued long after the U.S. declared an end to combat. In 1906, American troops on Jolo Island in the southern Philippines killed 1,000 Moro people in what the U.S. recorded as a great military victory over Muslim fanatics in the “Battle of Bud Dajo.” Recounted by historian Kim A. Wagner, it was a horrific massacre, whose victims included women and children, as well as outgunned or unarmed men attempting to surrender.
Regarding the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II, Robert McNamara admitted, “In that single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children.” After WWII, McNamara served as secretary of defense, overseeing the escalation of the Vietnam War that resulted in over 3 million deaths. The My Lai massacre, which was marked by wanton slaughter and sexual assault — was initially recorded as a successful defeat of “enemy” combatants in March 1968, but more accurate news about it finally broke through decades of silence on U.S. war crimes. Most Americans quickly bracketed it off, a horrific exception rather than the culmination of a pattern.
But My Lai was a near replay of tragedies from the Korean War that the U.S. military systematically covered up. South Koreans had long memorialized the hundreds of unarmed and defenseless civilians, from babies to elders, massacred by U.S. soldiers at No Gun Ri. It was only brought to the attention of the U.S. public, however, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning team of Associated Press reporters nearly a half-century later. Even today, mainstream histories largely ignore U.S. military involvement in the brutal partition and occupation of Korea.
And My Lai was far from the only civilian massacre in Vietnam. Indeed, on the same day, dozens of Vietnamese civilians in My Khe were killed by U.S. troops. American soldiers commonly used the most vile, racist epithets and dehumanizing stereotypes to characterize Vietnamese people — both combatants and civilians, friends and foes alike. “Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, [and] imprisonment without due process,” as author Nick Turse documented in Kill Anything That Moves, “were virtually a daily fact of life” for Vietnamese people.
The most common and continuous form these lies take is omission, erasing the pattern of U.S. war crimes from military records, history textbooks, and public memory.
Although the U.S. defeat in Vietnam caused veterans like Colin Powell to adopt a more protective approach to the deployment of U.S. troops, the pattern of civilian massacres continued. On February 13, 1991, over 400 Iraqi civilians taking refuge in a shelter were killed in Amiriyah by two laser-guided “smart bombs” in the U.S.-led war on Iraq. Though in this case U.S. officials did acknowledge the civilian deaths, they were largely dismissed as “collateral damage” from a strike on a military target.
Amnesty International investigated 10 incidents involving at least 140 civilians, including at least 50 children, killed in the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan, for which there were no war crimes prosecutions of any kind. Retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the former deputy national security advisor, acknowledged, “We virtually never held anyone accountable for civilian casualties.”
Whether actively or passively, our culture — just as it fails to value all American lives equally — has internalized the lies that elevate the value of American lives far above those who look like the enemy.
None of this is meant to imply that the U.S. always targets civilians deliberately or to deny that America’s enemies have committed atrocious crimes against humanity. Lies and dehumanization are a common tactic that all parties use in war. But with America’s unrivaled post-WWII military and economic superpower has come the concordant privilege to act with impunity, to disregard what the rest of the world thinks of us, and to dismiss the suffering of others.
Civilian massacres have been a regular feature of warfare under Democratic and Republican administrations throughout U.S. history.
When the Tokyo Trials were set up after World War II to prosecute Japanese war crimes, the U.S. ensured that the conduct of its military was barred from review, setting in motion a chain of disregard for equitable governance under international law. Since 2002, the U.S. has failed to endorse the International Criminal Court. The Trump administration has gone much further, attacking and placing sanctions on its judges, while waging war on Iran with Israel as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted for arrest by the ICC for war crimes in Gaza.
The incremental steps our own government has taken have been rapidly reversed, as well. Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned self-proclaimed “Secretary of War,” bombastically declared that “We negotiate with bombs,” while expressing disdain for “stupid rules of engagement.” Signaling this intent last year, he dismantled Pentagon programs intended to mitigate civilian harm. Such actions complement the misinformation campaign to eliminate “controversial” and “unpatriotic” topics from our public schools and national monuments.
But as the latest wrongheaded war reveals another layer of the United States’s limitations and declining power, those imperial privileges are waning. Trump’s threat to obliterate Iran’s civilian infrastructure should be opposed because it is a war crime in the making against innocent people and because such attacks could boomerang into a global economic meltdown, intensifying suffering at home and abroad.
Holding the individuals responsible for these decisions accountable — at the ballot box and under international law — is just the first step that people in the U.S. can take to become responsible citizens of a global community and stop the next atrocities before they occur. But we cannot wait for change to come from those at the top.
Historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu has chronicled the diverse U.S. activists who built transnational and multiracial solidarity through travels to Vietnam while it was under siege from the U.S. Since the 1990s, the International Women’s Network Against Militarism has brought U.S. educators, artists, and activists together with women in many of the places most impacted by war and the negative effects of permanent overseas U.S bases. Their multifaceted efforts to overcome militarism advance a decolonial model of solidarity crossing Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the Caribbean.
More recently, the humanitarian aid flotillas acting to alleviate starvation and death in Gaza and Cuba owing to Israel’s and the U.S.’s respective illegal blockades serve as important examples of the people-to-people relations necessary to break the chain of the lies that have torn us apart for too long. Reckoning with the legacy of empire ultimately requires a level of awareness that can best be achieved through these forms of solidarity from below.
The United States has begun bombing Iran with B-52 bombers, setting the stage for a massive increase in the saturation bombing of the country of 90 million as the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran intensifies. “We’ve successfully started to conduct the first overland B-52 missions,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine announced Tuesday at a Pentagon briefing.
An Air Force B-52 Stratofortress aircraft deploys its rear chute after touching down at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, April 9, 2016. [Photo: Tech. Sgt. Nathan Lipscomb]
The B-52 is capable of carrying 70,000 pounds of gravity bombs and nuclear weapons. It is the aircraft at the center of a US bombing campaign that dropped more tonnage on Indochina than was used by all sides in World War II combined, that carpet-bombed Cambodia in a secret campaign that killed an estimated 100,000 civilians, and that leveled entire cities in North Vietnam—where US bombing destroyed 85 percent of all buildings and killed roughly 20 percent of the population.
The United States, having failed to achieve its war aims through a month of airstrikes, is massively escalating the war. The administration is now turning to the methods it used in Gaza: mass murder and the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure.
The B-52 flights follow one day after President Donald Trump threatened to “blow up and completely obliterate” Iran’s power plants, oil wells and “possibly all desalinization plants.” The Trump administration declared from the start that the war would be waged without restraint. On March 2, War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced there would be “no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no politically correct wars.” He has since vowed “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” and prayed at a Pentagon Christian service on March 26 for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
On Monday, Trump shared a 31-second video on Truth Social showing the bombing of Isfahan, Iran’s third-largest city and one of the supreme cultural monuments of human civilization. The footage showed 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs striking targets south of the city, producing chains of secondary detonations and fireballs detected by weather satellites. Trump offered no caption—just the footage of a great city burning, posted for consumption like any other content on the scroll.
Isfahan is home to the Naqsh-e Jahan Square—one of the largest public squares ever constructed—Imam Mosque, Ali Qapu Palace, Chehel Sotoun Palace and Masjed-e Jameh, the oldest Friday mosque in Iran, a structure in continuous use for nearly a thousand years. All are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The city was the capital of the Safavid Empire, a center of Persian science, where Omar Khayyam reformed the calendar and Ibn Sina—Avicenna—worked and wrote. Earlier strikes had already cracked a 17th century Safavid fresco in Chehel Sotoun, sent turquoise tiles from the Friday Mosque crashing to the ground, and shattered calligraphic panels. UNESCO had transmitted the exact coordinates of every protected site to both the United States and Israel. Both governments confirmed receipt. The bombing continued. Iranian officials report that at least 120 cultural and historic sites across the country have been damaged.
The Pentagon said the target was an ammunition depot. But Isfahan also houses the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre, Iran’s primary nuclear research facility, and the Isfahan Missile Complex, described as the country’s largest missile assembly and production site. The enriched uranium Washington claims to be destroying now lies beneath the rubble of repeated bombardments in a city of 2.3 million, under conditions that no international inspector can evaluate. Russia’s Foreign Ministry warned of “a real risk of catastrophic disaster throughout the Middle East.”
At Monday’s briefing, Hegseth raised the question of ground troops directly. “You can’t fight and win a war if you tell your adversary what you are willing to do or what you are not willing to do, to include boots on the ground,” he said. “Our adversary right now thinks there are 15 different ways we could come at them with boots on the ground. And guess what? There are. So if we needed to, we could execute those options on behalf of the president of the United States and this department.”
Troops are arriving. Reuters reported Monday that thousands of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division—including a brigade combat team and the division headquarters—have begun deploying to the Middle East. The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), carrying roughly 2,200 Marines, arrived in the Persian Gulf over the weekend. The 11th MEU is en route aboard the USS Boxer. The USS George H.W. Bush, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, departed Norfolk on Tuesday with Carrier Air Wing 7 and more than 5,000 sailors—the third carrier strike group committed to the war, making this the largest US naval concentration in the Middle East since 2003.
According to the Washington Post Friday, the Pentagon has drawn up plans for ground operations lasting “weeks” and is preparing to deploy 10,000 additional troops. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the administration is actively planning a special operations mission to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of enriched uranium from deep underground in Iran.Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones
Despite the overwhelming support within the US political establishment for the Iran war, there is growing recognition among sections of the US media that Trump’s war is creating a rapidly spiraling disaster for US imperialism. On Sunday, the New York Times published a column by Thomas Friedman, its main foreign policy columnist, who wrote:
If it wasn’t clear before, it is undeniable now. President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel started a war with Iran assuming that they would trigger quick and easy regime change. They vastly underestimated the staying power of Iran’s surviving leadership and its military capacity not only to inflict damage on Israel and America’s Arab allies but also to close off the most important oil and gas shipping lane in the world.
While Friedman makes this critique as a defender of US imperialism, it captures the recklessness and desperation of the Trump administration, which sees no way out of the deepening crisis triggered by the war except further escalation.
One month of war has produced a catastrophe. The human rights group Hengaw reported at least 6,900 killed in Iran through Day 29, including 720 civilians and 150 children. Iran’s Red Crescent reported more than 85,000 civilian structures damaged, including 64,000 homes and 600 schools.
Between 3.2 and 4 million Iranians have been internally displaced. In Lebanon, according to the Health Ministry, more than 1,247 have been killed and 3,600 wounded since Israel launched its assault on March 2. The Pentagon reports that 15 American service members have been killed and more than 300 wounded.
Benjamin Franklin said it best: “There never was a good war, or a bad peace.”
Now that war is again underway—the third attack on Iran in two years—people of healthy human consciousness must pray that the destruction and carnage is limited.
Yet the trajectory appears to be grim.
Wars often progress in unexpected ways. The Persian Gulf region is a tangled spaghetti plate of interests including economic, religious, cultural, and geopolitical. None of our politicians have proved capable of comprehending those interests and foreseeing the consequences of their elective wars. President George W. Bush was stunningly uninformed about the existence of Sunni and Shia factions when he invaded Iraq, a war that inadvertently empowered Iran. Officials who assured us that they knew where the phantom Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were, were quite wrong. Just as they were wrong when they foolishly assured us that the war would last “six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
Similarly, as many quipped after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Washington took twenty years, trillions of dollars, and four presidents to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
Nor can it be allowed to slip down the memory hole that only a year ago the Deep State installed Ahmed al-Sharaa, the terrorist head chopper formerly known as al-Julani, as the president of Syria. It must not be forgotten that until recently al-Sharaa carried a $10 million dollar bounty on his head placed by the U.S. government. He was a State Department “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” But now the new president of Syria, having been sanitized and empowered by the Deep State, is fêted by Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
The U.S. global military empire—the Empire of Lies—is capable of exerting force, but utterly incapable of understanding the consequences of its regime change wars.
That is but one reason that the Constitution, often cited but seldom adhered to, lodged warmaking authority with the people’s representatives. The Founders knew from historical precedent that heads of states and executive branches have a propensity to make needless war. Thus they provided that the people who pay for it with their lives, limbs, and prosperity, would make the decision to go to war. Those decisions are to be made through their elected representatives who become more judicious about engaging in needless wars since they know they can be held accountable for their judgement and their votes.
No one—I repeat, no one—knows how events will unfold from here. Already President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are talking about the prospect of American soldiers—“boot on the ground”—in Iran, while Israel has clearly threatened the use of nuclear weapons. As reports, spin jobs, and chest-thumping proceed, the proverbial wisdom that the first casualty of war is the truth should be borne in mind. Despite the escalation that we are seeing, people of healthy human consciousness must pray that the destruction and carnage is limited. Our voices must be heard and echo throughout the marbled palaces of Washington.
When France entered the city of Aghwat (Laghouat) in Algeria in 1852, it burned two-thirds of its inhabitants to death in just one night.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
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