Donald Trump’s unprovoked war against Iran is denaturing my country…America is already dead. The funeral will come in November, when Trump’s regime takes over the elections. These people, who have committed war crimes, and domestic crimes, and financial crimes, have nothing to lose; you do not commit crimes out in the open like that if you believe you will ever be held to account for them. And by then, Iran in chaos and flames will be barely a memory, just as the Ice murder of two innocent American citizens barely weeks ago is hardly a memory
We are all, imperilled Iranian and ashamed American, drenched with black rain.
Lee Siegel
America is no more. Some might say it never was. But it once existed as a place where spasms of uncurbed irrational power sooner or later ran up against boundaries of reason and restraint. Sometimes the country hid its low behaviour behind its high ideals. Sometimes its high ideals shamed its low behaviour. Sometimes it simply lived up to its high ideals. No longer.
The war America is waging against Iran is unprovoked, unfounded and unnecessary. It does not even have the predatory logic of colonial intention. It makes the wars in Vietnam and Iraq look rational and justified – they were the product of elaborate deceptions that, at least, acknowledged reality by straining to reconfigure it. No one has any idea why America is at war with Iran. One minute, Trump says it is to liberate Iranians from the tyranny of the country’s theocratic regime. The next minute he says it is to eliminate what he falsely claims was the imminent threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons that can reach the United States. Then he says it is to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles. Or to retaliate for killing Americans, or to change the regime to a democracy, or to destroy its navy, or to ruin Iran’s ability to fund terrorism. He says that he will only accept Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and then, incredibly, declares that only he will decide when the country surrenders. If anyone anywhere required further proof that Trump is undergoing something like a psychotic break from reality, they would have needed only to hear him say that he and only he will decide who Iran’s next leader is. As if Iran, nowhere near “surrender”, would actually seek Trump’s permission for who their new leader will be. The regime’s choice of the late supreme leader’s son to succeed him was almost a welcome intervention, a more rational act than Trump’s demands.
I am ashamed to be an American. It shames and enrages me to hear Pete Hegseth, the sycophantic lush serving as America’s Secretary of Defense, cry that “America is winning decisively, devastatingly and without mercy.” Without mercy. The unstable Hegseth has the cowardice of his convictions, too. When an American submarine sank, for absolutely no military or strategic reason, an Iranian frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka – like using a semiautomatic weapon to bring down a mouse – the Americans allegedly made little attempt, some say in violation of the rules of war, to rescue the injured and drowning Iranian sailors. But then, Hegseth exults in the murder of Venezuelan drug smugglers – ordinary people, impoverished, expecting to return from work to their families that evening. There are no words to describe Hegseth’s moral imbecility. Yet he speaks for America.
One of the glories of American life has been its popular culture, in which the American ideals of freedom and equality have fevered the world’s imagination for almost as long as the country has existed. And yet as American missiles and bombs have poured black rain down upon Iran – slaughtered nearly 200 Iranian schoolgirls and killed scores of civilians, severely damaged over a dozen hospitals, crippled an already sinking economy and caused the suffering of multitudes – as America is causing such destruction, the Trump regime has been posting video montages of American action movies in celebration of the carnage. American fantasies of virtuous superheroes have now been turned on their head, replaced by an American reality of sociopaths governing as if they were superheroes. Here too: no words.
I am ashamed, on account of my identity as a Jew, to be associated with Israel in any way. For years, I bridled at the anti-Zionism that, almost always, concealed an anti-Semitism to some degree. No more. Netanyahu has made America his proxy every bit as much as Hezbollah is Iran’s. You sit aghast watching Israel kill dozens of women and children in Lebanon as its forces search for the “remains” (whatever that means) of an Israeli soldier missing since the 1980s. The country considers the entire Arab and Persian world to not be worth, not just the life of one Israeli, but the “remains” of one Israeli. I’ve written this before, as one must: my ancestors were murdered by Nazis in Poland and Russia, and by hordes of anti-Semites in Odessa. As a Jew, you do not forget bloody millennia of torture, murder and daily humiliation; you never forget being struck or insulted for being a Jew when you were young. As a Jew, you understand the seething anger at any menacing of the safe haven of Israel, brought to an explosive head by 7 October. But as a Jew, I do not recognise this Israel, which is, like the bloody millennia’s very own murderous child, trying to kill every single one of its enemies. Nor do I understand the Israeli blindness to Trump’s strange insistence on explicitly linking American atrocities to Israeli designs. It is like a dream come true for the Christian right that yearns to establish its earthly kingdom in America.
Great powers, like America, like Israel relative to its position in the Middle East, must contend with attacks and assaults the way grand figures must contend with pettiness and envy. But the narcissistic personalities that now rule America, and that cannot tolerate the slightest criticism or challenge without flying into a defensive rage, seem to be the model for the way America and Israel are proceeding. It is pathetic to hear adult American congressmen declaring that yet another reason for “decimating” – Trump’s new favourite word – Iran is that some Iranians have been chanting “Death to America” for 47 years. Surely a mighty power like America can bear a few chants. Contrary to Trump’s demented claims that Iran has killed “millions” of Americans, Iran has been responsible for the deaths of about a thousand Americans over the past 50 years. Heart-breaking and sad as each of those deaths was, the number is historically insignificant. It is the price a superpower pays. for being a superpower. But then, Trump the malignant narcissist cannot bear the slightest insult, so why should Trump’s America.
It is true, however, that chanting “Death to America” offends one’s sense of actuality. America is already dead. The funeral will come in November, when Trump’s regime takes over the elections. These people, who have committed war crimes, and domestic crimes, and financial crimes, have nothing to lose; you do not commit crimes out in the open like that if you believe you will ever be held to account for them. And by then, Iran in chaos and flames will be barely a memory, just as the Ice murder of two innocent American citizens barely weeks ago is hardly a memory; just as Greenland is hardly a memory. Trump will announce a non-existent victory over a wily and steadfast Iranian regime, hand off the slaughter to the Israelis, who now excel at slaughter, and move stupidly and vapidly on. Cuba is next up, after all. As a 39-year-old woman recently told the New York Times: “We’ve mostly accepted that we’re living in a situation where so many factors affecting our fate are beyond us.” She was an Iranian, speaking from Tehran, but she speaks for everyone here right now. We are all, imperilled Iranian and ashamed American, drenched with black rain.
https://magazine.newstatesman.com/2026/03/10/i-am-ashamed-to-be-an-american/content.html
Further reading:
Ice and Donald Trump’s regime of violence
The American Right and the thrill of political violence
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America feels like a country on the brink of an authoritarian takeover
Trump’s new world order is being born – and Venezuela is just the start
Jeffrey Epstein Was a Warlord. We Have to Talk About It
Alfred McCoy: The crumbling delusion of Washington’s endless world dominion
Alfred McCoy on the Politics of Heroin & CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
After the truth-shower 