The threat of destroying a whole civilization and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure cannot be morally justified. There are other ways to resolve conflict between peoples. I call on President Trump to step back from the precipice of war and negotiate a just settlement for the sake of peace and before more lives are lost.
After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem, and his first words were ‘Peace be with you.’ As the Holy Father, in his Urbi et Orbi message on Easter reflected, the peace that ‘Jesus gives us is not a peace that merely silences the weapons, but one that touches and transforms the heart of each of us! Let us make heard the cry for peace that springs from our hearts!’
Pope Leo has invited everyone to join him in a prayer vigil for peace on Saturday, April 11. I make a special plea to my brother bishops, the priests, the laity, and all people yearning for true peace to join the Holy Father’s Vigil for Peace, whether virtually, or in parishes, chapels, or before the Lord present in the quiet of their hearts to join with our Holy Father as we pray for peace in our world.
Let us entrust to the Lord ‘all hearts that suffer and await the true peace that only he can give. Let us entrust ourselves to him and open our hearts to him! He is the only one who makes all things new (cf. Rev 21:5).
Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
Donald Trump is systematically accelerating American decline making what might have happened over a two or more decades, had the existing trends remained and the U.S. not corrected itself, take place over a matter of months.
By the end of the Trump presidency, even if that end happens this year with him being taken out of the White House in a straight jacket, the US will not be the world's dominant economic power. China will be, followed by the European Union. The US will not be the leader of the free world, that's already ceased to be the case. The EU is. The US won't even be the moral leader of North America. Canada is.
And thanks to the war with Iran, the US is rapidly ceasing to be the military power it once was. Traditionally declining global powers lose that status last, and I suppose that's what's happening to us, but in a matter of months rather than decades, as is the norm. We are, right now, losing a war with a third rate power and we don't even know why we are fighting it, other than that Bibi Netanyahu wanted it fought while he had somebody he could coax in the White House. Right now, nations that looked to us since 1939 for help are quitting that, or have quit. Maybe only a few remain in the Pacific, but that will end within a matter of months.
Had Trump not pushed this all into high gear, it might have happened over a long period of time anyhow. The US hasn't been in control of its budget for decades and that was going to cause this to occur no matter what. We might have been able to arrest that with a major effort, but that would have required most of the current members of Congress to get new jobs. Now, however, things are so accelerated much of this is just going to happen all on its own.
Americans had better get used to it quickly and, for that matter, they'd better start planning for a post Trump world where we dance to the tune called by others, not to the one we called.
While we can lament this in many ways, not all of it will be bad. We will have to start rebuilding coalitions, but we're going to have to accept that we'll be regarded as a junior, and stupid, member of them. We deserve that. We're going to start building green energy and the like as people are going to tell us to and we're going to like it. People like Chuck Gray who run around screaming "not on my watch" will be looking at green power in California by the end of 2027.
We're going to have to look at reforming our tax and economic structure. A lot of the giant moneybucks people like Musk will be leaving anyhow. They love money, not the country, and the money will be leaving. We're going to have to pay for what we buying, and what the Baby Boomer and their parents bought, in terms of a government. Foreign countries are going to give us no choice. We're not going to be the world's banker within the next two years.
People who worried about "forever wars" and the like, after the war against Iran is over, won't have to so much anymore. They'll get what they wanted, just not the way they wanted it. We'll crawl back to our alliances, but we'll be a comparative minor member in many ways. As we can't pay for the huge military we have, we likely won't have it. I'll look at that in another post.
Nothing lasts forever and you don't appreciate the good things, in many cases, while you have them. Trump hasn't done the United States one single favor in either of his administrations. He'll go down in history as the worst President in American history. His legacy will be the acceleration of the end of the American Century.
Alexander Mosaic, House of the Faun, Pompeii. Alexander the Great fighting the Persians.
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
Matthew, Chapter 24.
Give me the money that has been spent in war, and I will purchase every foot of land upon the globe. I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire that kings and queens would be proud of; I will build a school-house upon every valley over the whole habitable earth; I will supply that school house with a competent teacher; I will build an academy in every town, and endow it; a college in every state, and fill it with able Professors; I will crown every hill with a church consecrated to the promulgation of the gospel of peace; I will support in its pulpit an able teacher of righteousness, so that on every Sabbath morning the chime on one hill should answer to the chime on another, around the earth's broad circumference; and the voice of prayer and the song of praise should ascend like a universal holocaust to heaven.
Charles Sumner, c.1840
Quand les riches font la guerre, ce sont les pauvres qui meurent.
Jean Paul Sartre
March 2, 2026
The US and Israel v. Iran War.
Even before the weekend news show hits, the Administration and its GOP proxies were trying to form a theory of why the US, in concert with Israel, had attacked Iran.
Why Israel did it is fairly clear. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a mortal enemy of Israel and an existential threat. The fact that the US was going to war with Iran gave it a great opportunity. And not just Israel, according to some information that seems fairly credible, at least Saudi Arabia saw things the exact same way, sort of.
In both instances, those conflicts were religious in nature, at least form Iran's prospective. Iran sees the world in apocalyptic terms and a struggle against Israel is a part of that weltanschauung. Iran sees Saudi Arabia as representing Sunni Islam, and a virulent variant of it at that. In fact, Saudi Arabia was in fact allied internally with Wahhabism, although that's long ceased to be the case. Be that as it may, Sunni Islam and Shia Islam depart from each other radically and have been enemies since the latter first formed. For that matter, Persia and the Arabs have been enemies for ever. Persia was a major civilized empire before Islam, and it knows it. Persia, Iran, could be a great nation without Islam, and it knows that.
But what about the United States?
According to the befuddled Donald Trump we attacked Iran, because, well it was a big honking monster threat to us. The thing is, that dog didn't really hunt.
Two Salukis, Persian hounds, painted by the Xuande Emperor of China (1399–1435)
They were going to have a nuclear weapons, Donny told us, with in the next two weeks. But then, it was realized, that would mean the befuddled Donny, dressed like a toddler in his trucker's cap, had been wrong when he told us that we'd bombed Iran back to the nuclear stone age in what is now being called the Twelve Day War.
Oops.
Well, explanations for that being wrong, other than Trump Is Always Wrong, needed to be found, as the GOP mantra worships Trump almost as much as Trump worships Trump.
They were fibbing in negotiations over the nuclear weapons program we destroyed was tried next, was the next thing.
They were going to have missiles that could hit the US was tried, but it was pretty quickly revealed that at some point they might, but it would be years from now, plenty of time to go to Congress and ask for a declaration of war. Well, they were going to have missiles that could hit Europe, which is much more credible, but the problem is that the Europeans, whom we've been telling need to fend for themselves, have had a "m'eh" reaction to that. The country that really can hit Europe with missiles, and has a demonstrated ability to do it, Russia, which Trump has a crush on so large that it probably looms larger in his nighttime dreams than Melania, who of course is mostly in New York, helicoptering over Barron, whom we might note will not be joining the Armed Forces to serve in this war, putting him in good company with the ancestral Trumps. Since Frederick Trump first set foot in the United States, the Trumps have missed the Spanish American War, the Philippine Insurrection, World War One, World War Two, the Korean war and the Vietnam War, a record few American families could match, including my own.*
Anyhow, that dog wasn't going to hunt either, so a new one had to be developed.
Neapolitan Mastiff. Indeed, the modern foundational Neapolitan Mastiff. Mastiffs are war dogs, of the "let slip the dog's of war" type. The only one I've been personally familiar with was enormously cowardly.
Finally, the "they've been at war with us for forty seven years" thesis was come up with.
Well, I'll give whoever came up with that some credit. There's really something to it. Iran's Shia clerical state has been at war with the rest of the world for more or less something like forty years.
Which raises this point. Up until now it was just our strategy to wait that out. . . and it was working pretty well.
Cleary, things had not reached a point where all of a sudden we needed to go to war on an emergency basis with Iran. And under the U.S. Constitution, this excuse is complete horseshit. In order to deploy force like this, in this way, we would have had to have been suddenly attacked.
We weren't.
This was completely illegal.
Not only that, it was highly ill advised. If Iran has been plotting against us for 47 years, it's had plenty of time to prepare for this day, and so far, it's been fighting back pretty well. Our burn rate of high tech munitions is unsustainable. It's burn rate on missiles might frankly not be. And its allied, for all practical purposes, with Russia. We're allied with Israel, which frankly depends on us for military support.
This was not smart.
We're going to be hit domestically. Iran is capable of waging an asymmetric war and will. It may have started that, in Austin, today. It's believed that it has targeted Trump in the past. If so, it will now, and there's no reason to believe it'll only target Trump.
The irony is, of course, that its likely not Trump who causes this to occur. While not meaning this to sound the way it might, Israel, knowing that Trump is a demented fool, may very well have played the sad bloated corpse of the once playboy, now hoping for redemption and to be remembered, twit. Saudi Arabia may very well have as well. And then there's Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, holding variant of Christian beliefs that Apostolic Christians, back during the Crusades, would have regarded as heretical. They may have thrown us into a holy war that we'll pay for, for decades.
At least it will be an American Evangelical Protestant Crusade. Due to the Black Legends, a common Protestant, and then atheist, argument stopper has been "what about the Crusades".
Well, MAGA, now you are the Crusader you imagined we were, even though we were never that.
At the end of the day, nobody publicly knows why we attacked Iran. The best guess is that it's a combination of Neo Conservatives (Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz), foreign influence (Israel and Saudi Arabia) and far right Evangelicals trying to being about the end of the world (Huckabee and Hegseth).
All brought about illegally and through influence on a very weak mind, that being Donald Trump's.
Oh, 150 Iranian school girls were murdered for this.
May the perpetual light shine upon them. Some of them were probably Christian.
Pete Hegseth, cultural warrior.
Heavily tatted Pete Hegseth, emblazed with Crusader images, but whom the Catholics of the Crusades, and the Orthodox through whose lands the Crusaders traveled would have regarded as a weird heretic, was busy, just before Donny launched a war against Iran, in the Culture Wars.
First, he engaged in a skirmish with wokeism and the Boy Scouts.
We're not completely unsympathetic with this. We've noted this cultural zeitgeist before.
It does seem to us, quite frankly, that the Boy Scouts, which we have very little personal connection, have evolved into being somewhat less than it was. It's less manly, it seems. And it definitely isn't the example of Muscular Christianity it once was. However, it seems to be an odd thing for Hegseth, who doesn't seem to have a sports coat that fits, to be engaged in so close in time to a major war being launched. Indeed, it seems a bit odd for the Secretary of Defense to care about this at all, but maybe Boy Scout interactions with the military are greater than I suppose. I'd have had to have been a Boy Scout near a military post to know, I suppose. I know a friend of mine, who was a Scout growing up in an Air Force family in the 70s related to me that all of their leaders were Air Force members and they always had Air Force tentage when they were camping.
On a related matter, Hegseth clearly wants women out of combat roles. This war, given as its a real one, gives him the opportunity to do that. It's going to be his last opportunity as well. The political tides are shifting. In November, the opportunity will be gone.
Somebody seemed to back Hegseth down, after which he went on to picking on the Ivy League.
I frankly didn't realize that Pete's an Ivy League graduate himself. Princeton. It really surprises me.
Which brings me to this. I think, that MAGA hates education in general. They Wyoming Freedom Caucus seems to. And if Hegseth, Cruz, Trump and Chuck Gray can come out of such vaunted schools and still be so blistering ignorant as they seem to be, it really backs up my long held opinion that the Ivy League and associated schools are a dumpster fire, but not for the reason that Pete and company would hold it.
Rather, they just aren't doing a good job of educating. Look at Trump and Hegseth. It's hard to believe they have more than 5th grade education. Or Chuck Gray. He comes across like a 7th grade brat.
Diverting
Back on Trump, while I completely discounted it for a long time, it's getting hard to ignore that the US is getting into more and more grave matters as the Epstein files begin to hit closer and closer to home. The thesis that some hold that Trump is creating diversions is getting a little hard to ignore.
People keep saying, even now, that there's nothing "to implicate" Trump. Oh bull, there most certainly is. There's apparently direct testimony of his "abusing", which means screwing, a teenage girl. No, I'm not saying he did it, but the information we already have about who he hung around with is pretty damming. And his conduct with adult women has been less than admirable. Even that gets ignored, however, for no good reason. There's no reason to believe that Carol Alt is lying about being groped by Trump, for example, but people ignore it.
We've dealt with it before, but if Trump didn't have his hands in the underaged cookie jar it would have been an act of restraint for a guy who otherwise has shown no restraint. It might be time to start really looking at these claims vis a vis Epstein.
But then there's a war going on.
Speaking of underaged girls, one of the first things that happened in the war against Iran was a school was hit and 150 girls were killed.
There's always collateral damage in war, to be sure, but this war wasn't legally launched. Killing those girls, therefore, is something akin to manslaughter, if the US did it. It'll go unpunished however.
Noblis Oblige
Theodore Roosevelt's sons served in World War One, and World War Two, one winning the Congressional Medal of Honor. FDR's sons served in the Second World War. Beau Biden served in Iraq.
This war gives the Trumps to finally serve the nation. They sure haven't done so, so far. At least Eric, Tiffany and Barron are young enough to serve.
They should.
They won't.
Americans have already died in the war. Nobody who dies will be a Trump.
It's probably fairly safe to assume that most of the children of those who visited Epstein Island won't be serving in harms way.
Footnotes:
*My father served in the Korean War. One of my mother's cousins served in Vietnam and he wasn't even an American citizen. I have uncles who served in World War Two and great uncles who served in World War One, albeit in the Canadian Army. One of my Canadian uncles served in World War Two as well.
