escalation – Memphis Flyer

I’ve seen this story before. The images coming out of Los Angeles — militarized streets, protesters met with force, another round of justifications for escalation — hit me with the dull weight of déjà vu. It’s not that I’m shocked. It’s that I remember.

My political awakening happened in California. I was 13 years old when I saw the Rodney King video. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I asked my father how it could be possible — how people with badges and nightsticks could commit such violence and walk away unpunished. The following year, the city exploded. The 1992 uprising etched itself into my memory — not as lawlessness but as outrage born of injustice and mismanagement. I’ve spent years studying those events, learning what we could’ve done better. We should’ve de-escalated; we should’ve listened; we should’ve shown restraint.

But we didn’t. And we still aren’t.

Years later, I found myself in Cleveland, marching peacefully to protest the killing of George Floyd. I wasn’t near any confrontation or property damage, but tear gas was deployed indiscriminately. The burn in my eyes and throat lingered for hours. Despite decades of practicing and preaching nonviolence, I felt a rage stir in me that I had forgotten. I didn’t act on it, but I understood in that moment how state aggression can turn even the most peaceful among us toward hopelessness or fury. I remembered the graffiti from ’92: “You did this.”

Escalation invites escalation. It’s predictable. It’s avoidable. And it happens anyway. The National Guard is not trained in the nuance of civilian crowd control. Their presence often exacerbates tension. It tells the public: We are at war with ourselves. It tells communities: We do not trust you — truth is always a casualty. And it signals to law enforcement: Anything goes.

Meanwhile, the politics behind these deployments reveal everything about our national priorities. I’ll never forget January 6, 2021 — when a violent mob stormed the Capitol and Trump did nothing. No tear gas, no troops, no swift and visible response. We were told to be patient. Contrast that with the armored vehicles that meet peaceful immigrants’ rights protests or the overwhelming force deployed in Black and brown neighborhoods when people demand accountability. The hypocrisy isn’t just galling — it’s deadly.

And Americans are noticing.

A majority of Americans have consistently opposed mass deportations. Overall, Trump’s approval has plummeted — the lowest 100-day rating of any modern president. The New York Times reports that 66 percent of voters describe Trump’s second term as “chaotic,” and 59 percent as “scary.” These aren’t just immigration figures — they’re indictments of a cruelty-as-policy approach. People are not just dissatisfied — they’re alarmed.

We protest because we still believe in democracy. Dissent is not a threat; it’s a patriotic obligation. We demand that the laborers, caregivers, coaches, teachers, and neighbors among us — regardless of citizenship status — be treated as the human beings they are, not threats. The lie that they are terrorists must end.

When protected speech is met with troops, when dissent is painted as chaos, and when a government rewards violence with silence and punishes peace with brutality, we are no longer in a democracy — we are teetering on the edge and sliding to something else.

I can’t watch what’s happening in Los Angeles because I’ve watched it before. I’ve felt it. I’ve tasted the tear gas. I’ve studied the history. And I know where the road we are on leads. We can still choose a different one. But that choice will require courage — not from the protesters, who are already showing it, but from those in power who must finally listen, and honor the oaths they swore.

No more lies. No more hypocrisy. No more silence in the face of force.

Wim Laven, Ph.D., syndicated by PeaceVoice, teaches courses in political science and conflict resolution.

For most Americans, who now wish we had never invaded Iraq, the notion of expanding that extraordinarily lethal mistake into neighboring Iran and Syria must seem insane. Yet those same brilliant neoconservative strategists who brought us the war in Iraq and constantly urge its escalation exist in their own special reality. They speak of military hostilities against Iran and Syria with anticipation rather than apprehension. As we have learned over the past four years, their dreams often turn out to be our nightmares.

For four brief hours on Memorial Day, however, the neoconservative drive toward a wider conflagration in the Middle East stalled when ambassadors from the United States and Iran met in Baghdad.

The historic significance of that meeting should not be underestimated, even though U.S. officials emphasized that no further meetings would necessarily occur. Convened under the auspices of the Iraqi government, which maintains close relations with Tehran as well as Washington, the meeting represented the first substantive bilateral discussion between American and Iranian officials in three decades.

Relations with Iran have been poor ever since the mullahs seized power from the U.S.-sponsored shah in 1979, but in recent months the increasing strains between us have brought armed conflict closer. Longstanding grievances against Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism in the region have been exacerbated by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear arsenal and allegations about Iranian agents supplying weapons to the insurgents in Iraq.

As these problems worsened, American policy toward Iraq has vacillated between “containment” and “regime change,” applying economic sanctions and threatening rhetoric in varying degrees. That policy cannot be described as a great success. Iran has become more aggressive and more influential in the region as a direct consequence of the violent regime change that we inflicted on Iraq.

What we have not tried, until now, was talking to the Iranian leaders. Breaking the taboo against speaking directly with them represents the change that the Iraq Study Group urged six months ago as the most promising path toward disengagement from that bloody quagmire, when its report highlighted the need for regional talks including Iran and Syria.

Naturally, such signs of sanity were immediately met with furious denunciations from the far right, echoing the shrill attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and several congressional colleagues who dared to visit the Syrian leadership in Damascus. When the Pelosi trip was followed weeks later by overtures from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to both the Syrians and the Iranians, it became plain that U.S. policymakers were considering a sensible shift.

The real danger is that whenever we start talking with our enemies, we may discover potential areas of compromise or even agreement. Progress would undermine the arguments of politicians and pundits who prefer a policy of permanent war.

But we already know that both Syria and Iran have cooperated with us in the past when they believed that their interests coincided with those of the United States. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Syrians were obliging enough to accept a Canadian citizen whom we deported and to torture and interrogate him on our behalf. (Unfortunately, he was innocent.) During that same period, the Iranians were helpful in western Afghanistan when the U.S. and its allies overthrew the Taliban.

There is no reason to pretend that the Syrian and Iranian regimes are anything but deplorable in their domestic conduct and foreign policy. But it is also true that those governments and the societies they control are more complex than our warmongers would tell us. Close observers of Iran, for instance, believe that our threatening attitude actually weakens the democratic forces in their struggle with the mullahs — and that improved relations, including normal diplomatic exchanges, could only strengthen reformers.

Is there reason to believe that negotiating with the Iranians or the Syrians would lead to any worthwhile result? Our allies in the Iraqi government — whose survival we have ensured with thousands of American casualties and hundreds of billions of American dollars — certainly think so. The Iraqi diplomats talk with their counterparts in Damascus and Tehran every day.

Those facts won’t dissuade the neoconservatives both within and outside the Bush administration from maligning any gestures toward realism. We are still living with the terrible consequences of the last great neoconservative triumph — the war in Iraq — and the enhanced power that their errors have bestowed so ironically on Iran. In coping with that reality, it is long since time that we learned to ignore their bad advice.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer and Salon.com.