Yesterday Concerned Families of Westchester hosted one of the hundreds of rallies and other events marking International Women’s Day. (Go here for pictures and video.) Our event’s speakers were community women who were doing things that make a difference, sharing news and generating enthusiasm. The news shared were about local doings, though many themes reflected national concerns. But the wallpaper for the day’s rally was the US/Israel war on Iran. Its horror. Its stupidity. The danger it poses to millions in the Middle East, with no end in sight. A grim shadow hung over our day.
Anxiety around the war is motivated in part by Trump’s aimlessness, his shifting focus from a short war to a long war, from demanding Iran renounce nuclear weapons (it already has done so) to demanding an end to Iranian sovereignty in all things, and so on. And his apparent subservience to Israel/Netanyahu inspires more anxiety. Yet the fact that the great majority of the US public opposes the war is heartening, just as the solid opposition to the war by those attending our rally yesterday indicates that there is a strong unity among US progressives regarding this hated war.
BELOW I’ve linked several useful articles about the war that suggest that Iran can and will sustain a long war if necessary, and that the US and Israeli governments may lose support from their citizens as the war goes on. Body bags, inflation, Trump incoherence, the looming mid-term elections – many factors will weaken the war mongers if this becomes, as I think it will, a long(er) war. Work for peace.
EXPLAINING THE US/ISRAEL WAR ON IRAN
What Are the Trump Administration’s True Objectives in Iran?
By Stephen Zunes, Truthout [March 4, 2026]
---- The ramifications of the escalating U.S.-Israeli war on Iran remain to be seen, but they will not be good. Indeed, as with the U.S.-led war on Iraq, the war on Iran could prove disastrous. It is important to understand, therefore, what would motivate the United States to launch such a reckless, illegal, and destructive action. Not surprisingly, most of President Donald Trump’s justifications for the war are demonstrably false. … Washington’s big mistake in Vietnam was seeing the conflict as part of an advancing global totalitarian threat that needed to be met by massive military support. In reality, the National Liberation Front (a.k.a. the “Viet Cong”), while communist-led, was first and foremost a nationalist movement, which was why the more the U.S. bombed and the more combat troops were sent, the greater the resistance. Similarly, the United States, by focusing on the religious orientation of the Iranian regime, is grossly underestimating its staying power as a nationalist government. As a result, this overtly imperialist effort, like most attempts of hegemonic overreach by Western powers, is almost certain to yield unexpected and devastating consequences. [Read More]
(Video) Can Israel & the U.S. Sustain Iran’s Military Power?
---- The Chris Hedges Report interviews Middle East expert Alastair Crooke. He describes the Iranian military capacity to sustain the war against Israel and the USA. Chilling. - 1 hour. See it here.
Trump, at War with a Shiite Country, knows nothing of Martyrdom or Apocalyptic Hope
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [March 7, 2026]
---- The United States is at war with a predominantly Shiite Muslim country. It is certain that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a white Christian nationalist with extremist white Christian nationalist tattoos, who views himself as leading a Crusade against Islam, knows nothing about Shiite Islam and has never read a book about it, visited a Shiite mosque, or familiarized himself with the spiritual geography of Iran. Yesterday, according to scenes on Iranian television, masses of Shiites flocked to mosques for Friday prayers and for sermons eulogizing the “martyr,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose death was fitted into the framework of Shiite mourning for martyrs. People are people, and I don’t want to suggest that Shiites can’t compromise or indeed that they always live up to their ideals. But they do have a distinctive moral style, and Hegseth’s and Trump’s assumption that they would be willing just to put their heads down to avoid death was incorrect. For Shiites, steadfastness in a cause unto martyrdom is noble, {Read More]
The War on Iran—and Washington’s Missing Exit Strategy
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Code Pink [March 8, 2026]
---- The United States has once again launched a war in the Middle East based on false claims about weapons of mass destruction. Like the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. assault on Iran rests on allegations that international inspectors have already debunked. But beyond the false pretext lies an even more pressing question that few officials in Washington seem willing—or able—to answer: What is the U.S. exit strategy from its war on Iran? President Trump has justified the attack by claiming that Iran refuses to renounce nuclear weapons. As he prepared to launch the war, Trump repeatedly claimed, “We haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, responded by reiterating Iran’s long-standing policy, stating plainly: “Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.” … If the war drags on for more than a few weeks, U.S. forces will begin to run short of air-defense interceptors, cruise missiles and other critical munitions, with Israeli air defenses expected to face shortages even sooner. The U.S. and Israel are therefore gambling that they can destroy enough of Iran’s missiles before they themselves run out of interceptors needed to stop them. Yet recent experience suggests this gamble is likely to fail. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Military Leaders See Iran War as “God’s Divine Plan” — a Chilling Turn for Trump’s Fascism,” by Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [March 5, 2026] [Link]; “Is it Un-Patriotic to Want Your Country to Lose a War?” by Stephen F. Eisenman, Counterpunch [March 6, 2026] [Link]; “Israel Is Using Its Genocidal Gaza Playbook on Iran,” by Séamus Malekafzali, The Nation [March 6, 2026] [Link]; “Recent U.S. Assessment Found an Attack on Iran Unlikely to Result in Regime Change,” by Julian E. Barnes, New York Times [March 7, 2026] [Link]; and (Video) “By Attacking Iran, U.S. & Israel Seek Unchallenged Supremacy in Middle East,” from Democracy Now! [March 3, 2026] [Link].
NEWS NOTES
Nick Turse of The Intercept has done the deep research, and it turns out that every member of Trump’s “Board of Peace” has been listed somewhere, even in the State Department’s annual publication of human rights enemies, as a human rights abuser. Read more here.
The Pentagon estimates that the war against Iran is costing about $1 billion per day. Other estimates are also very large. For those keeping score at home, the Iran War Cost Tracker is your go-to spot.
Also handy for making sense of government disinformation about the Iran war is this simple timeline of Iran’s nuclear program. The Trump people say Iran is just “weeks” away from having a nuclear weapon. The info from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists shows this is nonsense.
On the first day of Trump’s war on Iran, the US targeted the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in the city of Minab, killing 165 people, most of them school girls.. The site Middle Est Eye has put up a list of the children’s names and ages, and some context for the murders, which you can read here,
The Trump people recently issued an executive order compelling the weed killer known as Roundup, a proven health danger with links to cancer. Many protests ensued. This week we learn that, in addition to supporting “Big Agra,” Trump’s order was/is intended to support production of white phosphorus, which used in munitions and can horribly burn people. A revealing story about all this was published in today’s New York Times.
President Trump and his war makers held meetings with executives from Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and other major weapons manufactures to discuss speeding up the production of more weapons for killing Iranians. According to a news service report, the White House is expected to ask Congress for an additional $50 billion for the Iran War. Learn more about this here; and please call your congressional representatives to demand that they vote against more money for war. Here’s the list: Rep. Latimer - (202) 225-2464, Sen. Gillibrand - (202) 224-4451, Sen. Schumer – (202) 224-6542, and Rep Lawler - (202) 225-6506. Thanks.
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
I’m sure stalwart newsletter readers will join me in mourning the passing today of Country Joe McDonald. He was 84. We will remember him – Country Joe and the Fish – for his song protesting the Vietnam War at Woodstock in 1969. The New York Times version of his life can be read here, but the Fish Cheer will never die. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Rebecca Solnit Says the Left’s Next Hero Is Already Here
An interview with The New York Times Magazine [March 7, 2026]
---- Asked if calling Trump & Co. “racist” and “fascist” is “counterproductive,” (a traditional “liberal” concern), Solnit says “That’s the least of our problems. They are racist, they are authoritarian, they are misogynist, they are homophobic, and tiptoeing around it protects them and not the targets of the hatred and discrimination. I get so tired of the idea that progressives have gone too far in asserting that every human being deserves human rights when people are being shot in the streets of Minneapolis. We are facing such horrific brutality. Politeness is not really the problem. I think we got into this situation in part by a lot of people in the mainstream thinking it was more important to be polite than to call things by their true names. There’s a wonderful historian and scholar of nonviolence named George Lakey who says polarization is good. That’s when you have clarity. Sometimes people have to pick sides. You do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite. You get it by being strong.” [Read More]
Why Guns? From Personal Power to Autocracy in Donald Trump’s America
By Beverly Gologorsky Infdomed Comment [March 4, 2026]
[FB – Beverly Gologorsky has written several very interesting (imo) novels about working-class life in New York.]
---- Power is felt, attributed, invisible, all-important, descriptive, without shape, and so much more. There is personal power, governmental power, and the collective power of the people. Power can be bought, sold, traded, bestowed, even rescinded. It can be good or bad, positive or corrupt. However you might wish to describe power, one thing is clear: how it’s used depends on the society in which we live. At present, of course, our society is one in which President Donald J. Trump is the quintessential seeker of power, a man who needs power the way most of us need food. And as it happens, he has at his beck and call not just the entire military establishment, but ICE (and so much more). With him in the White House, power is distinctly in fashion. [Read More]
On International Women’s Day, the US needs an Equal Rights Amendment
By H. Patricia Hynes, Informed Comment [March 8, 2026]|
---- The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was first proposed in 1923 by Alice Paul founder of the National Women’s Party, which had identified more than 300 laws that exposed the rampant and degrading discrimination against women based on their sex, including employment, child custody, property and rape, to name a few. As proof of the intrangency of misogyny, the ERA has been one of the most controversial and challenged pieces of legislation in the 20th and 21st centuries. … In 1982 the ERA Amendment failed to meet its deadline requiring 38 states to ratify it. [But] in 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA, meeting the requirement of three-quarters of the states’ ratification necessary for an Amendment to the Constitution to become law. … However, the Archivist failed to certify and publish the Amendment guaranteeing women’s dignity and equality on the grounds that it did not meet a technical deadline. … Join and support former US Representative Carolyn Maloney’s ERA Now whose goal is to be ready for Congressional action in 2027 to affirm the ERA as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. [Read More]
The Future of Forests
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience [March 6, 2026]
---- Our species’ origin and destiny are entangled with the roots and branches of trees. We evolved in and around trees, and we’ve learned to breed and plant them for their fruit, nuts, wood, and blossoms, taking their seeds with us as we migrated—hence the English walnut, native to Persia, and the Georgia peach, native to China. It’s a relationship that has carried us around the globe, often in boats or carts made from trees. While human communities have benefited immensely from trees, tree communities (i.e., forests) haven’t always fared so well in the bargain. In this article, we’ll trace the ups and downs of this relationship and inquire why it has grown more one-sidedly abusive in recent decades. Unsurprisingly, many recent challenges to the health of forests have emerged because of climate change—even as forests are proving to be one of the planet’s primary climate-stabilizing systems. Finally, we’ll explore what we can do to defend and restore forests in the face of global warming and other threats. Along the way, we’ll dip into some of the most intriguing recent scientific findings about trees and forests. [Read More]
‘Dirty Work’ [The Palestinian “Nakba” of 1948]
By Nathan Thrall, New York Review of Books [March 26, 2026 issue]
---- S. Yizhar was the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, an intelligence officer in Israel’s Givati Brigade during the 1948 war and a founding father of modern Hebrew literature. Khirbet Khizeh, a novella based on his experience in the war, is a parable about the destruction and erasure of a Palestinian village. The narrator is an Israeli soldier whose unit invades the eponymous village, drives out its inhabitants, and burns it to the ground. As he watches weeping mothers, bawling children, and pleading old men being marched out of the village and loaded onto trucks, he grapples with the morality of the expulsion—and of Zionism itself. … What’s noteworthy is not just that the majority of young Israelis have learned little about the recent history of the ground on which they stand, nor that they haven’t read or even heard of the only canonical Hebrew literary work that portrays the reality of the state’s establishment. It’s that they live in a society that can’t bear to look in the mirror. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
Palestinians in Gaza fear famine returning as Israel cuts off food amid Iran war
By Tareq S. Hajjaj, Mondoweiss [March 8, 2026]
---- The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has been felt in the Gaza Strip from day one. As soon as the war broke out on Saturday, February 28, Palestinians in the Strip immediately expressed fears of potential border closures and the restriction of the entry of supplies, expecting that hostilities would likely continue for weeks. It did not take long for their fears to be realized. Israel almost immediately closed all the crossings into Gaza, including those designated for humanitarian aid. … Amid the world’s preoccupation with Israel’s continued escalation in Iran — and now in Lebanon, as Hezbollah enters the fray — Gazans fear that another of Israel’s wars will go unnoticed: the resumption of its starvation policy in Gaza.. [Read More]
With West Bank under total Israeli closure, settlers are seizing the moment
By Oren Ziv and Basel Adra, 972 Magazine [March 4, 2026]
---- With global attention fixed on the escalating U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, Israel has imposed a total military closure on the occupied West Bank. Israeli settlers, backed by the army, are seizing the opportunity to try to expel more rural Palestinian communities from their land, as they did in the days immediately following October 7. Within hours of the war beginning on Saturday morning, the Israeli army shut all checkpoints across the West Bank and blocked roads between cities and villages with iron gates and earth mounds. It also installed new iron gates in locations where none had previously existed. Settlers brought in excavators to seal makeshift passages Palestinians had carved out over the past two and a half years, in areas where the army has kept roads closed since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. [Read More]
THE WAR ON VENEZUELA
Venezuela After January 3: A Nation Standing in the Storm
By Medea Benjamin, Code Pink [March 6, 2026]
---- On our recent delegation to Venezuela, one quote echoed again and again — a warning written nearly two centuries ago by Simón Bolívar in 1829: “The United States appears destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” For many Venezuelans, that line no longer feels like history. It feels like the present. The January 3 U.S. military operation that seized President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores marked a dramatic escalation in a conflict that Venezuelans describe not as sudden but as cumulative — the culmination of decades of pressure, sanctions, and attempts at isolation. … The left in Latin America is far weaker than during the days of Hugo Chávez. Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa have been replaced by conservative leaders. Cuba remains under a suffocating U.S. siege. Progressive regional institutions like CELAC and ALBA have faded, and the vision of Latin American unity that once seemed within reach now feels far more fragile. In Caracas, the situation is tangled, contradictory, and volatile. But amid the uncertainty, one thing felt clear: the Venezuelan left is not collapsing. It is recalibrating. [Read More] – ALSO OF INTEREST - “A First Lady in a New York Cell.” by Medea Benjamin and Michelle Ellner [March 4, 2026] [Link].
WAR ON CUBA?
The Architecture of Siege: Cuba, Gaza, and the Strategy of Everywhere at Once
By John Marks, Common Dreams [March 3, 2026]
---- “Cuba is next,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday night in America, March 2, 2026, grinning between a Venezuelan surgical decapitation and an Iranian bombing campaign like a man checking items off a list. “They are going to fall. This communist dictatorship in Cuba, their days are numbered.” They are already falling. They fall in hospitals without power. They fall in nursing homes without food. They fall in cancer wards where the machines went silent weeks ago and no one came back to restart them. They fall in kitchens where mothers boil water they carried for miles, over fires made from broken chairs and splintered tables. They fall in apartments dark for 20 hours a day, on an island 90 miles from Florida, while a United States senator smiles on television and calls it progress. This is not a warning about what might happen to Cuba. It is a clinical description of what is happening right now, today, while you read this, while the news cycle skids forward to the next detonation and pretends the last one never happened. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
The Iran War Is Also a Climate War
By Mark Hertsgaard and Giles Trendle, The Nation [March 5, 2026]
---- War makes climate change worse in many ways, and vice versa. The human costs of the US-Israel attack on Iran—the hundreds of people who have died, including a reported 175 young girls and teachers killed at the Shajareh Tayyibeh primary school—are a tragedy. The mounting economic risks—disrupted supply chains, rising energy prices, shaken stock markets—are ominous. … The outbreak of any war is bad news for the climate, just as the election of politicians hostile to climate action is. The climate implications of this new war are not the center of attention at the moment, but they are essential context for understanding what’s at stake. At a time when civilization is hurtling toward irreversible climate breakdown, to overlook the climate consequences of three of the deadliest militaries on Earth going to war would be journalistic malpractice. [Read More] - ALSO OF INTEREST - “As the Gulf Conflict widens, so does its Environmental Footprint,” by Daniel Cressey, Dialogue Earth [March 7, 2026]. [Link].
CIVIL LIBERTIES
A Year After His Arrest, Mahmoud Khalil Lives in Limbo and in Fear
By Jonah E. Bromwich, New York Times [March8, 2026]
---- Mahmoud Khalil has memorized the license plates of the vehicles that park on his block. He keeps an eye on reflective surfaces — storefront windows, car mirrors — that help him monitor his surroundings. When strangers walk behind him, he stops to let them pass. A year ago, Mr. Khalil, a graduate of Columbia University and legal permanent resident, was detained and became the face of the White House’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators. And more than 250 days after he was released by a judge, he is still living the life that the Trump administration imposed on him. The government has accused Mr. Khalil, 31, of spreading antisemitism in the demonstrations that roiled the Columbia campus and, after he was already in detention, of failing to disclose pertinent information on his application for permanent residency. Mr. Khalil has said that criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic and that there was no failure of disclosure. But the Trump administration has continued its efforts to deport him, leaving Mr. Khalil in a tense limbo, concerned that the courts might tip against him and that, even before that, the administration might arrest him once again, in violation of the law. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
ICE Poses a Real Threat to Our Elections
By Domenic Powell, The Intercept [March 6 2026]
---- A high-profile election denier is leading election integrity work at the Department of Homeland Security. Trump and congressional Republicans are pushing the SAVE America Act and threatening to “nationalize” elections, purportedly to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. But despite an occasional murmur from Democrats that they are concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deploying to polling places around the country, they’re doing almost nothing to stop this nightmare scenario. ..The department is quickly metastasizing into a grave threat to the midterms, public safety, and our democracy — and Democrats are wasting time worried about their uniforms. … Democrats should not count on getting another chance to stop the Trump administration from stealing an election. DHS is more than an out-of-control law enforcement agency — it is quickly becoming a threat to democracy and national security. They need to act now before it’s too late. [Read More]
ICE’s Appalling Warehouse Prison Scheme
By Farrah Hassen, Counterpunch [March 6, 2026]
---- Warehouses are for storing goods. ICE wants to use them to store people. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ramps up arrests, the Trump administration is seeking to spend $38 billion to expand its detention capacity to 92,600 people, according to agency documents. At least 73,000 people — a record high — are already being held in ICE detention. To make room for more, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to buy numerous industrial warehouses using tens of billions in funding from the “Big Beautiful Bill.” ICE has already purchased at least eight facilities in Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maryland, New Jersey, and Arizona — and is looking at as many as 24 warehouses across the nation. [Read More] - ALSO OF INTEREST - “How to Dismantle a Concentration Camp,” by Jason Linkins, The New Republic [February 28, 2026] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
The Rubble of Gaza and the Ghosts of Tokyo
By Eric Ross, Znet [March 5, 2026]
---- We have not seen such systematic urban destruction since World War II. Gaza, a captive enclave with a besieged population that is nearly half children and one of the most densely populated places on earth, has endured six times the explosive tonnage equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb. This comparison has not been lost on observers, from A-bomb survivors to Holocaust historians. … At both the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, where Nazi and Japanese high officials were prosecuted for their crimes, aerial bombardment of cities was conspicuously absent from the indictments. … The laying waste to German and Japanese cities was followed by the millions killed in Korea and Vietnam. In recent decades, aerial campaigns have claimed tens of thousands of lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, and beyond. The rubble of Gaza today serves as the latest horrific reminder that the central lesson of this history remains unlearned: that might does not make right; that bombing can unleash endless horrors in war but cannot bring peace. [Read More]
Thank you to CFOW artist Isabella Bannerman!
