Last week Trump/the USA abandoned negotiations with Iran and re-launched the war. The attacks have escalated in intensity and now target Iran’s civilian infrastructure, as well as conventional military targets. Iran has responded reciprocally, targeting not only US military installations in the region, but civilian infrastructure in the Gulf States and others that host US military bases. There is now reason to expect that escalation will continue, leading to greater damage and civilian casualties, perhaps spinning ever more out of control
Last Monday Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News reported that the US had struck 140 targets in Iran, which the US claimed was in retaliation for an intensifying standoff over who (and how) would control the narrow waterway called the Strait of Hormuz. “There is no question,” stated Scahill, “that it’s the United States that’s been violating the terms of this agreement. It is quite explicit that Iran is supposed to have managing authority of the Strait of Hormuz.” It seems that the Memorandum of Understanding that began the ceasefire and set out a framework for negotiating the major issues between the US and Iran is now a thing of the past, and that we face a period of war-fighting that may extend for weeks.
It is important to note that Iran’s responses to the US military attacks have attempted to mirror the US targets. That is, as the US attacks “infrastructure,” so does Iran. And so we are potentially climbing up an “escalatory ladder” to greater and greater damage and threats to civilians. For example, Iran replied to a US attack on a water desalinization plant with a similar attack on a desalinization plant in Kuwait. As Juan Cole points out below, further attacks on the half-dozen remaining plants in Kuwait could force an evacuation of much of the country.
Finally, are there any limits on US military escalation? I fear not. For example, I read the pattern of US strikes along Iran’s southern coast and the Strait of Hormuz as effectively cutting off this area – no bridges, not roads, for example – from the rest of Iran. Is this a prelude to a US ground invasion, establishing a military beach head along the vital waterway? Of course I don’t qualify as even an armchair military strategist, but to me the future for the US-Iran war looks very bad.
SOME ESSAYS ILLUMINATING THE US-IRAN WAR
(Video) A “Forever War” in Iran? Ali Vaez on Escalating War, U.S. “Diplomatic Malpractice”
From Democracy Now! [July 16, 2026]
---- Has the United States launched a forever war on Iran? As the Trump administration renews its attacks on Iran, killing at least 35 civilians over the course of five days, political analyst Ali Vaez warns that the U.S. is inciting potentially never-ending “cycles of violence” with its manipulations of the diplomatic process. The U.S.’s unilateral renunciation of the “memorandum of understanding” as a “pretext for another round of war” has further eroded trust between the countries, says Vaez. “There is really no military solution,” he concludes. “The best solution is for both sides to agree to return to the MOU and to respect its terms.” [See the Program]
Yesterday’s US-Iran escalation is a mere prelude to what is likely to come
By Trita Parsi, Substack [July 18, 2026]
---- We have seen a major escalation between the US and Iran over the past 24 hours, but it is likely only a prelude to what appears to be coming next week. Tehran continues to respond tit-for-tat, demonstrating that, contrary to repeated Pentagon assurances, its ability to penetrate American and regional air defenses remains formidable. (Its strikes on U.S. bases in Jordan and Syria have killed at least two Americans.) Yet because Iran’s responses have been deliberately calibrated to remain proportionate—unlike earlier exchanges, when it pledged to respond at a ratio of 1.5 to one—its full military capacity remains unseen. … Trump, however, appears to have concluded that Tehran’s hard line in the negotiations stemmed from the United States not hitting Iran hard enough during the 38-day war. Seemingly indifferent to the costs for the GCC states, the global economy, inflation and the American cost of living—not to mention the risk to U.S. troops—he is gambling that a few more weeks of war will degrade Iran’s ability to close the Strait and force Tehran into a more accommodating negotiating position. It is, at best, a perilous gamble. [Read More]
(Video) What’s Next In Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza? Experts Tell Mehdi
From Zeteo [July 16, 2026]
---- The commonly used definition of insanity – doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results – is well suited to President Donald Trump’s latest moves in the Middle East. Whether it be declaring the United States “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT” or bombing Iran again this past weekend, the results stay the same. In a live Town Hall Q&A for paid Zeteo subscribers, three Middle East experts joined Mehdi Hasan to unpack developments in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza. It’s a conversation you won’t find in the mainstream media: Trita Parsi, executive vice president at Quincy Institute and author of several books on Iran Rula Jebreal, a Palestinian-Italian journalist, analyst, and academic Rami Khouri, longtime Lebanon-based journalist and former policy fellow at American University of Beirut. [See the Program]
Iran’s Kuwait Water Plant Strike: Oil Prices and Trans-regional War
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment [July 19, 2026]zz
---- Kuwait has 13,500 US service personnel at 7 bases, the largest contingent in the Middle East. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps believes that the US military establishment in Kuwait has been an essential component in the war on Iran and that therefore both those bases and Kuwaiti infrastructure are fair game, since the ruling Al Sabah has allied with Washington against Tehran. Kuwait is a small country of 5 million, only 1.5 million of them citizens and the rest guest workers. It sought US bases after having been invaded by Iraq in 1990-91, when the US helped expel the forces of then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The Al Sabah believed that US bases would be a guarantee against further annexation attempts by bigger nearby regional powers, and did not anticipate that the erratic Netanyahu and Trump would attack Iran and make Kuwait a target. On Friday, Iran targeted a Kuwaiti power plant and a desalinization facility, causing at least two major fires to break out that occupied several major firefighting crews for a day until they were controlled. About 90% of Kuwait’s drinking water comes from 8 desalinization plants, which produce almost half all the water used in the country. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Saudi-Led Forces Bomb Yemen’s Sanaa Airport, Reigniting War With the Houthis,” by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com [July 13, 2026] [Link]; and “The real cost of the Iran War: $103 billion in 120 days,” by Stephen Semler, Popular Info [July 8, 2026] [Link].
NEWS NOTES
Denise Oliver-Vélez, a founder and leader of the Young Lords in the 1960s, died this week at the age of 78. Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez knew her well; and in a full description of her life and times he reported that “She helped develop many of [the Young Lords’] Serve the People programs and helped to shape and write some of the key literature we produced back then.” He added, “Denise was never afraid to speak her mind, to challenge authority and to tell her comrades what they needed to hear — not what they wanted to hear — and she always did it with love and kindness.” See the program and learn more here.
Christian churches have been slow to engage with Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This week the Church of England “calls upon it members to stand in solidarity with Palestinian Christians” [but not Muslims?]. This article also notes the adoption of resolutions of the US Presbyterians, Unitarians, and others. For more, go here.
In congressional testimony this week, Epstein survivor Dani Bensky spoke out against acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s role in covering up the crimes of Epstain & Friends against hundreds of young women. Please watch her impassioned testimony to Congress here.
Three weeks ago Israel and the USA signed an agreement to build a permanent US Embassy in Jerusalem on stolen Palestinian land. As in many cases, land cases involving lands seized from Palestinians go back decades. In this case, one of the owners of Palestinian land now designated for an embassy belongs to Rashid Khalidi, a leading US historian of Palestine (emeritus Columbia Univ.) and a member of a prominent Palestinian/Jerusalem family going back for more than a century. The Israeli/Palestinian publication +972 magazine has a good story about this here; and Khalidi spoke briefly about the land-theft last week on Democracy Now!.
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!
The Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers this week come from the interesting group Playing for Change. First up is Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up,” with Keith Richards among the ensemble. Next is Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” And finally another one from Bob Marley, “One Love.” Many more great ones are on-line from Playing for Change. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Season of Smoke
By Naomi Klein, Substack [July 17, 2026]
---- As you might have heard, my country [Canada] is on fire. Not only mine. There a massive fires breaking out across Europe, too. Pakistan is experiencing unfathomable heat. Next week, I’ll be posting specifically about heat, and collective policy responses. But for obvious reasons, today I am thinking about smoke. This isn’t the first time smoke from fires in Canada has engulfed the continent. It feels all too familiar. But back in 2017, it was different. Shocking. That summer, I wrote an essay that tried to put the suffocation and claustrophobia into words. I poured my broken heart into it. At the fact that the worst climate forecasts were coming true. At the fact that our politicians were determined to make it all worse by building more pipelines and drilling for more oil and gas. Today, Prime Minister Mark Carney is going much further on this front than his predecessor; as the nation burns, he celebrates new fossil fuel projects as “nation building.” The essay was first published in The Intercept in September 2017, and I am sharing most of it here. The five-year-old boy in the piece is now 14. He understands a great deal more about what is happening and why, and there are many days when I wish he didn’t. I hope the piece can provide some solace to those in the haze, those under evacuation orders, and those trying to explain it all to little ones. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Climate Change made Historic Wildfire Smoke Event 5X Times more Likely,” from Yale Climate Connections [July 18, 2026] [Link]; and “Top Science Panel Backs Research Linking Extreme Weather to Climate Change,” by Raymond Zhong, New York Times [July 16, 2026] [Link]
A Hellish Month in the Occupied West Bank
By Jasper Nathaniel, Substack [July 19, 2026]
[FB – Jasper Nathaniel is a native of Hastings. His reporting from Israel’s Occupied West Bank focuses on what is now an epicenter of violence in Israel’s on-going genocidal war against Palestinians. He subtitles this update of what he saw there as “Inside a month of relentless violence, destruction, and suffering.” One of his encounters with the KKK “settlers” in the West Bank was reported on Democracy Now! last Wednesday.]
---- Each time I return to the West Bank, I tell myself—against all available evidence and my better judgment—“Maybe it’ll be calmer this time.” Never have I been proven wrong so thoroughly as I was this past month. I’m back home in New York now, and as ever, I have more material than I know what to do with. The story, at the most basic level, is that the settlers have seized more land. With the full support of the government, they have just about finished their takeover of Area C and have moved on to Areas A and B—ostensibly under Palestinian Authority control and off limits to Israelis—something that would’ve been unthinkable just a few years ago. Villages that had never seen a settler before are now finding themselves encircled by outposts, facing daily attacks. I’ve had countless settler encounters over the past several years, but never have I seen them come out swinging the way they are now—showing up in a village and wasting no time before physically assaulting people. Of course it’s because they know that they are far more likely to be rewarded than punished; they are, after all, doing the state’s bidding. [Read More]
The Long War on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase
By Erik Molvar, Counterpunch [July 17,2026]
---- In southern Utah, two crown-jewel landscapes have been the subject of a political tug-of-war spanning the past 25 years. On one end of the rope, Tribes, conservation groups, and the recreating public have sought – and gotten – expanded protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. Pulling the other end, the livestock industry, mining corporations, and Big Oil have joined forces with anti-regulation local governments to push to maximize the lands available for extractive use and minimize the protections. This week, the Trump administration sided with the industrial interests and anti-environmental local governments to slash the two National Monuments by 90 percent, pulling the figurative rope back over to the side of exploitation. … The new Monument Proclamations for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase wave away these historically and scientifically important objects by arbitrarily reclassifying them as “generic features and landscapes” or having “relative commonness” throughout the region. If one President protects cliff dwellings and pictograph panels and geologic features as significant, can a later President declare them insignificant? And how do we reconcile this wholesale dismissal of sacred sites? [Read More]
It’s Scary As Hell Being Black in America Right Now
By Alain Stephens, The Intercept [July 19 2026]
---- The deaths of Nolan Wells and Kohen Wiley are symptoms of a nation retreating from any pretense of equal rights. … Whether over a box of Pampers or a gulp of water, it is a startling reminder that for too many non-Black Americans, protecting even the most trivial property can take precedence over the sanctity of a Black life. It’s an existential dread that has now turned into expectation, an anxiety meant for the mind to blunt the inevitable oncoming pattern of pain, disappointment, and injustice — in this case, being Black in America. These deaths do not exist in isolation. They arrive amid a broader retreat from the institutions that, however imperfectly, once acknowledged Black Americans as a constituency deserving of protection and investment. And the casualties of Black existence transcend more than just bodies. The Trump administration has waged full spectrum warfare on Black identity in every sense. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
The Not-So-Secret Israeli Strategy: This is the Real Gaza Plan
By Ramzy Baroud, Znet [July 17, 2026]
---- Here is the bottom line: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of leaving Gaza, either before Israel’s general elections—likely to be held in October—or after. Conceding an inch from the roughly 70 percent of the territory his army currently occupies in Gaza will be considered a weakness by the majority of Israeli voters and would result in an open revolt within his extremist coalition. He has made his intentions clear time and again. Recent by Israel’s political leadership have only reinforced that reality, with officials insisting that Israel must maintain indefinite military dominance over the Strip and explicitly rejecting any framework that requires a full withdrawal of troops. To Netanyahu, the military footprint in Gaza is a permanent fixture, not a temporary bargaining chip. … It seems that two separate, irreconcilable tracks are taking shape. One is the Israeli track of continued war, entrenched military occupation, and prolonged genocide. The other is an international track, controlled firmly by Washington, aimed largely at finding alternative ways to manage Gaza on behalf of Israel. [Read More]
Politicians Should Stop Hiding Behind the ‘Two-State Solution’ Fantasy
By Norman Solomon, Antiwar.com [July 17, 2026]
---- Creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel seemed feasible when President Bill Clinton hosted the signing of the Oslo accords at the White House in September 1993. The goal was reaffirmed in 2011 when 90 percent of the Senate co-sponsored a resolution supporting “a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” But today, the two-state scenario is far-fetched to the point of delusion if not evasion. For politicians, it has become a box to check. According to data from the American Jewish Congress, every Democrat and most Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee currently say they support “the two-state solution.” … Is a two-state solution the best possibility for Palestine? That’s not for Americans to say. But there is a “two-state solution” that the United States could and should impose – on itself and Israel. In this decade, the catastrophic U.S.-Israel alliance has enabled not only genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians but also the ongoing wars of aggression on Iran and Lebanon. The alliance should not morph. It should end. American refusal to support the genocidal state of Israel would be a “two-state solution.” And it might lead to solutions in Palestine. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Greentech Revolution in the States
By Jeremy Brecher, Znet [July 16, 2026]
---- While Trump conducts his war against Greentech, many US states are forging ahead with energy expansion based on sun, wind, and water. Greentech’s slashing of the cost of renewable energy production and use has made states turn to it not only to protect the climate but to make energy affordable for their people. The US federal system gives states a powerful position in energy policy. States regulate electric generation, local distribution of electricity, and infrastructure siting. They can set policy in myriad other areas from urban planning to public transit to housing that can help shape the utilization of climate-protecting Greentech. Meanwhile, recent headlines have publicized retrenchment in state climate policies. … Such retreats register the reality that Trump’s attacks are restricting the development of the Greentech New Deal. Federal defunding of climate-protecting initiatives has made them more expensive; regulatory changes and subsidies have advantaged fossil fuels; and legal attack has undermined the Greentech revolution. But these retreats should not conceal the advances the Greentech Revolution has made in US states even during the first year-and-a-half of the Trump era. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
The Freedom to Be Woke
By David Cole, New York Review of Book [July 12,2026]
---- The response to a culture of intolerance by students and faculty, however, should not be official intolerance by the state. Yet that is exactly what Florida did when, in 2022, it enacted the Stop WOKE Act, a law aimed at excising what its proponents call “critical race theory” from state university classrooms. The law prohibits public university professors and K-12 teachers from endorsing eight proscribed ideas about race, sex, and national origin, including the view that people of a particular race should “receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.” … So conservatives and liberals alike should be cheering the decision on July 7 from the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit declaring unconstitutional the Stop WOKE Act’s application to university professors. … The decision, the most important affirmation of academic freedom in decades, reflects a fundamental divide among conservatives on free speech—between those who are committed to the ideal across the board, and those who champion it for ideas they approve but are only too happy to silence speech they disfavor. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
(Video) “Completely Unprecedented”: Ari Berman on Trump’s Attack on Elections Ahead of Midterms
From Democracy Now! [July 14, 2026]
---- We get an update on elections and voting rights in the United States from Mother Jones‘s national voting rights correspondent, Ari Berman, who warns of President Donald Trump’s escalating attempts to “try to claim dictatorial power” and commit an “unprecedented intervention” into the 2026 midterm elections. Whether it takes the form of claims of foreign interference, canceling mail-in voting or requiring proof of citizenship, “[t]he bottom line here is they keep lying about the 2020 election so that they can justify massive interference in the 2026 election,” says Berman. “That’s something that we all need to be very vigilant about.”
[See the Program]
Could Abdul El-Sayed Upend Democratic Politics for Good?
By Nathan Robinson, The Nation [July 9, 2026]
---- A Sanders-style insurgency may resonate better now than it did when El-Sayed ran eight years ago. With Donald Trump back in office, there is a “hunger for anti-establishment fighters” among a Democratic base looking for leaders who do more to fight back than sending strongly worded letters. Leftists backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have recently been winning improbable victories, including Mamdani’s successful New York City mayoral campaign, the ousting of the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Adriano Espaillat, by democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, and the victory of Melat Kiros in Colorado, who showed that the phenomenon may be spreading outside New York. … If El-Sayed does beat Stevens, it remains an open question whether the forces within the party that have tried to keep him from getting the nomination will fall in line behind him in the general election. Centrist Democrats will have mixed feelings at best about helping El-Sayed to the Senate. An El-Sayed primary victory sets up a high-stakes test of what kind of Democratic politics are most effective against the right. If Michigan sends a Senator Abdul El-Sayed to Washington, traditional “electability” assumptions will have been shattered for good. It will no longer be possible to argue that centrism and pragmatism are synonymous, and insurgent progressives everywhere will have a stronger case that they are the Democratic Party’s future. [Read More] – ALSO OF INTEREST - “Only Progressive Abdul El-Sayed can Defeat GOP in Michigan,” by Conor Lynch, Truthdig [July 14, 2026]. [Link].
Israel and the United States Are Merging Their Militaries. Here’s Why.
By Nuvpreet Kalra, Znet [July 15, 2026]
---- In June 2026, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wrote to Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman of California, saying that “the time has now arrived [for Israel] to move from aid recipient to partner” with the United States. Yesterday, on Fox News, Netanyahu again repeated the proposal to move “from aid to partnership“. What Netanyahu proclaims is at the core of the proposed “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”, which has been included in a section of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that seeks to push the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion in 2027. This proposal to the annual military policy bill aims to essentially merge the Israeli and the US militaries. While the initial bill, the “United States-Israel FUTURES Act,” failed as a standalone bill, the core provisions have been included in the NDAA. This aims to “expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation” between the US and Israel, led by an “executive agent” decided by the US Defense Secretary [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “Social Security is a Problem of Income Distribution, Not Demographics,” by Dean Baker, Counterpunch [July 17, 2026 [Link]; and “Medicare Turns 61; The Case for Expanding it to all Americans,” by F. Douglas Stephenson, Informed Comment [July 14, 2026] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
Thirteen films that are essential to understanding the nuclear age
By Alex Wellerstein, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [July 16, 2026]
---- Nuclear films are both reflections of the zeitgeist in which they are made and shapers of it. They feed off of both popular and expert anxieties, while also helping to solidify the terms on which these anxieties are engaged. While some themes are apparently universal (how many ways are there to blunder into nuclear war), some feel very much of their particular time and place. In creating this list, I was cognizant that there are dozens of films that incorporate some sort of “nuclear” elements into their plots. Narrowing it down to 13 required implementing arbitrary criteria. Ultimately, I decided that any film on my best-of list needed to be explicitly engaged with nuclear themes in a serious and sustained way. [Read More].
ALSO OF INTEREST - “How the movies (and the rest of the media) made me into an anti-nuclear weapons campaigner,” by Helen Caldicott, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [July 8, 2026] [Link]; and Paul Goodman, “Designing Pacifist Films,” Liberation [April 1961] [Link].
Remembering Lillian Roberts, NYC Labor Leader
FB – Lillian Roberts, an amazing crusader for labor rights in NYC, died yesterday at the age of 98. She was a stalwart’s stalwart, twice leading the nation’s largest municipal workers’ union. I hope that labor publications will soon print some useful things about her life and work as a Black woman labor leader and all that that entailed. As a first draft, here is her obituary from today’s New York Times. [Link].
