Middle East In Focus - Sunday, June 14, 2026

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1. Gardens Before the Show.
2. Further information available at www.theatricum.com and at kpfk.org.
3. This is Ed Begley, Jr., and you're listening to KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles,
4. 98.7 FM Santa Barbara and worldwide at kpfk.org.
5. Hello and welcome to Middle East in Focus. I'm Negwa Ibrahim.
6. With the killing of 175 schoolgirls, educators, and parents in Minab, Iran,
7. The latest chapter of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine has added a new horror to a term many of us only recently learned, scholasticide.
8. Defined by the UN as the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention, or killing of teachers, students, and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure,
9. Scholasticide is a weapon of genocide, one designed to destroy a people's ability to educate their young, produce knowledge, and transmit culture to the next generation.
10. Since the Israeli genocide on Gaza began in 2023, U.S. and Israel have destroyed nearly 400 schools, including all 12 of its universities, along with the targeted killing of hundreds of professors, journalists, and intellectuals.
11. More than 90% of Gaza's school buildings are now destroyed, and children continue to go without regular schooling with no end in sight.
12. This playbook has since spread across the region.
13. In Lebanon, as reported in The Intercept, more than a million people have been displaced, with schools now being used as emergency shelters.
14. This means that the schools as educational facilities are closed.
15. And while ad hoc educational measures are being enacted by volunteers, systemic education has stopped.
16. Teachers aren't getting paid and students are learning months of formal education in addition to traumatic impacts on well-being and health as a result of U.S.-Israeli violence and war.
17. In Iran, more than 3 million people have been displaced, resulting in incalculable level, not just of learning loss for children, but loss of childhood nutrition, medical access, and overall safety.
18. And the Minab strike in Iran was not one attack, but actually two.
19. In a deliberate double tap, a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile first killed the schoolgirls, then killed the parents and first responders rushing to save them.
20. And this comes on top of at least 15 years of U.S. and Israel assassinating Iranian scientists and their families and an accelerating assault on Iranian universities and research centers.
21. Now, meanwhile, back here in the United States, universities are being transformed in ways that make them complicit in this violence,
22. converted into laboratories for surveillance technologies and weapons development, stripped of their democratic mission and reshaped to normalize militarization, conformity and authoritarian power.
23. As our guest today has written unless we mount organized resistance we may find that the very institutions that are supposed to be dedicated to critical thought have instead completely aligned themselves with the logics of war surveillance and national security
24. Here to talk with us about the military-industrial academic complex, what it is, how it operates, and what can be done to stop it, is Henri Giroux.
25. Henri holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy.
26. His work spans cultural studies, youth studies, critical pedagogy, popular culture, media studies, social theory, and the politics of higher and public education.
27. His recent books include Fascism on Trial, Education and the Possibility of Democracy, Burden of Conscience, Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence, and Assassins of Memory, Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure.
28. His website is henryajeroux.com. Henry Geroux, welcome to Middle Eastern Focus.
29. Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure.
30. You know, I have to say, I actually had never heard of the military-industrial-academic complex. I've heard, of course, of the military-industrial complex, but never specifically the military-industrial-academic complex.
31. And I'm so excited about your work to have you on the show and to really dive into that and what it is and unpack that for all of us.
32. Before we dive into that, though, if you can just talk with us about something you start your most recent piece about, which is this idea that militarized policies, values, identities and modes of governance don't merely creep into U.S. society, but under Trump actually increasingly define it.
33. Can you unpack that distinction for all of us?
34. I think one of the ways of doing that is to think about the difference between militarism and militarization.
35. Militarism really suggests that there are particular niches and cultures within a society where the language of war and defense and surveillance basically operate.
36. They're there to train soldiers to do the usual thing, to kill and so forth and so on.
37. But militarization suggests something else.
38. militarization suggests that that culture now begins to creep into every aspect of society
39. whether you see it in sports or whether you see it in advertisements or whether you see it in a
40. language that basically seems to suggest that we live in a society marked by a survival of the
41. fittest and that you know competition basically amounts to who's going to be left on the island
42. It emphasizes a kind of rugged individualism as opposed to a notion of cooperation and care and compassion.
43. And basically, it engulfs the culture.
44. The culture becomes a war culture.
45. And I think under Trump, this has become so clear.
46. I mean, there's almost nothing that Trump can do without suggesting that the logics
47. of violence and war and competition and aggression are basically the governing principles of
48. society.
49. I mean you know when you listen to Pete Hegseth who ironically renames the Department of Defense as the Department of War and seems to suggest that that logic of war and militarization has nothing to do with ethics has nothing at all to do with the due process has nothing to do with basically how we begin to talk about ourselves as a society
50. Two things to sort of just make that clear. You know, tomorrow or today on the White House lawn, Trump has organized a basically a cage fight.
51. And I think the message there is that the ultimate expression of values, political governing values in the United States is basically aggression and violence.
52. At another level, they have turned this notion of war and this notion of aggression into a kind of cinematic cartoon. All of a sudden, we're treated with videos that seem to make a joke out of killing people, whether they're boats in the Caribbean or whether they're basically bombs sort of attacking Iran.
53. And so I think that what I've tried to get at in a number of years, the last 15, 20 years, that really began with a book called University in Change.
54. I was really shocked at how universities have become complicit with this and how those values have spread increasingly throughout society.
55. So and I want to get into how this connects to universities and the way they are actually a part of the war machine and this militarization culture that you're talking about.
56. But quick follow up on what you just said. How would you describe the distinction between what we're seeing under this administration versus what we've seen under past administrations in terms of militarization creeping into every aspect of society?
57. I mean, I think. Yeah, go ahead.
58. practical distinctions, that actually what we're experiencing under Trump is more militarization
59. creeping into every aspect of culture and society than previous administrations?
60. Yes. I mean, I think there's something very different here. I think that what we saw in
61. the previous administrations was not the argument that war isn't something sacred and operates in
62. the interest of democracy, so to speak. That's what they actually argued. I mean, there was an
63. attempt to give it some sort of ethical whitewash, whether we're talking about what happens in 1973
64. in Chile, or whether we're talking about endless sort of sanctions that cripple countries and
65. basically cause massive human suffering. It was always hidden. You know, it was always hidden in
66. the discourse of democratic, liberal democracy. And I think that where we see a terrific change
67. emerging is around 1980. And I think around 1980, all of a sudden you have the rise of
68. neoliberalism on steroids. And I think that as it increasingly takes hold, it can no longer
69. legitimate itself It can no longer say we lifting everybody up by their bootstraps there going to be massive equality for everyone life will get better Actually everything got worse And I think that what you see at the end
70. of this is that neoliberalism can no longer defend itself. So it turns towards fascism.
71. It turns towards basically aligning itself with white supremacy, with white Christian
72. nationalists in the United States. It aligns itself with the most disgusting,
73. really political values that one can imagine, values that basically are about abducting people,
74. building prisons for migrants, making the claim that anybody who basically is not white and a
75. Christian nationalist doesn't qualify as a citizen. So I see in the Trump era, what you see
76. with Trump is this kind of neoliberal fascism no longer apologizing for itself and in fact embracing
77. the language of fascist politics or the language of neo-fascism, whether we're talking about
78. abductions, we're talking about disposability, we're talking about racial cleansing or white
79. supremacy. It's all out in the open. They're not talking about democracy any longer. They don't
80. care about democracy. I mean, as a matter of fact, democracy gets in the way because democracy
81. suggests, even in its most liberal sense, something that has to do with the rule of law. They hate the
82. rule of law. This is about the concentration of power in the hands of a financial elite.
83. It's about capitalism on steroids. And it reveals something that we need to be very,
84. very careful to think about. And that is that what we see with Trump is that capitalism and
85. democracy no longer sustain each other. They're actually the opposite of each other. And that
86. where we are now under Trump, with this militarization of everything in society,
87. is basically the endpoint of a capitalism that's failed.
88. What we see now is basically fascism on steroids.
89. So, okay, so now I want to get into how this relates
90. to what we're seeing with respect to universities.
91. And really what you just described is the way in which the Trump administration
92. is really embracing neoliberal fascism and the language of it and normalizing it.
93. And in some respects, we see that in terms of universities.
94. First, before we unpack what's happening right now under the Trump administration and the military industrial academic complex, can you just give us an overview of what the military industrial academic complex is and when the dangers of it were first identified?
95. I think the military-industrial-academic complex is a term, first of all, to go back to your introductory statement.
96. I first wrote about that when I wrote The University in Change because what I discovered was that while Eisenhower had talked about the military-industrial complex and the danger it posed to what he called democracy at that time, actually it had been called the military-industrial-academic complex.
97. But his advisers convinced him not to use that term because they felt that it would be such an indictment of higher education as one of the few places left that offered some sort of hope for being able to both legitimate and talk about democratic principles and ideals and educate people to be equipped to be engaged critical citizens that he thought was too dangerous.
98. And so they dropped the term.
99. But I think that while they may have dropped the term, I mean, the higher education has been inextricably in many ways involved with military research from time to time.
100. I'm immemorial.
101. And I think increasingly, after the so-called war on terror, it became more involved, with
102. millions of dollars going to MIT, millions of dollars going to places like Penn State.
103. But it was low-key.
104. It wasn't really used as a defining feature of the university as much as it was seen as
105. kind of an adjunct of ways to sort of increase revenue, given the fact that the state was
106. constantly defunding.
107. higher education because it was deemed as too politically dangerous, as you know.
108. And I think that what has happened, particularly with the rise of the protest movement for
109. Palestinian justice in the last few years, is that the universities have become more visible
110. in terms of the way in which they've aligned themselves as adjuncts of the military industrial
111. complex and, of course, the arms industries and the war machines. Because now the effects of
112. those investments, the effects of that kind of identity have become clear. People are killed,
113. as you said, in Lebanon, in Iran, God forbid, in Gaza, over 70,000 people, maybe even 180,000
114. people killed. So it seems to me we can't ignore the relationship between the university and its
115. alleged position as a public good, and its increasingly alignment with a war machine.
116. They're contradictory moments. I mean, they don't make any sense unless you realize that the university no longer wants to define itself as a public good, that it really has aligned with capitalism in ways in which it has substituted training for education.
117. But the training that it substitutes is not about providing people with skills that basically increase the common good. It's about providing people with skills that lead them to believe that the machinery of death, as long as it produces revenue, can be legitimated.
118. So can you walk us through exactly how the military-industrial-academic complex has played out under previous administrations? Specific examples, if you can, and then where Trump fits in.
119. Well, I think that what we have seen under Clinton, what we have seen under Obama, is an attempt to basically do two things.
120. First, there's an attempt to define the university as basically about training, which seems to me opened it up to disavowing its notion as a public good and taking into consideration what it means to have a sense of social responsibility.
121. That coupled with the constant defunding of higher education, not just under Obama and Clinton, but almost under Bush, under a whole range of presidents, particularly after the war on terror.
122. because you know you know and i know in the united states today you have a counter-revolution taking
123. place and that revolution begins with with what happened in the 60s where students were arguing
124. for the university to be a to promote active critical citizens in the interest of a socialist
125. democracy if i may in its most radical sense that kind of revolution then now takes place in the
126. realm of culture and in the realm of culture it's about the realm of ideas and the realm of knowledge
127. and how that knowledge can be defined and whose interest it might serve.
128. And increasingly, as the universities were defunded and the universities were basically under siege,
129. the emphasis shift in the funding from basically funding for the social good to funding to the military industrial apparatus I mean and when you say to me you know where the evidence All you have to do is look at the amount of money that was basically being invested in universities particularly
130. after the war in Iraq or after 9-11. And it's huge. I mean, those investments go increasingly
131. get larger and larger and larger.
132. But they were kind of hidden.
133. I mean, they were hidden behind the notion that universities basically promote dissent,
134. dangerous thinking, and we need to do everything we can to prevent that.
135. And one way of doing that was to redefine the notion of the university as being aligned
136. with the politics of militarization.
137. And I think that what we now see under Trump is something incredibly different.
138. And that is the universities are no longer defined as simply being crucial forces to train people for the workforce, i.e. in part the military industrial complex.
139. Now they're laboratories of indoctrination.
140. Now they're involved in censoring, firing faculty, putting police on campuses to eliminate dissent.
141. And in a sense, they align perfectly with a notion of militarization that basically is organized around questions of repression, aggression, and the squelching of dissent, and the death of the social and ethical imagination.
142. Coming to you from the studios of listener-supported KPFK in Los Angeles, this is Middle East in Focus.
143. I'm Negwa Ibrahim.
144. Very happy to be joined by Henry Giroux, author of the books Burden of Conscience, Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence, and Assassins of Memory, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Erasure.
145. And we are talking about the military-industrial-academic complex, what it is, how it operates, and what can be done to stop it.
146. So can you maybe elaborate a little bit more on exactly how universities are being utilized as laboratories to actually develop surveillance technologies and weapons?
147. Well, I think that what we see happening is that in the name of technological innovation, what we see the arms industry, along with the military industrial complex, they now view the universities as being increasingly valuable in terms of providing the kind of research that can be used to, in a sense, produce new social formations.
148. in the interest of expanding what war looks like and how it might take place.
149. The universities now become valuable repositories, and they're vulnerable.
150. I mean, they recognize this.
151. They're vulnerable because they've been, again, I want to emphasize this,
152. they've been defunded.
153. They're defunded.
154. I mean, they're basically, it's very difficult for them to sustain themselves anymore,
155. particularly in terms of those notions of study that don't translate immediately into workable skills.
156. So it seems to me that the military and the arms industry are now coming to the defense of the university under very specific kinds of arguments.
157. First, they claim they are absolutely crucial as institutions that will protect security of the country involved,
158. Whether we're talking about Canada, whether we're talking about the US, it's always about security.
159. It always mobilizing knowledge and the investment in knowledge around the discourse of fear At the same time it a discourse that seems to suggest that the militarization of everything basically means that we no longer have to think about
160. what it means for universities to take seriously their role as ethical and basically
161. democratic institutions as a space for democratic inquiry, for critical thought,
162. for collective liberation and that the money that goes into the universities, and this is very
163. important, and maybe I should have stressed this earlier. Look, to the degree to which you have the
164. punishing state, which is basically organized by the military-industrial complex, is the degree to
165. which the social state gets killed. It gets eliminated. And what we see here is an argument
166. for surveillance, for security, that basically is perfectly aligned with destroying the social state,
167. with investing in all the things that kind of matter,
168. addressing pressing social, environmental,
169. and humanitarian challenges that basically,
170. and if they're talked about at all,
171. they'll be talked about in terms of military applications.
172. And so you see this enormous narrowing
173. to a kind of instrumentalism
174. that now is basically entangled and defined,
175. if I may, by the machinery of death.
176. So one of the things you talk about is how the defenders of these militarized partnerships try to claim that the universities must remain neutral in securing funding and advancing national interest.
177. But that neutrality, as you've sort of laid out, is actually a myth. Can you explain deeper for us and further what you mean by that, that it's a myth, and what this false claim of neutrality actually means for the production of knowledge?
178. I mean, I think that one of the things that the right and all of the institutions that
179. support it, whether we're talking about the financial elite, the new class of trillionaires
180. and billionaires or the military industrial complex, they want you to believe that the
181. universities are basically apolitical.
182. They want you to believe that the universities have nothing to do with power.
183. They want you to believe that basically that under the guise of neutrality, we don't have
184. to think about questions of accountability, we don't have to think about questions of
185. ethics, we don't have to think about ways in which the universities are organized.
186. It's a way of simply eliminating from any discourse about the university how politics
187. actually works in the real world in the role that universities play both in terms of how
188. they define themselves, the power relations that shape them, and the consequences that
189. emerge from them.
190. I mean, when the university, like the University of California, turns over the names of students
191. and faculty to the government, the names of students who are actively involved in the
192. struggle for political justice and freedom in Gaza for Palestinians, they make the claim
193. that that's not just political in the worst sense, but that's something that the university
194. should not do, that it should not be in some way aligning itself with questions of social
195. justice.
196. So the call for neutrality is really a way of saying that the university cannot take a stand on almost anything that would address social issues and invoke the issue of social responsibility.
197. Look, the university can never be neutral.
198. It impossible because the university exists within a network of social relations and influences economic political social and cultural that it can escape from the way it hires faculty the way it gives some money to more departments than to others the research that it decides to
199. fund as opposed to not fund, the way it keeps silent about some issues but speaks up about
200. others. I mean, it's entirely a mythical assumption that basically allows people to come in and say
201. things like it's a liberal institution it doesn't have to take a stand uh it's just going to be
202. there and let people talk but that's nonsense i i mean it can't escape how does the university
203. escape from a society that is so deep in economic and political inequalities that is so aligned with
204. a society that basically is waging war across the world that basically i mean that is an
205. inextricably funded by an arms industry, in some cases, that is causing the death of thousands and
206. displacement of thousands of people across the world. It doesn't work. It's a way of justifying
207. liberal democracy by making the claim that it doesn't have to, in some ways, think about the
208. relationship between institutions, economic activity, and what I would call social cost,
209. ethical responsibility. So can you give some concrete examples of specific universities in
210. the U.S. and Canada, because I know you discuss both in your piece, that have partnered with
211. military institutions and either stayed silent about documented human rights abuses that were
212. connected to those institutions or actually actively surveilled and policed students who
213. spoke out, as we saw with the protest movement speaking out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza?
214. I mean, look, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology historically has been tied
215. to the military via the Cold War, radar, aerospace, engineering. I mean, you know,
216. there are a number of institutions that basically today are tied to the military industrial complex,
217. NYU, Penn State. I mean, all one has to do is simply go to any website and type in those
218. universities with the highest amount of funding with respect to military industrial complex.
219. Stanford University, the Georgia Institute of Technology comes to mind, the University of Texas
220. at Austin with the Supply Research Laboratories. I mean, all the evidence is there to do that.
221. What we just have to do is to make it public. It has to be seen. It often hides behind the language of neutrality or the language of funding or the language of necessity and fear in ways in which it gets covered up.
222. So are there any institutions that are not part of the military industrial academic complex?
223. Oh, I think, of course there are.
224. I mean, but I don't think that's a relevant question.
225. I don't think the question is are there any institutions that are not part of it.
226. I think the real question is how do we define and prevent higher education under any circumstances,
227. regardless of whether they're small institutions or big institutions,
228. from basically defining itself and aligning themselves with basically the arms industry,
229. with basically the military-industrial complex.
230. I mean, militarization doesn't just reshape technology and governance, it produces knowledge.
231. It creates modes of agency, it creates particular ways of thinking in a society.
232. And it seems to me that it should not become a part of the military industrial complex.
233. It should be a space for democratic inquiry, critical thought, and collective liberation. That's what it should be.
234. should be about the practice of freedom. So we need a larger kind of narrative that talks about
235. what universities should be, as opposed to what universities are actually involved with the
236. military industrial complex, and what universities aren't. None of them should be involved.
237. Universities should not be involved in research that basically produces knowledge that is aligned
238. with questions of mass destruction. Well, the reason why I think there is some relevance to
239. it is because it is identifying those institutions who may have stood up, to see them as an example,
240. to be able to utilize their experience as a reference point to push back, to learn from that,
241. and then to understand the ways they've come under attack and how they fought back,
242. to use that to motivate this organizing and to understand how to do this organizing.
243. That's why I ask, like, is there any, you know, anyone that we can point to to say, look, this
244. This is possible. These are the institutions that have done it, despite all the defunding that has happened. And this is how we do it.
245. I think we could point to Brown, which has the Cost of War Institute, which aligns, which is embedded at Brown University and is fighting back against, for instance, that kind of alignment.
246. But I still, I'm sorry, I still want to say, hey, look, I think this is a systemic issue and needs to be taken up systemically. And yes, it might be useful to point to a few universities that basically are not aligned with that. I mean, I don't believe that Amherst College is aligned with it. I mean, we could name particular schools that I think are free of that kind of corruption.
247. But unless we understand this as a systemic issue, I'm not sure that those, you know, that's worth mentioning. I think the primary connection lies in critiquing it rather than basically pointing to the institutions that don't align themselves.
248. I think institutions that don't align themselves with the institutions that take seriously their role as liberal arts institutions that are concerned about in some way equipping students with the skills and the knowledge they need to be actively engaged critical citizens.
249. But I also think that generally universities that don't have the resources, they don't have the labs, they don't have the technological capabilities.
250. I mean, in Canada, you have like Concordia University.
251. You have a number of universities that basically, you know, will try to improve their endowments through their investments, which often are aligned, in many cases, with the military industrial complex.
252. Smaller schools don't have those investments.
253. They don't have the funds.
254. So I'm not even convinced that it's done out of some sort of ethical consideration as much as it simply may not be practical or pragmatic to do it because it's difficult for them to mobilize the investments and the resources to align themselves with that sort of thing.
255. And we'll end with this last question to your point that this is really a systemic issue that is directly impacting the planet, directly impacting any sense of the possibility of any sort of true democracy.
256. So what can students and the public do to demand that universities refuse to become these laboratories for war and an extension of the U.S. war machine?
257. I mean, I think that there are a number of things.
258. I mean and I actually going to go back and I going to use your example again Look students at Brown University is one of those universities that basically have voted to reject this investment That came about because of student protest
259. Students basically aligned themselves with groups outside of the university that were against militarization
260. and mobilized what we might call educational campaigns to develop ethical alternatives,
261. to use institutional power as a public good rather than basically as a machinery of death.
262. But I think that what's really crucial here is that we need to understand that any form of protest
263. cannot be reduced to what students might do or what young people might do.
264. This is a problem that basically should not be burdened, that students should bear the burden of.
265. This is an issue that involves all of us.
266. What kind of universities do we want? What kind of society do we want with respect to what it means to take the principles of democracy seriously? So we need to have unions involved. We need to have youth groups. We need to have faculty. We need to have students. We need to have cultural workers.
267. anybody that basically refuses the slide of creeping fascism in the United States in almost
268. every aspect of everyday life, including its institutions, it would seem to me has to be
269. addressed. We have been talking about the military-industrial-academic complex, what it is,
270. how it operates, and what can be done to stop it with our guest, Henry Giroux, author of the books
271. Burden of Conscience, Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence, and Assassins of Memory,
272. Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure. Thank you so much, Henry, for joining us today
273. and for your really important work. Oh, thank you. You know, may I say one more thing, if I may?
274. Yes, of course. In light of your questions, look, we need to fund universities as a public good.
275. We need to fund them so that they basically don't have to align themselves with the arms
276. arms industries. We need to, in some way, redefine the missions of universities. I mean, and get them
277. away from this sort of sick instrumentalism and this need to sort of define themselves and align
278. themselves in a society that is basically moving at full stop towards fascism. They're the two
279. issues that it seems to me we need to take seriously. Thank you again so much, Henry Giroux,
280. for joining us on Middle East in Focus today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
281. As our next guest, Curry Peterson-Smith argues in his most recent op-ed, the ongoing U.S.-Israeli
282. assault against the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran is the latest phase of a rampage in which
283. this administration is making war and militarization central features of life in the
284. United States itself. And while brazen U.S. military aggression in the 21st century didn't
285. begin with Trump, Curry makes the case that Trump is doing something distinct, stripping away the
286. pretense and bringing the unvarnished reality of U.S. militarization into the open. And in doing so,
287. exposing just how deeply unpopular and undemocratic U.S. foreign policy actually is.
288. And from that analysis, he urges anti-war organizers to seize on this moment of awareness
289. and outrage to build the movements we need against escalating U.S. militarization.
290. So here to talk to us about exactly that is Curry Peterson Smith, the Michael Ratner Middle
291. East Fellow and the co of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies He researches U empire borders and migration and strategizes with activists to work against
292. the violence that U.S. carries out and supports around the world. Welcome back to Middle East
293. in Focus, Curry Peterson-Smith. Thank you so much. I'm grateful to be here.
294. So let's dive in because there's a lot to talk about. One of the things that, as I mentioned
295. in the opening, in my intro just now, that you argue is that while brazen, aggressive U.S.
296. military action in the 21st century didn't begin with Trump, his predecessors were far more careful
297. about what they exposed the public to and what they did not expose the public to. Can you talk
298. about how previous administrations managed and filtered the public's view of the U.S. war machine?
299. Yes, it's a great question. And I think that there's really two things to consider. One is a kind of a strategy for how administrations have approached wars and how they've approached talking about them or not with the US population that tends to fall along party lines.
300. And so, for example, there's been tremendous continuity, actually, in terms of U.S. military violence in various countries over the past two decades since the post 9-11 wars began.
301. But if you think about, for example, U.S. airstrikes on Somalia, which began under the first or the second rather Bush administration and continued under Obama and Trump and Biden, you know, there were several U.S. airstrikes on Somalia under Biden, but they weren't really Biden.
302. the administration didn't really talk about it. You know, it was not kind of a point that they
303. wanted to make about it. And they kind of didn't want the U.S. public to know about it. Whereas
304. for Donald Trump, when he took office for the second time last year, the very first U.S. military
305. intervention that they carried out was against Somalia, and they announced it as the largest
306. airstrike in world history, right? So you have, in many ways, a continuation of the same policy,
307. but Trump is kind of highlighting it as a spectacular thing,
308. whereas Biden is not talking about it.
309. He's kind of carrying it out in the shadows.
310. So that's one way to answer the question.
311. But the other is that, and this is where Trump differs from not only the Democrats,
312. but the Republicans actually too,
313. is that there has been a way of managing war, U.S. wars with the U.S. population for several decades.
314. But I think especially since after the U.S. war in Vietnam, they have taken great care, Democratic and Republican administrations, to obscure what the U.S. is doing abroad, but also to really emphasize the notion that the U.S. is a force for good, that when the U.S. does kill civilians, it's an accident.
315. It's collateral damage. But for the most part, we just don't talk about the killing of civilians.
316. And we don't talk about U.S. casualties either. After 9-11, for example, the Bush administration,
317. a Republican administration, made it clear to the U.S. media that they did not want images of
318. flag coffins you know arriving that is of U war debt arriving back in the United States And the U media said OK So there was a real effort actually by Republicans and Democrats to minimize U civilian casualties so actually
319. U.S. casualties, rather, to minimize civilian casualties of people abroad in these U.S. wars.
320. And Trump is breaking with all of that. Trump is saying not only is he and his, you know,
321. Secretary of Defense and other officials emphasizing what they call the lethality of the U.S. war machine.
322. But when U.S. troops are killed, as they have been in this latest war in Iran, Trump basically says he doesn't care about it.
323. So it's a different mode of talking about these things.
324. Why do you think he is operating in this different mode?
325. I think that there is an authoritarian project that Trump is really running with and really trying to, again, use a different kind of mode of rule, at the heart of which is coercion through violence.
326. You know, I get what I want and I get it through violence.
327. and that is true in terms of what he is doing domestically
328. and that is true in terms of what he's doing in terms of foreign policy as well
329. and especially what he's doing with the U.S. military.
330. And so the way that he talks about negotiating, in quotes, with Iran,
331. he always talks about it in the context of threats.
332. You know, Iran better come to the table or I will end the civilization.
333. You know, they'd better agree to this or else.
334. You know, Iran is very close to a deal because we have used so much violence against them. That is really the whole kind of ethos, which is a different approach. I mean, you know, a different rhetorical approach than his predecessors.
335. Biden and Obama also had U.S. sanctions on Iran and other ways of enacting pressure on Iran.
336. But they emphasized the diplomacy and kind of minimized the hard power they were using, whereas Trump is emphasizing the hard power.
337. He thinks that that's the way that he gets what he wants.
338. And would you – just one last thing on this point. Would you say that it's – in any way something we sort of talked about in the last segment, that it's an attempt to also normalize neoliberal fascism by just being so in your face about it in the rhetoric and the way that things are talked about?
339. Sure. I mean, you know, so first of all, fascism, I mean, all forms of authoritarianism, but fascism in particular really requires, it relies on the kind of conspicuous, spectacular use of violence and absolutely the normalization of armed force.
340. And that is taking many forms. Certainly, for example, the deployment of National Guard in Washington, D.C. I mean, they've tried to do it elsewhere, but have gotten away with it most extensively in Washington, D.C.
341. That is about normalizing for Americans the notion that soldiers should just be on the street.
342. You know, the way that they have put ICE and other federal agents in military uniforms, even if they're not in the formal military, but they put them in military uniforms and give them military weapons and let them use military tactics in Minneapolis and Chicago and elsewhere is about normalizing a certain kind of violence.
343. absolutely. And we have to remember too that Trump's entire career really relies on spectacle.
344. It relies on image. It relies on brand.
345. Folks will be familiar with the various ways that that's happening.
346. We know that there's a UFC fight happening at the White House lawn today, which is all about spectacle and presenting a certain image that is just pregnant with all kinds of notions of masculinity and patriarchy and violence and force and et cetera, et cetera.
347. But all those things are things that Trump thinks a lot about.
348. And the question of military violence in that is absolutely central.
349. Well, and one of the other things that you importantly point out about how Trump is just speaking so openly about U.S. militarization and violence in a way that is normalizing neoliberal fascism, that you also point out that oftentimes when he's talking about U.S. military power,
350. what matters more to him than the actual facts is the story he decides he wants to tell that
351. actually don't line up with the facts that diverge from reality. Can you walk us through
352. where some of his stories that he puts out about U.S. militarization and violence actually diverge
353. from reality? Yeah, absolutely. And again, this continues with that whole kind of spectacular use
354. of violence and of the display or the demonstration of violence, which in many ways is as much
355. the point as actually achieving whatever goal or more the point, you know, than achieving
356. whatever goal is the sort of stated goal.
357. There's so many examples of this.
358. I mean, last year when the U.S. joined Israel in that war, the 12-day war last summer on
359. Iran, the U.S. joined by using its B-2 bombers to bomb Iran. Then Trump declared that Iran's
360. nuclear program had been absolutely obliterated. He made this declaration before the U.S. planes
361. had even returned to the United States. There was simply no possible way for anybody to evaluate
362. the extent of the damage the U.S. carried out in Iran. There was no way for U.S. intelligence to
363. do it. There was no way for US satellites to do it. It was simply not possible, but that didn't
364. matter. The point was not whether those facilities were obliterated or not. And it has been
365. abundantly evident that they were not. I mean, literally, the current war is justified in,
366. among other ways, as stopping this nuclear program that was supposedly obliterated last
367. summer, right? So evidently it wasn't obliterated, but that wasn't the point. The point wasn't
368. actually destroying it. The point was being able to claim that it was because that is the awesomeness
369. of U.S. power. And then similarly, I will refer again to the deployment of National Guard in
370. Washington, D.C. Trump says, you know, before the National Guard, D.C. was this crime-ridden place.
371. It was totally unsafe. And now that the National Guard is there, there is no crime. You know,
372. it's totally over. Again, this is not about a statistical reality. This is about telling a story.
373. And what's the impact of that? I mean, why is that important for us to know? And what is the
374. impact of Trump telling these stories that actually diverge so much from reality?
375. I think that's a really good question.
376. I think that's a really good question.
377. I think that's a really good question.
378. You know, one of the, at the risk of getting too kind of heady or philosophical, I do think
379. that there is this kind that one of the projects of the Trump administration is actually to really destabilize for all of us notions of reality I mean if we remember if we can remember back to the first Trump administration we had this notion
380. This is when he introduced the notion of alternative facts and fake news.
381. You know, the notion that what you know to be true, what you know, the things that you know that are actually happening, you're wrong.
382. You know, that's fake news. That's alternative facts.
383. And so to be able to say to a population, you know, this thing that you are upset about, you know, that's outraging you, whether it is the, you know, assault on your neighbors who are migrants and deportation and so on, whether it is the economy and the ways that is impacting you or the things that this country is doing abroad.
384. You're actually wrong about all those things.
385. And so that's part of it is Trump is elevating this notion of storytelling in a way that kind of makes us all question reality.
386. Even for those of us, you know, who are so critical of what he says and how he says it, when Trump says, I will end the civilization tonight, you know, I mean, speaking for myself and folks who I work with, we didn't want to believe what he was saying, but we said, OK, I guess we better tune in at 8 to see what he's doing.
387. And again, that is the point. He has achieved the purpose, which is having us sort of look at the world on his terms or try to see it through his lens. And so we really have to actively resist that.
388. Coming to you from the studios of listener-supported KPFK in Los Angeles, this is Middle East in Focus.
389. I'm Negwa Ibrahim.
390. Very happy to be joined by Curry Peterson-Smith, the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow and the co-director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
391. We're talking about how Trump is exposing the deeply unpopular and undemocratic reality of U.S. foreign policy and what anti-war organizers must do to seize this moment to build the movements we need against escalating U.S. militarization.
392. I want to turn now more specifically to Iran and Lebanon.
393. Can you discuss how the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran and Lebanon have actually been the culmination of years of aggressive and devastating policies and military actions spanning multiple administrations and how Trump's role fits into this longer arc, both in terms of actual actions he's been taking as well as the ways in which he's been talking about it publicly?
394. Yeah, this is so important because both in the ways that the U.S.-Israeli wars in Iran and Lebanon are discussed in the media here, as per usual in the mainstream media, they're discussed without context.
395. I mean, this is when we're talking about Lebanon, for example, the current Israeli invasion.
396. I mean, Israel is currently occupying whole swaths of southern Lebanon and forcibly depopulating villages, bombing Beirut and bombing other cities, carrying out all kinds of violence there.
397. And the fact is, this is actually not the first Israeli invasion.
398. Israel's invaded Lebanon multiple times since 1978.
399. And by the way, that first Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 was before the existence
400. of Hezbollah.
401. I mean they justifying the current invasion by saying we have to disarm and stop Hezbollah But Hezbollah didn exist actually during the first Israeli invasion And actually when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 that was the context for the emergence of Hezbollah really It emerged as a force that was fighting the U or I sorry Israeli invasion then
402. So that context is just really important and it tends to be missing. And then we're talking about Iran. You know, the U.S. has has carried out all kinds of violence, both kind of direct military violence and the violence of economic sanctions on Iran for decades.
403. I mean, that's the context. I mean, you know, at the risk of a kind of really superficial sketch of history, the U.S., the very first CIA operation to, you know, be part of overthrowing a government took place in Iran in 1953 against the democratically elected government that sought to nationalize Iran's oil.
404. So, you know, U.S. intervention goes back at least to then. And then since 1979, the U.S. has had economic sanctions on Iran after its revolution in which it seized American staff of the U.S. embassy because that embassy was so closely associated with the U.S. back regime that was overthrown in the Iranian revolution.
405. And so generations of Iranians have grown up under U.S. economic sanctions, which have been absolutely devastating for this country.
406. This is extremely important context because there's this notion that Iran constitutes this threat to the United States when, in fact, it's Iranians who've been suffering for decades because of U.S. policies.
407. So I want to get to this last question because we only have a few minutes left.
408. And, you know, one of the things that I so much appreciated about your op-ed is something that I've often talked about myself, which is that, you know, Trump's public glorification of the U.S. war machine, you know, actually is actually lifting the veil and exposing the truth about U.S. militarization that have always been there but carefully hidden.
409. And that's what we've been talking about in this last half hour. Why does it matter that Trump is putting the horror of U.S. militarization on display in a way we've never seen before, but that has always sort of existed in terms of U.S. atrocities abroad?
410. And how can anti-war organizers use this to build awareness and further outrage to expand on the movements that we need to be building on against escalating U.S. militarization?
411. I mean, this is the key question, right? You know, I just think about the past several years as such a time of revelation of all kinds of forms of oppression for so many Americans. I mean, just let's go back to the whole kind of wave of Black Lives Matter struggle, in particular, the culminating wave in 2020, the uprisings against the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
412. So many people in this country who either didn't really know that anti-black racism was real or didn't know how extensive it is, saw those things and were horrified by them and then came to see, oh my goodness, this is not just the murder of these two people by the police.
413. there's something much deeper that has much deeper roots than this particular moment,
414. but actually goes back to, you know, throughout the history of this country. And it's kind of
415. rooted in not kind of it deeply rooted in the founding of this country It forced people to simultaneously take action for black lives but also raise major questions The Gaza genocide I think for so many people
416. you know, in a country where we are told that the question of Palestine and justice for Palestinians
417. is simply too complicated to understand. The Gaza genocide has clarified for many Americans
418. who have not only been, again, outraged by this particular phase of genocide,
419. but have raised those questions of why is Israel the U.S.'s ally anyway?
420. Oh my goodness, is it true that this is how much the U.S. has been giving in military aid to Israel
421. for all of these years and decades?
422. And so now Trump continues the revelation.
423. And I think that we should actually, as horrifying as this moment is,
424. we should be heartened by the fact that when Trump speaks in such grotesquely violent terms,
425. I will end the civilization. The response to that is not a rallying behind him. The response is actually Americans recoiling and saying, this is too much. This is bad. I don't support this. The war is unpopular, not popular.
426. I mean, Trump is counting on the notion that we are as violent and racist and nihilistic as he is.
427. And polls and people's actions indicate that that's not true, that actually Americans want something different.
428. And this is opening up possibilities that we really have to grapple with.
429. I mean, those of us who are working to end this war and working to end the Gaza genocide really need to appreciate the fact that the majority of Americans are cutting with us.
430. That's historic. I mean, it's simply never, ever happened regarding Palestine. Never have the majority of people in this country sympathized or been in solidarity with Palestinians in these numbers.
431. And never, to my knowledge, I'd love to be corrected, has there been a war that is this unpopular at its beginning. I mean, before the war even started, the war, the majority of Americans were opposed to it.
432. And that is leading to all kinds of things, including votes in Congress, you know, where Democratic members of Congress are voting against sending weapons to Israel, are voting for war powers resolutions regarding the war in Iran.
433. Things that have not, simply have not been part of the landscape in these two plus decades of post 9-11 wars.
434. And so this affords us enormous new opportunities.
435. And with those opportunities come responsibilities that we really need to seize.
436. Thank you so much, Curry Peterson-Smith, for joining us today on Middle East in Focus.
437. I'm so grateful, Nagwa.
438. Thank you.
439. I want to thank our fantastic engineer, Irene.
440. You have been listening to Middle East in Focus.
441. Thank you so much for tuning in.
442. Our theme song is The Overture from Summer Night's Dream by Marcel Khalife.
443. For Middle East in Focus, I'm Nagwa Ibrahim, wishing you all light, love, peace, and justice.
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