OPINION: An unauthorized war with Iran exposes America’s colonizers and monarchists

It’s time to acknowledge the real regime change was done here in the United States, with a Republican-led Congress surrendering its power to billionaires and war hawks.

For all of the word salad being tossed out there about the significance of President Donald Trump unilaterally declaring war on Iran, the explanation is really rather simple if you don’t mind adding some old-timey terms back into your vocabulary: colonizers and monarchists. 

First, a little history lesson. When European Navies set sail to conquer various parts of the globe, it wasn’t something demanded by your great-great-great-great grandfathers, the blacksmiths (or farmers or woodsmen or even the soldiers). They just wanted to get through life with minimal levels of disease, death, and poverty. It was the comfortable men living high on the hills and in the capitals who wanted more power and riches — and they had no qualms about sending the farmer and/or his sons into their wars (or face execution). The pitch wasn’t a hard sell, though: You just had to tell them the “mongrels” or other boogeymen of the day needed to be vanquished and/or converted to Christianity and/or promise endless riches that would come from pillaging foreign lands.

Is it really that much different today? Cheap oil is now among the endless riches. Beyond that, the folks back home don’t really get a lot of benefit from these wars and conquests. The spoils are mostly enjoyed by the few who can bankroll the aftermath: a colony in Massachusetts, a resort strip in Gaza, oil facilities in Venezuela and the Middle East. If the end goal is extraction of wealth rather than putting autonomy, land, and resources back into the hands of its newly-liberated inhabitants, we’re not talking about liberators — we’re talking about colonizers.

Colonizers take it upon themselves to choose the puppets — that is, the rulers — who succeed the “bad guy” they overthrew. Nicolas Maduro rigged his last election in Venezuela. Why isn’t the rightful winner in charge, or a new election held? Why aren’t the people of Iran going to be given a say in their next leader anytime soon? Because colonizers are having a moment — and it’s okay, say some, because it’s being inflicted upon people who “aren’t like us.” This helps explain why Trump won’t lose sleep about violently targeting the Latino dictator in Venezuela and the Muslim dictator in Iran… while he embraces the white dictators Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban in Russia and Hungary. 

Sadly, some Americans don’t seem to mind being ruled by a dictator or a wannabe king as long as they’re going after the “others” with brown skin or “godless” religions or a view of gender and sexuality that doesn’t match what someone taught them was right and wrong. 

Too many Americans are willing to surrender the checks and balances that have been the centerpiece of American democracy since its foundation. Today, a president can launch wars with little to no congressional oversight over the American lives being risked and the financial cost we bear long after the bombing has ended.  

What do we call people who are good with all of this — good with an authoritarian ruler “taking the initiative and calling the shots,” checks and balances be damned? You might have answered, “MAGA.” Think more old-timey. The word we’re afraid to use is monarchists. 

Monarchists put their faith in a person rather than a Constitution, largely because they believe the head of state is always on their side — and anyone not in the king’s good graces deserves to suffer.

A former leader once welcomed immigrants? Too bad, we’re rounding them up. Someone else once said dissent is patriotic? Not anymore. Protests, once celebrated and protected, are now criminal acts, punishable by executions in our streets. 

Monarchs and colonizers hate dissent at home

Everyone who opposes the monarch is a threat: Somalis are all fraudsters — never mind the presidential pardons to a parade of white fraudsters. Muslims, in the eyes of the monarch, are all potential terrorists — never mind that the overwhelming amount of terror inflicted in America is done by white nationalists and anti-government goobers. 

But the protests against colonizers and monarchists aren’t happening out of thin air and certainly not because other rich guys are paying for it. (What a loser cop-out, Derrick Van Orden.) Protests are happening because we can read. We can read the Constitution. We can read the history books that remind us that causing the external overthrow of a government doesn’t mean you’ll be greeted as liberators by its subjects, who have to live with the chaos you brought to their doorsteps. And we can read the promises made by a guy who said, “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.”

Of course, he also promised to solve the war in Ukraine on Day 1, and to bring down prices on Day 1, and to release all of the Epstein files, so it’s easy to see why some of Trump’s own voters are now protesting someone who forgot the things he said, except for the part about being a dictator “for a day.” 

But like it or not, we have arrived in the era of regime change — not only Iran and Venezuela or the likely regime changes in Taiwan, Ukraine, and Cuba — I mean right here. The January 6 regime change of the United States of America has happened. Like the end of the Roman Empire, it didn’t happen in a single moment but with a lot of little declines over a longer period while the blacksmiths, farmers, and woodsmen shrugged at the nobility – the colonizers, the titular monarchs, and the members of Congress who willingly surrendered control to a single leader and his billionaire sponsors. 

I’m not saying we can’t reverse the trend, at least just enough to maybe keep American democracy hanging on through the rest of our lifetimes. But it’s not enough to state an opposition to oligarchy, we have to speed up the process where our neighbors recognize this new path is not a better one for us, the people. We have to help them understand that colonizers and monarchists might seem beneficial to them right now, but this kind of system has never helped the generations that follow.  Our grandchildren’s fates and freedoms are in danger unless we change course right now.

Before we allow our nation to further embrace the nonsensical braying of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a warrior only in the shallow world of basic cable TV, we would be wise to remember the words of one of America’s truest knights, General-turned-President Dwight Eisenhower, when it comes to truly defending freedom here at home: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

And perhaps there could be no greater theft from our grandchildren than to slash their food benefits, health care, and educational opportunities in order to fund yet another “Forever War.”