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Joshua Scheer
As the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran enters its second week, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges delivers one of the most blistering indictments yet of the political class steering the conflict. In a wide‑ranging conversation on MEE Live, Hedges argues that the war is not simply a strategic blunder — it is the latest symptom of an empire collapsing under the weight of its own delusions, corruption, and incompetence.
Hedges describes the Trump administration as “a lawless world led by idiots,” a government run by “grifters, con artists, and Christian fascists” who wield the U.S. military with no understanding of the region, no coherent strategy, and no grasp of the consequences. Trump, he says, has become “Netanyahu’s useful idiot,” green‑lighting a war Israel has lobbied for over decades — a war every previous U.S. administration, Democrat or Republican, refused to start because they understood the catastrophic risks.
The result is a conflict with no off‑ramp, no public mandate, and no strategic logic. Hedges warns that Iran — a nation the size of Western Europe with 90 million people — is not Iraq, not Libya, not Yemen. It is capable of inflicting serious damage on U.S. bases, Gulf infrastructure, and Israeli targets. And as the Strait of Hormuz remains threatened, the global economy edges closer to crisis, raising the specter of wider escalation involving Russia and China.
Hedges draws sharp parallels to Iraq: the recycled lies, the cartoonish caricatures of the enemy, the same neocon ideologues who were never held accountable for past disasters and now reappear on cable news to demand another. But this time, he argues, the empire is too hollowed out to correct course. The institutions that once restrained presidential power — Congress, diplomacy, international law — have been gutted. What remains is brute force, propaganda, and a political class that mistakes violence for strategy.
The war, Hedges says, is not just a geopolitical miscalculation. It is a sign of a system in terminal decline — one that “no longer functions as a mechanism capable of making rational decisions based on verifiable fact.” And the longer it continues, the more dangerous it becomes for the U.S., Israel, and the world.
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