By Judy Bello, July 1, 2026
Margaret Kimberly wrote a thoughtful and well researched piece showing a vicious response by many congressional Democrats to the U.S. Iran MoU and the negotiations to end the war. I’m glad Margaret followed up since I had not had a chance to listen to Congressional responses to the current disaster in the Middle East, disappointing but not surprising as they were. And I agree with her conclusion that the Democrats are no different from the Republicans in their stance towards Iran. But, I started thinking that they are worse than hypocrites. There is another significant level on which they are interacting.
The first thing that came to mind when I read these responses was that I now understand Trump’s futile raging on Truth Social which threatens to undermine negotiations necessary to end a war that is doing serious damage to the United States and will crash the global economy if it continues. He was reacting to the congressional drubbing that was directed his way, and not to the rather nuanced process at hand. I’m sure the President wasn’t happy with this outcome in any case, but the Democrats are clearly rubbing salt in the wound at a time when they should be backing him up to do the right thing whether or not he or they want to do it.
But, more broadly, it seems to me that this reaction shows exactly the contradiction that undermines our Corporate Democracy, which privileges internal competition as well as external competition over constructive cooperation, even in a time of crisis when working together would be the only responsible option. In times of serious threat, a functional government should have some mechanism that encourages all parties to work together until the crisis has passed. But we have only more bitter and aggressive competition. The second party becomes like a cancer in the body politic. they are undermining their own team.
These so called Democrats know just as surely as the Trump administration that destroying the global economy is not a good idea. They also know that persistence in the current path will destroy the global economy, and our own as well. There is more than one way to lose a war. You can lose and then negotiate a respectful ending which cedes something to the winner but protects your core assets (the American people?) or you can fight on in the hopes that there will be no winners, taking down as many others as possible along the way.
But it isn’t only that the Democrats are just as bloodthirsty and aggressive as the Republicans; it is that they are competing internally while our attention should be focused on an external process. Like a cancer they are consuming the resources necessary for the body to survive. And clearly they know why the war has to end. If we know, they do. We lost because we are running out of weapons while the global economy is sinking into chaos. We lost because the Iranians are holding all the cards in their own region. We lost because the Iranians have been under continual threat for decades and they were prepared to protect their resources and to utilize them well. We lost because in their arrogance and hubris our leadership never noticed that Iran is a civilizational state at minimum ten time as old as our own infantile state.
And yet they persist. Maybe they are lost in denial and cannot confront the reality of their situation. Maybe the handful of oligarchs who will survive unscathed are more important than the majority of the global population including the U.S. population. Either way, it is truly despicable that they are willing to take this path while blaming Trump’s madness as an easy scapegoat. The good news is that these jerks will go down with the ship whether they know it or not. Maybe they are hoping to be “raptured” off to heaven. It seems to me the chances are slim.
When they blame the Republicans for a bad deal, I assume they are blaming them for entering the war at all. After all, it now seems clear that they would be no more likely to win than Trump and his Republican advisors. Even so, it took months or them to pass a War Powers Resolution to take back their power and put an end to the war. They know as does the Trump executive that we don’t have enough resources to win this war. Yet they continue to vote to send weapons to Israel, where they will be used to continue an ongoing genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, and to undermine any effort to negotiate an end to war with the Iranians.
Whether Trump should have embarked on this venture or not, today it is lost and the consequences most be dealt with by the entire nation, not just the executive. In that light, it is not appropriate for a large sector of our government to be deliberately undermining the process of resolution in the spirit of ‘democratic’ competition. If they didn’t like the way things are going, there should be a mechanism wherein they can elect one of their own as a participant. In fact there are mechanisms through which the could have ended this failed venture sooner. It is time to let go. And Congress has the power to make that happen if they stop messing around and do their jobs.
*Featured Image: They can impeach Trump but they can’t stop sending weapons to Israel. src: NYT Video
Judy Bello is a member of the UNAC Administrative Committee. She is the Administrator and Editor of a number of antiwar and anti-imperialist websites including this one, Sanctions Kill , Sovereignty Support for West Asia, Ban Killer Drones, One Democratic State of Palestine, Free Palestine Movement and others.