By John Catalinotto
March 13, 2026
The battle that started with the Feb. 28 U.S.-Israeli death machine’s unprovoked assault on Iran has in its first 11 days expanded to a regional conflagration and is moving at undetermined speed toward a world war.
Veterans For Peace offers assistance to GI dissenters.
Antiwar and anti-imperialist activists in the United States — in the entrails of the monster — have a special duty to do whatever they can to stop this war. And there is one area where they are in the best position to act, which is in reaching out to members of the U.S. military.
The first thing to make clear in planning this struggle is that the superrich ruling class in the United States and the racist reactionary regimes running the U.S. and Israeli oppressor states are the criminals responsible for the horrible consequences of the war. The antiwar movement must expose these crimes and aim to disrupt the criminals’ war machine.
Minimal popular support for war in the U.S.
Compared with the last six lengthy U.S. aggressive wars — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq 1991, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq 2003 — this potential “forever war” against Iran has the most opposition at home. The war against Iran opened with U.S. bombs and rockets killing over 150 schoolgirls in the city of Minab and Israel assassinating Iran’s supreme political and religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamanei on Feb. 28.
Before unleashing the conflagration, the MAGA regime made no effort to win support for the aggression, neither among the people nor Congress nor by adding international allies beyond the genocidal criminals running the Israeli settler state. The regime counted on the decades-long Big Lies demonizing Iran.
Since the opening massacre in Minab, reminiscent of the My Lai village burning in Vietnam in 1968, each MAGA cabinet toady and the unpopular U.S. president have given contradictory explanations of how the war started, how long it would continue, whether they would deploy ground troops and what was its goal. Their contradictory lies have only diminished their credibility.
Even before extensive casualties among U.S. troops have been reported, even before the $1 billion daily military cost of the U.S.-Israeli “war of choice” has hit home (csis.org), even before the war sparks a worldwide economic disaster, a majority of the U.S. population opposes the “forever war” that the administration unleashed.
A population who rejects the war can be mobilized to fight against it, just as the people of Minneapolis rejected the brutal mistreatment and murders of migrants and the migrants’ allies rejected the presence of ICE thugs.
If civilians oppose the war, it means troops may refuse to obey illegal orders. Reservist troops and active duty rank-and-file troops are workers in uniform. They will reflect the attitudes of their civilian peers –– but with their lives and limbs at stake.
Will U.S. troops resist war?
During the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, the resistance of U.S. troops to waging warfare contributed to the 1969 decision to slowly pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam and rely on bombing. It also led to ending the draft — military conscription — in early 1973 and the Pentagon’s decision to create over the next decades a high-tech, non-conscript military.
Even within the non-conscript military, some U.S. troops refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, although fewer than in the Vietnam period. After much cost, killing and destruction, U.S. troops were forced to retreat from the “forever wars.” (War Without Victory)
A 2017 book on GI resistance discusses how the U.S. can’t field a ground army big enough to conquer the Global South without breeding opposition at home and resistance among the troops. It gives examples of U.S. wars of aggression that may lead to a soldier’s rebellion: one the U.S. starts with “Russia, China, or even Iran or the [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea],” or if “the president orders federal troops to break workers’ strikes or repress rebellions in communities of color inside the United States.” (“Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolutions,” last chapter.)
And that’s exactly today’s scenario, from Tehran to Minneapolis.
If the MAGA regime orders U.S. ground troops into Iran, there’s little doubt the 93 million Iranian people will defend their 5,000-year-old civilization, a historical resistance the U.S. rulers underestimate. Regarding military intervention in U.S. cities, the people of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and other cities showed how working-class solidarity can surprise the Washington warlords.
Youth protest in Berlin against conscription, March 5, 2026. “Youth fight back” and “The rich want war, the youth want a future” on homemade signs.
One can hardly imagine the popular fury should the MAGA regime attempt to reinstate conscription, the hated draft. Youth in Germany are currently protesting German imperialism’s similar plans. (See German youth protest)
There is already evidence that the Pentagon has recorded casualties far beyond the seven U.S. troops officially admitted as dying in combat. That the U.S. military’s major hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, has already canceled labor and delivery health care (Military Times, March 5) shows that the Pentagon anticipates much heavier U.S. casualties.
Antiwar veterans organizations, like Veterans For Peace and others, have reached out to active-duty troops offering support for conscientious objectors. A leader of the Center on Conscience and War said their phones have been ringing off the hook since the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran began.
An announcement a few months ago by six Congressional Democrats that troops have the duty to disobey illegal orders has already spread in the ranks of soldiers. Whatever the motives of these elected representatives, who are all veterans of the military or CIA, no one can put that genie back in the bottle.
The MAGA warmongers may find out that their aggression against Iran has only accelerated the decline of U.S. imperialism.
