Eleven days into the US-Israeli war against Iran, the Trump administration is openly using the language of genocide. In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Trump threatened the “end of Iran” and warned that “you’d never hear the name again” once he acts fully on his threats to destroy the country. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One Saturday, he defined his demand for “unconditional surrender” as “where… there’s nobody around to cry uncle.”
On Monday—one day after Trump stated, in the same CBS interview, that the war was “very complete”—Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised “yet again, our most intense day of strikes inside Iran: the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.” Just hours earlier, at least 40 people were killed in a US-Israeli bombing near Risalat Square in Tehran. The US military bombarded Iranian cities Tuesday night, as well as ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
The US-Israeli assault has killed at least 1,255 people and wounded more than 12,000. Two hundred children are among the dead, including more than 170 killed by a Tomahawk missile that struck a girls’ school in Minab. The Iranian Red Crescent reported 19,734 civilian structures damaged, nearly doubling in 24 hours. This includes 77 healthcare centers and 69 schools.
This criminal war of aggression is systematically enabled by the media and the Democratic Party, whose leaders have endorsed the murder of Iranian officials, provided political cover for the Trump regime and funded the war. Not a single Democratic leader, not a single major newspaper editorial, has called the war what it is: a war crime and a “crime against peace” under the Nuremberg precedent, the very crime for which Nazi leaders were hanged.
Reflecting the general attitude of the Democratic Party-aligned media, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ most influential foreign affairs columnist, wrote Tuesday that the war’s initial results are “good for the Iranian people, given how many have been killed by the regime controlling that power, and it is good for the region.”
Friedman’s declaration that the outcome of the war is “good” is the endorsement of an unprovoked war of aggression in violation of international law. The murder of Iran’s head of state under the guise of negotiations is the crime of perfidy under the Geneva Conventions. The extermination of more than 170 children in a school is a war crime under the Rome Statute. The torpedoing of an unarmed vessel whose crew was left to drown is a violation of the Second Geneva Convention.
Friedman ignores every one of these crimes. His sole concern is tactical. The “transformation of Iran”—that is, overthrow of its government and the installation of a regime beholden to American imperialism—“is so much more important than the war’s critics admit, but so much more difficult than the war’s designers understand,” Friedman writes.
“Trump and Netanyahu should take their military achievement and call it a day, at least for now,” Friedman advises, stating that this will create better conditions for the Iranian state to “break.”
Edward Luce, the Financial Times’ chief US commentator, advanced a similar line in a column published Tuesday, writing that Trump will confront a “self-inflicted dilemma” whatever the outcome of the war, and that “Anticipating this would have served Trump well.”
Luce presents a number of possible escalations, treating acts of imperialist violence as risky but conceivable “gambles.” The lives of Iranians do not enter the equation except insofar as they affect energy prices and “deterrence.” Luce concludes by stating, “One piece of damage that Trump cannot repair is to trust in America”—that is, the ability of American imperialism to wage war all over the world has been damaged.
On the broadcast networks and in the evening news, Trump’s genocidal statements are routinely passed over without comment—let alone condemnation—if they are reported at all. Threats to “end” Iran as a country and erase its very name are treated as just another soundbite, normalized as legitimate policy rather than exposed as incitement to mass murder.
The Democratic Party plays an even more direct role in enabling the war. The House Democratic leadership has endorsed the murder of Iran’s civilian leaders. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared on the Senate floor on March 2: “I will not shed a tear for Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, who was killed in the initial rounds of airstrikes.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared on Meet the Press last weekend that Iran’s leader “was a bad actor, and I’m not going to shed any tears as a result of his departure.”
Jeffries also signaled his openness to providing Trump with more money to wage the war: “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” The ritual is the same in every case: denounce Iran, praise the illegal murder of Iran’s civilian leadership, then complain about the process.
The Democrats have not only refused to condemn the war, they have armed it. In February, 21 House Democrats provided the decisive margin to pass a $1.2 trillion spending package that funded the military through September 2026, by a vote of 217-214, as Trump was surging US military assets to the Middle East in preparation for his attack on Iran. Schumer personally negotiated the deal with the White House. In the Senate, 23 Democrats voted yes.
Even as they endorse Trump’s criminal war, the Democrats’ main differences with the administration are questions of tactics—above all in relation to Russia. In recent days, a dominant theme in the statements of Democrats has been the claim that Russia is “interfering” by providing intelligence to Iran. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal declared on Tuesday, “Russia seems to be aiding our enemy”—a statement aimed at intensifying anti-Russian hysteria and laying the political groundwork for further escalation.
Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, writing in the Washington Post the same day, complained that “instead of tightening pressure on Moscow, this administration is moving in the opposite direction, with the U.S. Treasury Department offering Putin a green light to export previously sanctioned oil to India.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played her assigned role in the Trump administration’s war propaganda. On January 9—two days after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, in Minneapolis—she posted on X: “The Iranian government’s violent crackdown on demonstrators is horrific and must stop now.” At the Munich Security Conference in February, she repeated the administration’s claims that the Iranian government had killed “tens of thousands of people,” adding her voice to the propaganda barrage that preceded the attack on Iran.
On March 8, Ocasio-Cortez held a joint town hall in Glens Falls, New York, with Representative Pat Ryan, a former military intelligence officer and CIA Democrat whose career includes work for a Palantir subcontractor that proposed surveillance of left-wing activists. She did not mention the Iran war once.
The purpose of this massive propaganda onslaught is to combat and trample the mass popular opposition to the war. It underscores the fact that Trump is not acting as an isolated individual. He is the political representative of the capitalist oligarchy, which is resorting to the most criminal methods—war and extermination abroad, repression and dictatorship at home—to defend its wealth and global dominance.
At the same time, the war is massively unpopular. Polls show only 38 percent of Americans approve of the war against Iran, while 49 percent oppose it. The longer the war continues, the more its effects will be felt by the working class—in rising prices, in the threat of conscription, in the diversion of resources from social programs.
As David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS, stated at the emergency webinar on the war on March 8, “the United States will lose this war,” not only because of the resistance of the Iranian masses, “but more fundamentally, the very character of the war and the very contradictions that gave rise to it are also intensifying social contradictions in every capitalist country.”
This is a war waged not only against the people of Iran, but against the working class in the United States and internationally. The fight against imperialist war is inseparable from the struggle to defend and extend the social and democratic rights of workers everywhere and to build an independent movement of the working class against the capitalist system that produces war, austerity and dictatorship.