Everybody knows the story. In 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian terrorist, triggering World War I. All the great European powers had vowed to either attack or defend one another if something like that happened, so when this one man was killed, they all had to go to battle, destroying their whole world in the process.

It was tragic and senseless. A wrong turn allowed the assassin to get off an impossibly lucky shot. The Serbs were only four percent of the Austro-Hungarian population. Franz Ferdinand wasn’t even that important: he was just the heir presumptive to the Emperor Franz Joseph, who’d already disinherited his children.

Still, Germany and Russia and France and England and Italy (and later America) all piled on, with disastrous consequences. They annihilated a generation and toppled three dynasties. Bolshevism and Fascism both took root in the churned earth that followed. The rest of the 20th century and the present day owe their contours, their hatreds, and their nightmares to the carnage that ensued.

So it was kind of a a bad idea, right?

Well, everything old is new again, and we’re already seen another pandemic like 1918’s influenza, another Vietnam (we’ve actually seen quite a bunch), another stock market crash like 1929’s, and another great…uh, “recession” (just don’t call it a Great Depression, that’s too, er, depressing).

So I don’t know why I’m surprised at the spectacle of America risking its people and its economy and its standing and its power all over again for a war NOBODY WANTS.

That’s right. NOBODY was demanding we go to war with Iran except Bibi Netanyahu. True, Iran was and is an awful country. It’s led by people who have no compunction about killing their own citizens and meddling in the affairs of every other country in their region, stockpiling nuclear weapons and actually using them and…oh, wait a minute. That’s the U.S.A. I’m talking about.

Iran is just a dangerously unstable theocracy holding onto power by supporting Islamic rage by proxy. It’s a threat to the United States, but so are lots of other things. Russia. China. Rising oceans. Digital oligarchs. Disinformation. Food scarcity. AI misuse, and future pandemics.

It’s still too early to judge exactly what motivated our alleged leaders to go into this war, although a few things occur to me: pride, pique, aggrandizement, misunderstanding, profiteering, distraction, insider trading, or simple fantasy.

I just know this time we did it to ourselves. It didn’t take an inciting incident, because there wasn’t one. No crisis brought this call to arms. Nobody even bothered to lie to us about weapons of mass destruction.

No, we just shot Franz Ferdinand ourselves, and all I can do is quote Kyle Broflovski and say, “You bastards!”

XXX,

Adrienne V. Parks