Charlottesville Virginia’s City Council voted Monday evening to adopt a resolution opposing war on Iran and urging passage by Congress of Senator Tim Kaine’s privileged resolution.
The City Council re-affirmed the position it had taken in 2012 in passing a resolution against war on Iran.
The latest threat of war on Iran is particularly Trumpian, but it has also been in the works for decades. Many in the U.S. government have wanted to attack Iran since 1979, and the Shah’s son has been waiting that long for the United States to put him in power.
Iran was on the Pentagon’s target list in 2001. There was a huge push for war on Iran in 2007 that was stopped in large part by public pressure. There was another huge push in 2015, blocked by the nuclear agreement that is usually misunderstood as having restrained Iran rather than the United States.
Now Congress has refused to impeach for wars and threats of nuclear war, has stripped out of the National Defense Authorization Act the ban on war on Iran that was contained in the House version, has given Trump more military funding even than he asked for — and numerous Congress Members of both parties accused Trump of weakness toward Iran last week.
Trump’s latest act of war is murderous, reckless — possibly puting the race to war beyond Washington’s control — and predictable. It is also criminal, violating Iraqi laws against murder and war, violating the United Nations Charter, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the U.S. Constitution.
The normalization of murder bestowed on us by the Obama years will not end well and must urgently be reversed. Congress must not only specifically and redundantly ban this particular war, but it must also impeach for this and similar more significant offenses than Russiagate and Ukraine.
It must also end the sanctions and hostility toward Iran, withdraw troops from and make reparations to the region for the past 17 years of destruction, end weapons sales to the Middle East, and commit to abiding by the rule of law. Without this sort of reversal, we risk a catastrophe that will make the endless wars that have led up to it look insignificant.
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We are no longer content with placing dictators in the countries we want destroyed as we now do our dirty work ourselves in the Middle East. America doesn’t have a moral genius like Twain or Martin Luther King Jr or Victor Hugo or Tolstoy to save us from the plague of war and our own destruction. War with Iran would be a terrible continuation of military madness. I tell my children there is hope in that Germany recovered from the throes of dictatorship after paying a terrible price. We can do the same and rejoin the community of nations.
The text:
WHEREAS, the Charlottesville City Council adopted a resolution on January 17, 2012 requesting the United States Congress refrain from entering new military ventures in Iran; and
WHEREAS, on January 3, 2020, Iranian General Qasem Soleimani died as a result of a United States military action; and
WHEREAS, on January 3, 2020, United States Senator Timothy M. Kaine introduced a Senate Joint Resolution to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran that have not been authorized by Congress.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by the Council of the City of Charlottesville that it requests the United States Congress to refrain from entering new military ventures in Iran and to adopt the Senate Joint Resolution introduced by Senator Timothy M. Kaine.