Iran: a senator says he was briefed on a plan to resume the war

According to Al Jazeera, US Senator Chris Murphy claims to have been briefed on Donald Trump's plan to relaunch the war against Iran. The channel's headline picks up the word "insane", "insensé" in French, attributed to the plan. That is all the wire report gives us.

What we don't know: the content of the plan, its timetable, its objectives, what was said to the senators exactly, or even whether the decision has been taken. We won't invent anything. What remains is the structural question, and it is more interesting than the detail.

First point: senators are "briefed". They are not the ones who decide. The verb tells the whole story. The executive prepares, Congress is informed, sometimes shocked, rarely decisive. When one of them leaves the room calling it madness and the wire turns that into a headline, it shows where real power lies. One does not consult to obtain agreement; one informs to avoid surprise. Our reading: the state, here, works as an apparatus in which the executive core has wide latitude to escalate, while the chambers serve as an echo chamber and a guarantor.

Second point: cui bono? Let us be careful, since the report says nothing about motives. But the Leninist reading obliges us to ask the question. For Lenin, capitalism at the monopoly stage pushes the great powers to compete for investment, raw materials and spheres of influence. The Gazette's concept notes sum it up this way: sanctions, alliances and arms contracts are the political shell of these economic rivalries. The Middle East is a textbook arena: energy, sea lanes, customers for the arms industry. It remains to be established whether this particular plan serves those interests. Nothing in the report proves it. But that is where one must look, not in speeches about "stability".

Third point: the vocabulary. We will doubtless be told about deterrence, security, a rules-based order. Lenin already mocked those who imagine a non-violent, non-annexationist policy on the basis of finance capital: this was, in his view, bourgeois reformism that blunts contradictions instead of exposing them. Applied to today: believing that Congress, out of institutional virtue, will rein in a war is cut from the same cloth.

Senator Murphy, for his part, at least spoke. That is his role as an opponent, and it is to his credit. But a public alarm is not a counterweight. As long as the decision to go to war remains a matter for the cabinet, informing elected representatives will be a ritual, not a brake.

What to watch: the details other sources bring, the reaction of other senators, and above all who, in the arms and energy industries, would welcome a resumption of hostilities. As for the peoples, Iranian and American alike, they will pay the bill, as usual. They will then be asked to find it reasonable. (our translation)