The Lead

What Brutes Are These Who Call For—or Stumble Into—Nuclear War?

by Megan Dobrodt (EIRNS) — Mar. 10, 2026

“O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason."—Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2

It should be no surprise that just days after a majority of the U.S. Congress abrogated its Constitutionally-mandated duty to decide whether or not the nation goes to war, an op-ed appeared in The Hill, a newspaper delivered to the office of each and every member of Congress, insisting that hitting Iran with nuclear weapons is a viable—and even necessary—next step.

“That was pure shock and awe,” proudly writes author Harlan Ullman of the nuclear bombing of Japan, “And only nuclear weapons could produce that. The lesson is clear. Strategic bombing with conventional weapons has never worked. It did not work in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. It will not work in Iran.”

The factor of insanity is alive, well—and growing by the hour.

In a press conference on March 9 Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump flailed about in the face of Iran’s staunch unwillingness to roll over and give in, sometimes describing the Iran War as an “excursion” that is “very complete, pretty much,” and other times asserting that “we haven’t won enough.” Mirroring the brutality of Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth, Trump posted afterwards that if the Iranians don’t open the Strait of Hormuz, “Death, Fire, and Fury will reign upon them.” Hegseth, for his part, gave an interview to CBS News’ “60 Minutes” the night before, in which he said to expect more American casualties, and threatened, “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians who think they are going to live.”

What brutes are these who run amok in the halls of power? What brutes are we who elected them? And, the most important question: Will they be held accountable for their actions? As Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich warned: “Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. But, in the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military. We become addicted to the ‘spectacle’ of explosions. And the price of this habit is almost unnoticeable, as we become desensitized to the true costs of war…. I know that the American people are better than this.”

A hard-hitting statement of military and intelligence veterans published March 8 by the Eisenhower Media Network echoes Cardinal Cupich’s call for the better America: “The Trump administration’s policy (announced by Pete Hegseth) of ‘war without mercy’ is both unjust and un-American. In America’s proud ideal of the citizen soldier, this is not who we are. This war is not America first. This is not what we do.”

On Monday evening, independent candidate for U.S. President Diane Sare hosted an emergency activists’ call, declaring, “Only the American People Can Stop This War,” to mobilize the better angels of the American people. Sare was joined by Congressional and Senate candidates and other activists and leaders who called on the citizens to step up and stop this illegal—and perhaps fatal—war. “We are in a paradigm-shift,” said Sare. “Centuries of an imperial system that treats human beings as animals, with some born to rule and others born to serve, is at its end. It is bankrupt. It is finished. All they have left is terror and force. There is a new system coming into being, and they are determined to stop it, and that’s what this is about…. So, what you do, what we do, matters. And don’t count on so-called Washington. It is up to the citizens right now.”

If the logic at hand is allowed to play out, we will almost certainly find ourselves as having gone along with our own tragic extinction. History is made, and human progress secured, when we have the courage, morality, and insight to break from the axioms that brought us here. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called for just that in her open letter to Pope Leo XIV, which must be circulated widely: “Millions of ordinary people are asking in total despair, what can be done to change the course of history, when many governments, especially in the West, are obviously incapable of fulfilling their obligation to avoid damage to the people they are responsible for?… If, as a first step, the Churches of the West and the East would unite and campaign actively and daily for world peace, this could affect the majority of people to express their commitment for peace and thus cause a change in world history and fulfill the will of God, who for sure did not create the world and gift humanity with reason, to have it destroyed by the lack of it.”