Our President after World War Two:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

Eisenhower said this in 1953. Every word of it applies today. The kicker is that our situation is compounded by seventy years of choosing bombs over bridges.

Since 1990, the United States has launched military operations in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Venezuela. That is eleven countries in thirty-five years. One new war every two to three years, many running at the same time. None of them ended the way we were told they would.

Iran makes twelve.

Another war. Another country full of civilians under siege. Another set of children who will grow up under American ordnance and be told it was for their own good.

This is Operation Epic Fury. The name itself tells you everything about who these people think they are. It has cost $779 million in its first 24 hours and over $5 billion in its first four days. It is the largest US military deployment in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Congress did not authorize it. The bombs continue to fall.

We are not at war with Iran because Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. We were conducting diplomacy. We are at war with Iran because Israel needed us to be at war with Iran. The $3.8 billion we send them every year, the largest military aid package in American history, was not enough.

This is what democracy looks like when the war machine is the one driving.

Here is what the Iron Cross looks like now:

  • A single B-21 Raider costs roughly $750 million. That is an entire public university system’s annual budget
  • A single Tomahawk missile costs $2 million. That is a fully staffed community health clinic for a year
  • The United States spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined. We still can’t guarantee clean water in every American city, and every winter someone will die because of a power outage.

The FY2026 defense budget is $1.01 trillion. According to the National Priorities Project, that same money could simultaneously fund:

  • Health insurance for all 4 million uninsured children
  • Affordable housing for all 3.9 million Americans facing eviction
  • Housing for all 653,000 people experiencing homelessness
  • Four-year scholarships for all 3.9 million high school graduates
  • Replacing every lead pipe in the country
  • 350,328 nurses — enough to fill the entire national shortage
  • Repairing all 46,000 structurally deficient bridges
  • Modernizing the power grid so it stops killing people every winter
  • Erasing all medical debt for 20 million Americans

All of it. At the same time. Total cost: roughly $950 billion — still less than the military budget.

This is not security. This is the largest transfer of public wealth into private destruction in human history. It has been happening so long that we have confused it for normalcy.

There is no version of bombing Iran that makes your life better. There is no version of this war that fixes the roads, funds the schools, or keeps the hospitals open. There is no version where the people who start these wars bear any of the cost.

The people who will pay for this war are the same people who always pay: working families who send their kids, taxpayers who fund the bombs, and the defender civilians who always bear the most. It is their cost that guarantees we will be back to fight their sons and daughters.

Eisenhower was a five-star general. He led the invasion of Normandy. He was not a pacifist. He was a man who understood exactly what war costs because of his experience.

The defense budget has roughly doubled in real terms since he gave that speech. He warned us about the military-industrial complex, and we built it twice as large and then handed over the keys.

The United States is still hanging from that cross of iron. The only thing that has changed is that the cross is bigger, the iron is more expensive, and the ones nailing us to it call themselves saviors.