Déjà Vu All Over Again: The War Began As I Flew Out of Dubai En Route to New York

We made our connection in the knick of time at Dubai Airport. As we stood in line to board the Airbus A380 behemoth, the only thing that was irksome was the final security check we were subjected to in the lounge. A prerequisite before entering fortress America. Having made many trips between New York and Hyderabad, I was used to this drill.

I was returning to Brooklyn after three weeks in India. This time with a heavy heart. My mother had suddenly left the planet and I was finding it difficult to come to terms with it. Becoming an orphan at any age is not easy. You feel like your arms have been severed.

As the pilot announced we will be cruising at 39,000 feet, we settled in for the fifteen hour flight. I hoped to pass my time between sleeping, reading a book and concluding the Apple TV show “Tehran” on my laptop.

As I watched the final episode of season three, where the protagonist manages to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, with her handlers at the Mossad remotely helping her achieve this noble goal, I felt the show had lost its way. Even though it had started with much promise, it had become an overcooked Hollywood trope.

My eyes drifted to the screen above showing the graphic of the plane in mid air, the flight path taking us through Iraqi airspace on to JFK. To its right was Iran, almost three times its size and I wondered if we were avoiding its airspace as America had moved its warships into the Persian Gulf and talk of another senseless cooked up war was in the news.

Moments later, BBC news lit up multiple screens across the deck. The headline read “US-Israel strike Tehran.”

I would find out later that a missile or drone struck Dubai airport, not far from the very gate we boarded, a few hours after we were in the air. As we cleared Iraqi airspace I presume the firing had begun below us.

The last time the United States launched an unprovoked and unwarranted war, was in 2003. I was working at ABC News as an editor for their flagship News Magazine shows Primetime, 20/20 and Nightline.

I watched in horror as mainstream legacy media, broadcast and print, fell in line, beating the war drums, lock step with a deceiving administration, as they prepared to drop bombs on a nation which had done nothing to be on the receiving end.

The warmongers had fabricated a story about “weapons of mass destruction” while itching to use them on innocent brown Muslim people, just because a dictator was ruling over them and he was easy to turn into a boogyman. They wanted to show to their people that they were doing something in response to an attack on their soil, which had never happened before since they were protected by two oceans.

The few journalists who spoke up, like Dan Rather, were cancelled. The rest became imbedded reporters and made their careers from a bloody war zone.

Brother in Arms

A documentary I edited back then for Primetime, titled “Brother in Arms,” showed first hand, American marines killing innocent Iraqi civilians with impunity. The film also showed young American teenagers who found themselves on the battlefield shell shocked and traumatized. They were trained to become war machines and deployed to kill in the name of “protecting our way of life” and upholding “freedom,” at an age when they could barely think straight.

The documentary was not promoted. I don’t know if that was by design or by chance. It had one broadcast and then disappeared never to be shown again.

I edited a number of episodes for TV on the war during my tenure there. And as I kept going deeper into that rabbit hole, I lost all faith in the media and all those who I admired from a distance to be seekers of the truth and holding the powerful to account.

That war ended twenty years later spilling into Afghanistan and other places. The politicians who started it retired with full benefits and were never held responsible. The dead came home in flag draped boxes and the thousands who were massacred in their homeland had to pick up the pieces and move on with no justice or restitution.

The military industrial complex was the ultimate winner of that war.

Now America is back at it again. Bombing another nation in the Middle East, one that has been its sworn enemy for decades. The theocracy that emerged after America’s plans for Iran failed, has brutalized its own people for almost half a century and has brainwashed the faithful by framing America and Israel as the monsters who posed an existential threat.

This time the administration is angry with the legacy broadcast media, as they are not beating the war drums. The threat of revoking their operating license is being used to coerce them to sanitize the war for the American audience.

The war was launched with brazen disregard for congress and the American people. The charade of seeking approval was dispensed with, angering the media and others who still expect this administration to adhere to norms.

Also, the president and his minions have made it their strategy to attack all media that is not in their favor as “fake”. So threatening them was the next logical step for a government that has lost all credibility with the majority of the population.

Avenging Iran for what it did in 1979, by holding Americans hostage for 444 days, has been on every President’s mind since Jimmy Carter. There were hawks, like John Bolton, within Republican administrations, who were eager to carpet bomb Iran at a moment’s notice. Sensible minds always erred on the side of caution as everyone knew what a quagmire it could become. Plunging the Middle East into calamity causing oil prices to spike impacting global economic stability. 

So the goal was always to cripple Iran with sanctions and keeping their nuclear ambitions restrained by threats. The sanctions made the lives of Iranian citizens dire, while the regime flourished and spent all its resources preparing for war and funding its proxies in the region.

America has lit the fuse, and in just a year and a few months has demonstrably demolished global peace and order. The new order seems more hopeless than ever.

President Obama, employed diplomacy, to bring Iran into the fold and at the same time stem its nuclear threat. In 2015 the JCPOA treaty was negotiated, which would not only end their weapons program over time but would also bring much needed relief to the ninety million Iranians. Clearly this was no magic bullet, but it was a step in a constructive direction. An alternative to war, mass murder and destruction.

Unfortunately, the American people had different plans. They decided to elect an incompetent leader who tore up that agreement and has now reneged on his promise of no new wars, to probably start the most consequential conflict in a generation.

Coterie of “Yes” Men

The world had barely recovered from COVID and now has been thrust into another economic crisis by the whims of the most unstable, unsuitable, unhinged and unqualified leader the world has ever known. He along with his coterie of mediocre “yes” men (Jared Kushner, Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff and Pete Hegseth) have thrust the world into disarray with a war of escalation and no off ramp. They have changed the Middle East forever and have exposed the fragility of alliances that needed to be cultivated and respected and not discarded.

The other faithful partner in this fiasco is Bibi Netanyahu, the most extremist Prime Minister Israel has ever produced. He has been harboring a desire to bomb Iran for almost forty years. Framing Iran as an existential threat of our time, he has made it his life’s mission to destroy the clerical regime who have chanted “Death to Israel and Death to America” as their policy of provocation and indoctrination. He finally found the perfect leader in the White House to bend to his will, getting the green light to unleash the wrath of his American financed arsenal.

The futile hope of disappearing a regime by assassinating its leaders with missiles is a tactic Israel has tried and tested on Hamas over decades. It did not diminish them but probably led to the October 7th massacre and the unraveling of the world. An investigation into why Israel failed to protect its people on October 7th is being postponed as Netanyahu keeps his nation distracted in relentless war.

Israel also seems to be deploying the same scorched earth strategy they used in Gaza, on Iran.

But Iran is not Gaza and the IRGC is not Hamas. The IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guards Core) is a million strong, tasked with the singular mission of saving the theocracy at any cost, not Iran per se. While most Iranians despise the regime probably more than America and Israel, there is a sizable number that consider their Ayatollah a Shia prophet. They are now being radicalized even more by the falling bombs and the senseless mass murder they witness.

The young who want a free Iran have their back to the wall. One cannot start a revolution while breathing poison air and seeing reflections of a pulverized Gaza in their neighborhood. One cannot free a people with flying bombs and destruction of ancient cities and UNESCO sites and hollow words from the mouth of a western leader who is authoritarian and lacks credibility in most of the world. Bombing during the holy month of Ramadan sends a message of disrespect and disdain to the whole Islamic world.

No matter the brutality unleashed, change has to come from within, by the people who are not under siege by external powers.

The world currently seems to be adrift and rudderless. The UN has been defanged. Its statements asking for peace and restraint fall on deaf years. Might is right, seems to be the doctrine of our times. Rogue nations are unrestrained to bomb with impunity with disregard for civilian life and infrastructure. Russia set the stage with its invasion of Ukraine. Now America has followed through with its aggression of choice. They even went so far as to not to call it a “war,” but an “operation” deploying Russia’s much maligned playbook.

Burning buildings and oil fields in war zones, add gigantic amounts of carbon to the atmosphere, offsetting any progress made by renewable energy to save the planet. A bleak future seems to be confronting the earth as nations no longer seem to be cooperating on anything as global warming is treated as a hoax by retrograde leaders.

America has lit the fuse, and in just a year and a few months has demonstrably demolished global peace and order. The new order seems more hopeless than ever.

America celebrates 250 years of its existence this year. We also commemorate the 25th anniversary of that ill-fated day when my world as a New Yorker was turned upside down as planes crashed into buildings a few miles from my home. As I watch buildings being pulverized in Beirut, Tehran and Gaza and dust clouds below as concrete collapses, I remember that September day in horror and have empathy for those experiencing similar trauma, as their families perish in a senseless war.

I cannot not ignore why 9/11 happened, and all the decisions America made in its past that got us to that diabolical moment.

With the dismantling of agencies like USAID and others that support humanitarian efforts around the world, that bought U.S. goodwill to offset the killing, America is in a precarious place in the eyes of the world.

Americans are less safe today than ever before.

On its 250th anniversary, America finds itself isolated and belligerent, a pariah, no longer the shining city on the hill.

After fifteen hours of being in the air, snow covered Long Island emerged through the clouds in my window. We were asked to fasten our seatbelts. I was relieved to be home. But there was also a sense of foreboding of what lay ahead, as the war escalates and my friends and family in India and the Middle East, are on the receiving end.

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Anand Kamalakar is a Brooklyn based documentary film director, producer and editor. His film OSBORNE will premiere on PBS nationwide this year.