SMART PEOPLE DON’T

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

Smart people don’t believe that
the United States rides in to save the day,
waving flags of freedom while bombs fall like rain,
turning cities to rubble in the name of democracy.

Smart people don’t swallow tales
of soldiers dying for noble causes, when the orders
come from boardrooms and think tanks, and the dead
 and injured are just numbers on someone’s ledger.

Smart people don’t imagine women’s rights blooming
from drone strikes and invasions, when the perpetrators
arm tyrants who oppress their people, and the truth
vanishes under the roar of precision-guided lies.

Smart people don’t expect flowers and parades
after governments are toppled, when chaos births
power vacuums that breed new monsters, all while
oil contracts are quietly signed without fanfare.

Smart people don’t trust the official story
spun by the same mouths that sold previous wars
with doctored intelligence about WMDs, then shrugged
when the graves of the innocent were being dug.

Smart people don’t see cartoon heroes
in camouflage and stars-and-stripes, pitting flawless
“good” against cartoonish “evil”, while the real
ledger dripping in blood, records huge profits.

Smart people don’t pretend that
Washington’s hands are cleaner than Tehran’s,
when both crush dissent and both count bodies,
yet only one controls the global headlines.

Smart people don’t gorge on atrocity porn
served up fresh each morning, without asking
who benefits from the latest horror, or why stories
about the other side’s victims and orphans are never told.

Smart people don’t accept “self-defence” 
as a legitimate excuse for waging war, when the
battlefield is thirteen thousand kilometres away, and
the threat is a lie manufactured in briefing rooms.

Smart people don’t buy compassion
from a man-child who destroys democracy at home,
while preaching freedom to distant populations, as if
the cruelty he inflicts abroad is invisible to his own people.

Smart people don’t march to war
because ancient scripture says they should, or because
one patch of desert is part of one people’s prophecy, and
those on that land are bled for another people’s faith.

Smart people don’t weigh
an Iranian life less than an American one,
as if geography and complexion decides whose blood 
has value, and whose screams of terror deserve only silence.



Smart people don’t look at a military machine
and see a global charity, when its legacy is
annihilation, mass graves, and repeated atrocities,
and its mission is domination dressed as deliverance.

Smart people don’t expect democracy to grow from
bombing foreign lands, when history shows that
occupation breeds resentment and revenge, and 
puppet leaders show their strings being pulled by the US.

Smart people don’t cheer a war that fattens the
wallets of defence contractors and shields a genocidal ally,
while the people it claims to be saving pay a price 
in blood, and the rest of us are told to look away.

Smart people don’t mistake a fading fascist empire’s mask
for a saviour’s face, when the arc of its history bends
toward control, and it only values freedom in order
to pursue its own imperial agenda.



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