[First published by Middle East Eye]
It is near impossible to make sense – at least from the justifications on offer – of what US President Donald Trump really hopes to achieve with his and Israel‘s blatantly illegal war of aggression on Iran.
Is it to destroy an Iranian nuclear weapons programme for which there has never been any tangible evidence, and which Trump claimed just a few months ago to have “completely and totally obliterated” in an earlier lawbreaking attack?
Or is it intended to force Tehran back to negotiations on its nuclear energyenrichment programme that were brought prematurely to an end when the US launched its unprovoked attack – talks, we should note, that were made necessary because in 2018, during his first term, Trump tore up the original deal with Iran?
Or is the war supposed to browbeat Iran into greater flexibility, even though Trump blew up the talks at the very moment Oman, the chief mediator, insisted that Tehran had capitulated on almost every one of Washington’s onerous demands and that a deal was “within our reach“?
Or are the air strikes designed to “liberate” Iranians, even though the early victims included at least 165 civilians in a girls’ school, most of them children aged between 7 and 12?
Or is the aim to pressure Iran to give up its ballistic missiles – the only deterrence it has against attack, and which would leave it utterly defenceless against US and Israeli malevolent designs?
Or did Washington believe Tehran was about to strike first, even though Pentagon officials have confided to congressional staff that there was zero intelligence an attack was about to happen?
Or is the goal to decapitate the Iranian regime, as the strikes have already achieved with the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei? If so, to what purpose, given that Khamenei was so opposed to an Iranian nuclear bomb that he issued a religious edict, a fatwa, against its development?
Might Khamenei’s successor – having seen how utterly untrustworthy the US and Israel are, how they operate as rogue states unconstrained by international law – now decide that developing a nuclear bomb is an absolute priority to protect Iran’s sovereignty?
There is no clear rationale from Washington because the author of this attack is not to be found in either the White House or the Pentagon. This plan was cooked up in Tel Aviv decades ago.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, admitted as much on Sunday. He gloated: "This combined effort allows us to do what I have hoped to achieve for 40 years: to crush the regime of terror completely. That's my promise and this is what is going to happen."
Those four decades, let us note, were also the timeframe for an endless series of warnings from Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that Tehran was only months away from developing a nuclear bomb.
Netanyahu has been peddling this same urgent, nonsensical pretext for attacking Iran all that time. For 40 years, each year has been proclaimed the very last opportunity to stop the “mad mullahs” from obtaining a bomb – a bomb that never materialised.
And all the while, Israel’s own arsenal of nuclear weapons, undeclared and therefore unmonitored, has been an open secret.
Europe helped Israel develop its bomb, while the US turned a blind eye, even as Israeli leaders espoused a suicidal doctrine known as the “Samson Option“, which posited that Israel would rather detonate its nuclear arsenal than suffer a conventional military defeat.
The Samson Option implicitly rejects the idea that any other state in the Middle East can be allowed to acquire a bomb and thereby level the military playing field with Israel.
It is that very premise that, for decades, has guided Israeli policy towards Tehran. Not because Iran has shown an inclination to develop a weapon. Nor because its supposedly “mad mullahs” would be foolish enough to fire them at Israel were they ever to acquire them.
No, it was for other reasons. Because Iran is the largest and most unified state in the region, one with a rich history, a strong cultural identity and a formidable intellectual tradition. Because Iran has repeatedly shown itself – whether under secular or religious leaders – unwilling to submit to western, and Israeli, colonial domination.
And because it is looked to as a source of authority and leadership by Shia religious communities in neighbouring countries – Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen – that have a history of similarly refusing to bow to Israeli hegemony.
Israel’s fear was that, were Iran to follow North Korea and acquire a nuclear weapon, Israel would be finished as the West’s most useful militarised client state in the oil-rich Middle East.
Stripped of its ability to terrorise its neighbours, stoke sectarian division and help project US imperial power into the region, Israel would lose its rationale. It would become the ultimate white elephant.
Israeli leaders – grown fat on endless military subsidies paid for by US taxpayers and given licence to plunder the Palestinians’ resources – were never going to willingly step off their gravy train.
Which is why Iran has rarely been out of Israel’s sights.
The extent of Israel’s extraordinary deception over the case for war on Irancan be gauged by comparing it to the hoax perpetrated by the George W Bush administration in launching its invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Iraq was another strong military state – if one more inherently fragile because of its deep sectarian and ethnic divisions – that Israel feared could develop a nuclear capacity that would wreck its top-dog status.
In the build-up to this illegal war – again cheered on by Israel – Bush claimed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had large, secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that predated the introduction in 1991 of a United Nations weapons inspection regime.
The inspectors, who enjoyed extensive powers in Iraq, assessed that to be improbable. They also pointed out that, even had some of Iraq’s known chemical weapons eluded their inspections, they would by then have been so old as to have turned into “harmless goo“.
After the invasion, no WMD were ever found. Nonetheless, western politicians and media readily bought into the big lie. At least on that occasion, they could claim to have had only months to assess the credibility of the allegations.
In the case of Iran, by contrast, the politicians and media have had 40 years to investigate and weigh the plausibility of Israel’s claims. They should long ago have worked out that Netanyahu is an utterly unreliable narrator of a supposed Iranian “threat”.
And that does not even factor in that he is also a fugitive war crimes suspect who has spent more than two years lying about Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza. No one should trust a word that comes out of his mouth.
As with the ongoing eradication of Gaza, and the earlier occupation of Iraq, the current attack on Iran is another US-Israeli criminal co-production – in fact, a continuation of the same project.
The sales pitch is clear.
Netanyahu talks of wishing to “crush the terror regime”, just as he earlier spoke of “eradicating” Hamas in Gaza.
Trump similarly claims a defeated Iran is the key to a “totally different Middle East“. After the launch of air strikes at the weekend, he urged Iranians to overthrow their “repressive theocracy“ and build a “free and peace-seeking Iran”.
It is all designed to echo fantasies about engineering a new Middle East that Israel and its ideological agents in Washington – known as the neoconservatives, or neocons – have been peddling for more than a quarter of a century, since before the futile invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, spoke in 2006 of painful “birth pangs“ the region would have to endure while the US and Israeli militaries acted as midwife to this new era.
The first time around, the plan quickly came unstuck. US troops could not overcome fierce Iraqi resistance. Afghanistan was slowly recovered by the Taliban from its US and British occupiers. And Hezbollah dealt Israel a bloody nose when it tried to reoccupy south Lebanon in 2006.
Nonetheless, Round One was a horror show. It involved the mass slaughter of populations across the region by the US and Israel. Special US military black sites were established where torture flourished. International law was shredded. And the displacement of millions of people by war drove them towards Europe and stoked the rise of an anti-immigrant far right.
Round Two, which Israel and the neocons have been champing at the bit to start ever since, was always going to be even uglier.
Its moment arrived in late 2023 with Hamas’s lethal, one-day breakout from the Gaza concentration camp where Palestinians – some 2.3 million in number by that time – had been imprisoned by Israel for decades.
Insisting on the right to “retaliate”, Israel launched a genocidal campaign of indiscriminate air strikes. The tiny coastal enclave was levelled, many tens – more likely, hundreds – of thousands of Palestinians were killed, and the entire population left homeless and destitute.
But that devastation – just like Israel’s parallel campaign to starve Gaza’s people – was not simply a response to Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023, though it has been taboo to suggest otherwise.
Israel long had a plan for “remaking” the Middle East, one that dated back even before Netanyahu’s rise to power.
It is still unclear how much Israel’s template for a transformed Middle East accords with Washington’s, though analysts usually refer loosely to both in terms of “regime change”. But that is a misnomer. Even for Washington, regime change precludes installing a democratic leader representing the will of the Iranian people.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who served in Iraq, was more honest than recent predecessors in dismissing the idea that anything benevolent would emerge from this illegal attack.
“No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars,” he told reporters.
There is good reason for that aversion. The last time Iran had a democratic government, in the early 1950s, its secular, socialist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, outraged the West by nationalising Iran’s oil industry for the benefit of Iranians.
The CIA’s Operation Ajax toppled him in 1953 and reinstated the brutal Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as monarch, or Shah, allowing the US and Britain to take back control of Iran’s oil.
The backlash was 26 years coming. Islamic clerics rode an outpouring of popular hatred for the US and Israeli-backed Shah to launch their revolution.
Washington would doubtless like “regime change” in the form of installing Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of the Shah, as a new autocratic, western puppet.
Israel might be happy with that conclusion too.
But no one in either Washington or Tel Aviv really imagines Iran can be bombed into accepting the return of a cruel client leader like the Shah.
All that the US has managed to prove so far is the obvious: that large numbers of Iranians can be driven to the streets in protest, as they were in late December, if they and their country are impoverished beyond endurance by a sustained and pitiless regime of US economic sanctions.
But whatever the insinuations of western politicians and media, Iranians angry at being driven into penury are neither a coherent political movement nor are they likely to be receptive to supplications from the very US elites that have spent years bankrupting their country.
If the idea that an Iranian opposition is poised to sweep to power looks plausible, it is only because western media has been priming their audiences with two likely falsehoods.
First, that the Iranian regime has no mass support. And second, that those out protesting exclusively blame their plight on their own rulers rather than reserving a share of their anger for external actors meddling maliciously in their lives.
A few wealthy Iranian exiles – those keen once again to profit from selling off Iran’s silverware to colonial western masters – may be cheering on the bombing of Iranian schoolchildren from the safety of western TV studios. But it would be unwise to imagine they represent anything more than a small, unhinged minority.
Unlike the muddle caused in Washington by the need to placate the US public, Israel’s long-term plan for “remaking” the Middle East is clear-sighted.
In Tel Aviv, there is no interest in “regime change” unless the new regime is willing to subordinate itself – as the Gulf states have done – to Israel as regional overlord.
With no likelihood of that, Israel wants what would be better termed “regime overthrow” or “regime collapse”: the wholesale destruction of Iran’s infrastructure, the dissolution of all governmental and military authority, and the creation of a power vacuum in which Israel can manipulate rival actors and foment a permanent and enervating civil war.
Sounds familiar?
That is because the attack on Iran accords with the same disastrous US military strategy employed by Israel’s neocon allies in Washington in the assaults on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen before October 2023.
Trump was brought to power precisely because he promised he would stop the “forever wars“ – wars for Israel – that have created chaos across the Middle East and directly fed new forms of militant Islamic extremism, from al-Qaeda to Islamic State.
Understandably, his Maga movement is now in turmoil over the attack on Iran.
But Trump, electorally dependent on the votes of the vehemently pro-Israel Christian evangelicals and financially dependent on big Israel donors like Miriam Adelson, was never going to stray far from the existing playbook.
Since October 2023, backed by the Biden administration, Israel has rolled out its regime overthrow wars in Gaza, in Lebanon, and once again in Syria. Each is now militarily eviscerated and barely governable.
Trump did not object to those wars – and their primary purpose was to pave the way to Iran’s isolation from its regional allies, leaving it exposed enough for the current attack.
This has followed an entirely predictable script, as the four-star general Wesley Clark admitted back in 2007. Shortly after the 2001 Twin Towers attack, he was shown a classified briefing paper for a Pentagon plan to “take down” seven countries, starting in Iraq and ending with Iran.
Washington’s western allies may be privately uncomfortable at being visibly associated with another illegal US-Israeli war. But in supporting more than two years of genocide in Gaza, they already made their pact with the devil. There is no going back now.
Which is why Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia all dutifully lined up behind the Trump administration as the mayhem began.
The first reaction of Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, was to eat the words he delivered at Davos in January: that it was time for “middle powers” like his to stop “living within a lie“ of US-led benevolence and instead establish their own strategic autonomy to advance a more honest foreign policy.
Carney issued a statement at the weekend throwing Canada’s full weight behind the US and Israel’s egregiously illegal war of aggression on Iran – what international law defines as the “supreme international crime” – only to have to walk it back when faced with a domestic backlash.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, meanwhile, has handed Trump the keysto UK airbases for what he duplicitously terms “defensive purposes”.
Someone needs to explain to Starmer, once a famed human rights lawyer, that you cannot assist “defensively” a war of aggression. In doing so, you become an aggressor too.
The timeline of the Pentagon’s 2001 regime overthrow plan seen by Gen Clark was “seven countries in five years”. As events have proved a quarter of a century on, that scenario was wildly unrealistic.
There is no reason to assume that the US or Israel has any clearer insight than it did in 2001 into how this will play out. The only certainty is that it will not go according to plan.
Israel has wiped tiny Gaza off the map, but Hamas is still standing and in charge of the ruins, doubtless filled with an anger and desire for revenge burning even more intensely.
Iran is a far, far bigger proposition than Gaza, or any of the other previous targets of Israeli-US attacks.
The embers of resistance – in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and potentially in new sites like Bahrain – have not been snuffed out. And now, with the attack on Iran, they are being fanned into a fire with every new crime, every new outrage, every new atrocity.
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