“The attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States are illegal, unprovoked, and unjustifiable,” said Jeremy Corbyn, an independent member of the UK Parliament.
A man walks by the Fox News ticker displaying “War on Iran” on February 28, 2026 in New York.
(Photo by Ryan Murphy/Getty Images)
Jake Johnson
Feb 28, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
Elected officials, activists, and experts around the world voiced horror and outrage Saturday as US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu jointly launched an illegal war on Iran with the explicit goal of toppling the nation’s government, sparking chaos throughout the Middle East.
The wave of bombings, expected to mark the beginning of a wider assault, spurred airspace closures and flight cancellations across the region as countries braced for the fallout. While European leaders offered milquetoast responses to the unlawful military attack and Canadian and Australian officials openly endorsed it, leftist politicians and others unequivocally condemned the US and Israel as the aggressors.
“The attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States are illegal, unprovoked, and unjustifiable,” said Jeremy Corbyn, an independent member of the British Parliament and former leader of the UK Labour Party. “Peace and diplomacy was possible. Instead, Israel and the United States chose war.”
“This is the behavior of rogue states—and they have jeopardized the safety of humankind around the world with this catastrophic act of aggression,” Corbyn added. “Our government must condemn this flagrant breach of international law, and urgently pursue a foreign policy based on justice, sovereignty, and peace.”
Progressive International co-founder Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, echoed Corbyn’s criticism of the US and Israel as “rogue states.”
“Israel and the USA,” he wrote on social media, “have started a war not against Iran but against the whole world. We stand with Iranians, with humanity, against the notion that Israel and the US can bomb anyone their fancy takes them to bomb.”
Badr Albusaidi, the foreign minister of Oman and the mediator of recent US-Iran talks, said he was “dismayed” by news of the US-Israel attacks on Iran, which were quickly followed by reports of horrific atrocities. Albusaidi said hours before the bombs started falling on Iran that a diplomatic resolution was within reach.
“Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined,” Albusaidi lamented on Saturday. “Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer. I urge the United States not to get sucked in further.”
Leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro said he believes “President Donald Trump has made a mistake today” and implored the “helpless United Nations” to “convene immediately” in response to the US-Israel attacks and retaliation by Iran and allied groups in the region.
Iran vowed a “crushing” response to the US-Israeli onslaught, firing drones and missiles at Israel and pledging to hit US military installations in the region.
Al Jazeera reported that “Iran has targeted United States assets across the Gulf Arab states in retaliation for a huge joint attack on Iran by the US and Israel, as the region’s worst fears of being ignited in the flames of a sustained war loom.”
“The Iranian government on Saturday confirmed its attacks on several targets, according to the Fars news agency, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, where US airbases are hosted,” the outlet noted.
“What they posed as the threat they were trying to preempt—an attack by Iran against US forces—is so extremely implausible, it is also laughable,” said one analyst.
US President Donald Trump oversees the military assault on Iran with Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles at Mar-a-Lago on February 28, 2026 in Palm Beach, Florida.
(Photo by Daniel Torok/White House via Getty Images)
Jake Johnson
Mar 01, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
Senior Trump administration officials attempted during a briefing with reporters on Saturday to make their case for the joint US-Israeli military assault on Iran that has so far killed hundreds and plunged the Middle East into chaos.
According to experts who listened to the briefing, which was conducted on background, the justification for war was incredibly weak. Daryl Kimball, president of the Arms Control Association, told Laura Rozen of the Diplomatic newsletter that the administration’s argument was “the flimsiest excuse for initiating a major attack on another country without congressional authorization, in violation of the UN Charter, in many decades.”
During his early Saturday remarks announcing the attacks, President Donald Trump claimed that “imminent threats from the Iranian regime” against “the American people” drove him to act. But Kimball said that administration officials “provided absolutely no evidence” to back that assertion during the briefing.
“What they posed as the threat they were trying to preempt—an attack by Iran against US forces—is so extremely implausible, it is also laughable,” said Kimball.
Following the start of Saturday’s assault, which Trump explicitly characterized as a war aimed at overthrowing the Iranian government, unnamed administration officials began leaking the claim that Trump feared an Iranian attack on the massive US military buildup in the Middle East, prompting him to greenlight the bombing campaign in coordination with Israel and with a nudge from Saudi Arabia.
Kimball, in a social media post, took members of the US media to task for echoing the administration’s narrative. “Reporters need to do more than stenography,” he wrote in response to Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman.
“The American people were lied to about Iraq. The American people are being lied to again today—and once again, it is ordinary people who will pay the price.”
Trump and top administration officials also repeated the longstanding claim from US warhawks that Iran is bent on developing a nuclear weapon, something Iranian leaders have publicly denied—including during recent diplomatic talks. Neither US intelligence assessments nor international nuclear watchdogs have produced evidence indicating that Iran is moving rapidly in the direction of nukes, as claimed by the administration.
Rozen noted that some remarks from administration officials during Saturday’s briefing “suggested Trump’s negotiators”—a team that included Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff—“may not have had the expertise or experience to understand the Iranian proposal to curb its nuclear program.” Rozen reported that one administration official kept misstating the acronym for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog.
Trump administration officials, according to Rozen, seemed astonished that Iranian negotiators would not accept the US offer to provide free nuclear fuel “forever” for Iran’s peaceful energy development, viewing the rejection as a suspicious indication that Iran was opposed to a diplomatic resolution—even though, according to Oman’s foreign minister, Iran had already made concessions that went well beyond the terms of the 2015 nuclear accord that Trump abandoned during his first stint in the White House.
Experts said it should be obvious—particularly given Trump’s decision to ditch the previous nuclear accord—why Iran would not trust the US to stick by such a commitment.
The administration’s inability to provide a coherent justification for war tracks with the rapidly shifting narrative preceding Saturday’s strikes—an indication, according to some observers, that Trump had made the decision to attack Iran even in the face of diplomatic progress and left officials to try to cobble together a rationale after the fact.
In a lengthy social media post, Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted war was necessary because Iran “refused to make a deal” and because the Iranian government “has targeted and killed Americans,” hardly the claim of an imminent threat push by the president and other administration officials.
Brian Finucane, a senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, noted in response that the Trump administration has “sidelined anyone who could articulate... a coherent argument, partly because expertise is deep state and woke and partly because they just don’t care.”
The result is another potentially catastrophic war that runs roughshod over US and international law, puts countless civilians at risk, and threatens to spark a region-wide conflict.
“President Trump, along with his right-wing extremist Israeli ally Benjamin Netanyahu, has begun an illegal, premeditated, and unconstitutional war,” US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement on Saturday. “Tragically, Trump is gambling with American lives and treasure to fulfill Netanyahu’s decades-long ambition of dragging the United States into armed conflict with Iran.”
“The American people were lied to about Vietnam. The American people were lied to about Iraq,” Sanders added. “The American people are being lied to again today—and once again, it is ordinary people who will pay the price.”
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