A War That Cannot be Won: Israel and the United States Bomb Iran
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Having just formed the Board of Peace, the United States and Israel have begun the board’s first war, this time on Iran. The US-Israel attack launched early on February 28, on sites in Iran has already caused devastation, including the deaths of at least 60 little girls from an elementary school in Minab (Hormozgan Province), and dozens of others across the country. The latest estimates put the death toll at 201.
In fact, the attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, was not the first strike on Iran. Israel and the US have been in a state of war against Iran for decades, either through direct military strikes (as recently as June 2025) or through the long hybrid war imposed on Iran (including punitive US sanctions that began in 1996).
Neither Israel nor the United States value the United Nations Charter, whose Article 2 has been routinely violated by both (neither face condemnation in the UN Security Council, which impacts the reputation of the Charter). For decades now, the United States and its Global North allies have demonized Iran, treating its politics as terrorism and its government as dictatorial. They have essentially created the argument that attempts to overthrow the government in Tehran is legitimate even if it is a violation of the UN Charter.
However, US President Donald Trump does not have the appetite for a long war. He has a short-attention span and seeks quick victories that can quickly give him a headline for the news cycle, like the kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, and the executive order to prevent the sale of oil to Cuba on January 30. Trump hoped for a similar outcome: the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or the president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Reports have confirmed that Iran’s supreme leader was in fact killed in the Israeli-US attack. However, despite Trump’s call for regime change, so far there has been no change in political leaders. The Israeli-US strike in June 2025 did not destroy Iran’s nuclear energy project, nor did the strike in February 2026 destroy Iran’s political system.
The history of unilateral strikes on Iran
The current Israeli-US military campaign against Iran began in January 2020, when the United States assassinated General Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, Iraq. General Soleimani was the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the architect of the “axis of resistance”, which was the first circle of defense for Iran: the idea that if the United States or Israel tried to strike Iran, then Iran’s close allies from Hezbollah (Lebanon) to Ansar Allah (Yemen) would strike both Israel and the US military bases.
The killing of Soleimani was a blow to the axis, but three years later, a set of events disrupted the axis that he had designed. Israel’s genocide against Palestine weakened Hamas, its war in Lebanon disrupted Hezbollah (especially the assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024), and the installation of the former al-Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa as President of Syria in January 2025 led to the removal of all pro-Palestinian groups from the country. Having relatively broken this first circle of defense, Israel and the United States struck Iran in June 2025 with some Iranian retaliation but nothing like it would have been had Hezbollah and the factions in Syria been able to strike Israel.
After the June 2025 strike on Iran’s nuclear energy facilities, Israel and the United States said that it had destroyed Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons. If this was the case, then why didn’t the United States make a deal with Iran and withdraw sanctions? After all, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian came to power in 2024 with a “reform” agenda, formed a cabinet that included a neoliberal finance minister (Ali Madanizadeh), and therefore showed that he was willing to be concessionary to Western-controlled institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). However, in response to US-Israeli strikes in June 2025, Iran ended its inspection agreements that it had made with the IAEA. The IMF noted the weak outlook for Iran but saw that this was largely due to US-imposed sanctions and—from its perspective—the subsidy regime in Iran.
Madanizadeh placated the IMF by pushing an austerity budget. This created the social distress that was inflamed when the US intervened to disrupt the Iranian rial and deepen the economic crisis in the country. Sections of the bazaaris or the small traders in Iran, the base of the Islamic Republic, who felt the blunt of the inflation turned against the government but not necessarily against the system itself. The US and Israel, as well as the foreign media, deliberately misread the situation, proclaiming erroneously that the people of Iran are against their republic. Despite the attempt by Pezeshkian’s government to meet the United States on its terms, the US and Israel pushed for an unrealistic maximalist end game, namely the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.
Nuclear program or regime change?
That maximalist end game was driven by the demand by the US and Israel that Iran end an illusionary nuclear weapons program. Iran has, for decades, said that it is not interested in nuclear weapons, and Pezeshkian’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi repeatedly has said that Iran will never develop such weapons. Iran has said that it is willing to discuss the issue of its nuclear program, but that it will not put the reality of the Islamic Republic on the table (or the actuality of the December 1979 Iranian Constitution). Hours before the February 2026 attack, the negotiations between Iran and the United States had come close to an agreement. Oman’s Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr bin Hamad al-Busaidi said that a “peace deal is within our reach” and that Iran agreed to zero stockpiling. In other words, Iran had been ready to accept most of the demands being imposed upon it against its nuclear energy program. That the US-Israel attacked in this context shows that Iran’s nuclear project is not the real issue for Washington and Tel Aviv. They are committed to regime change.
If the US-Israeli war is a war for regime change then it is a war that cannot be won without enormous loss of human life. There are nearly 100 million people in Iran, a large section of whom will defend their republic till their death. A few days after the US kidnapped Maduro, Khamenei went to the shrine of his predecessor Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (1900-1989). It is interesting that Khamenei turned 89 years old, the same age as Khomeini when he died. It was almost as if he went to see his old friend and mentor to take courage from him. The assassination of Khamenei will not demoralize the supporters of the Islamic Republic but will instead lift him into the sphere of martyrdom and strengthen their resolve. With Iran, the US and Israel have no realistic strategy to win. They might kill large numbers of people. But they cannot break the will of Iranian patriotism.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
‘Peace’ President Trump Launches another War, This time a Doozy that Could Rival Bush’s Iraq Nightmare
U.S. Central Command strike during Operation Epic Fury in Iran, 2 March 2026.
US President Donald Trump, who already shares the title of the 21st Century’s worst perpetrator of genocide along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, can now add the title of worst war criminal of the 21st Century for his completely unprovoked war on Iran, also shared with Netanyahu.
When President Roosevelt took to the radio in 1941 to notify the American people of Japan’s US surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet moored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii he called the blitz by carrier-based aircraft and mini-subs on December 7, “A date that will live in infamy.”
Roosevelt was referring to a Japan’s decision to attack the US without first declaring war, though later research shows that the Japanese government did send such a warning to be delivered to the White House by the Japanese Embassy in Washington, but because of difficulty there in translating the code, it arrived after the attack was already underway.
In Trump’s case, Pentagon planning for this joint attack on Iran by the US and Israel, which began early last November, from the start was meant to be a complete surprise.
As Iran was in no condition to attack the US, even as Trump had assembled the largest naval armada since the launching of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 ,and also ordered half the US Air Force’s fleet of air-worthy bombers and fighter-bombers moved to the Persian Gulf region, this invasion constitutes a “Crime against Peace” under the Geneva Conventions, which is described as “the highest of all war crimes as it contains all others.”
Particularly galling is Trump’s failure to give any credible reason that could justify the attack. In the run-up to to his newist snd biggest war, he spoke about defending the “tens of thousands” of young people being killed by government thugs as they protested the rule of the mullahs. He spoke too of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (killed in an early strike by Israel on his compound) as being being “evil,” and about Iran’s allegedly being “a week away” from having enough U-235 to produce a nuclear bomb (this despite Thump’s boast that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” by an earlier surprise bombing attack by the US and Israeli planes he had ordered last June), and about Tehran’s being unwilling to submit to inspection of its “nuclear program,” including some of his own.
In any event, none of these explanations for launching a “pre-emptive” war against Iran—with the exception of the wholly absurd claim about the threat of that far-away country being“within days” of building a uranium bomb, a deliberately scarey line which echoes G.W, Bush’s fraudulent excuse for invading Iraq over two decades ago— can justify this latest US Invasion of that sanctions-strangled nation. (Trump’s other claim was that Iran was working on an ICBM that could “reach the United States,” though even if this were true, it would pose no significant threat if the country could only put a conventional warhead on it).
Many, myself included, noting how often presidents have launched wars when their popularity is crashing because of scandal or incompetence (both of which crises Trump faces), are suggesting this is all a bloody and incredibly costly diversion from the increasingly appalling Epstein scandal, in which Trump’s name and image is appearing (or being blacked out) with increasing frequency.
Meanwhile President Trump appears to have no plan or even any “concept of a plan,” should the US-Israel blitz succeed in toppling the Tehran government, to restore order (much less democratic rule) in a nation of 92.5 million people who have been struggling under tyranny of one kind or another for the 73 years since their elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was ousted in a 1953 coup orchestrated by the US and Britain. All Trump has done is advise Iranians to “rise up” and overthrow their leaders. That’s what he called on Venezuelans to do after he bombed their capital city and had US Special Forces kidnap their elected President Nicolas Maduro. Since then our president’s been too busy stealing the Venezuela’s oil to pay any attention to restoring its economy and helping its people put a new government in place (something one hopes that Iranians have noted).
Eventually, Trump should be impeached for this latest war crime, which also violates the US Constitution, which states clearly that unless it is attacked or faces imminent attack, only Congress can authorize the country to launch a war. But at least the inevitable debacle in Iran and in the wider Middle East should keep the US military too busy to invade Cuba — something Trump has threatened to do.
How Deadly is a Dying Animal? Carnage in Iran Can’t Stop the Inevitable
Photograph Source: Mehr News Agency – CC BY 4.0
When I was small my mother warned me never to approach a sick animal. The dying ones, she said, are the deadliest of all.
That hasn’t been my experience; most of the dying creatures I’ve encountered just want a quiet place to pass their final hours. The source of my mother’s anxiety was closer to home than she had yet to recognize, but her fear was palpable. She was haunted by the vision of her curly-haired child falling prey to some sickly, snarling, yellow-eyed feral creature with nothing left to lose. That’s a mother’s worst nightmare.
Flash forward to February 28, 2026. Dozens of schoolchildren were reported dead in “one of two strikes that appear to have hit schools since U.S. and Israeli warplanes launched their attack on Iran around 10 a.m. local time.” It was a mother’s worst fear come true, many times over.[1]
Why would Israel and the United States kill children? The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that neither country is shy about the systematic extermination of the very young when it serves their strategic interests. These deaths, however, seem to be the products of tactical indifference rather than intentional annihilation. The girls’ school was near an Iranian naval base, and the high school was in the neighborhood where former Iranian president Ahmadinejad lived and was targeted by bombers.[2]
This is how dying animals behave in a mother’s nightmare. They’re not looking for human children to kill—not the way an airborne raptor or an IDF soldier would. They simply lash out blindly in a desperate fight against the inevitable. Sometimes children get in the way.
Yes, Ayatollah Khamenei is dead. Big deal. Others like him were already prepared to step in.
Our political culture is naive, almost childlike, in its attachment to the “great man” theory of history, with the “evil man” as its shadow side. Powerful figures do sometimes alter history, but only within those time-worn channels Tennyson called the “ringing grooves of change.” Khamenei’s power began with the US overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, which set the stage for Iran’s current theocracy. The brutality of the Shah only hardened the steely resolve of Khamenei’s predecessor, who cast aside pro-democracy Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri to put Khamenei in power. If it hadn’t been him, it would been found someone equally hard-lined.
Trump and Netanyahu are merely the latest leaders to be vomited up from a groove whose name is “colonialism.” Its source is not the culture or beliefs of ancient Jewish tribes. This groove traces back to the chieftains and pagan shamans of pre-Christian Europe. It rings with the sound of cauldrons and cannons and the church bells of the inquisitor. If some of its own children must be sacrificed, too, so be it.
Once again, pro-democracy protesters have been betrayed by US-made bombs. Attacks by foreign countries almost always strengthen their current leadership and weaken protest movements. There’s no reason to think this time will be any different. Khamenei is almost certainly more powerful in martyrdom than he was in the last months of his life. The protesters must now wait for the inevitable betrayal. May they find solidarity in just people around the world.
As-yet-unconfirmed reports suggest that the bombers have targeted some of the leaders who are best positioned to form an independent government. That wouldn’t be surprising. The US and Israel don’t want an independent Iran. They want a vassal.
But wait, you say. Israel and the United States aren’t dying animals. They’re very much alive and will be for the foreseeable future. Don’t be so sure. Netanyahu has been clinging to power for years to avoid prosecution for a litany of corruption charges. Trump was also threatened by multiple prosecutions before winning re-election. Both men, having feasted lavishly on ill-gotten gains, were desperate to avoid the consequences of their own actions.
For Netanyahu, Israel’s future looks grim. Much of the world has turned against it. Public opinion is evolving from revulsion over its actions to doubts about its very legitimacy as a theocratic ethno-state. Public support for Israel, once considered immutable, has plummeted in the US and Western Europe, especially among younger people who are more likely to consider it an “apartheid state.”
Israel, dependent on Western largesse, is likely to face a critical decision when these generations assume power: become a truly democratic state that ends radicalized privilege or remain an unsustainable international pariah. Either way, the clock is almost certainly ticking on the era of Eretz Israel envisioned by Zionism’s founders. It may take decades, with great bloodshed along the way, but this change seems increasingly likely.
This is not an outré idea. Israel’s military and political leaders see this future almost as clearly as independent observers do. No wonder they’ve become increasingly open in their violence. It’s a sign of desperation as well as hate.
The United States may not disappear as a nation in the foreseeable future. But its global dominance and that of its elites will end, and probably soon. That prospect fills its current leaders with existential dread. Billionaires build airstrips in the Hamptons and rehearse the apocalypse in mountaintop retreats. Politicians try to seize control of oil-rich nations through brute force and feed the fantasy that exorbitant military spending can crush the spirit of independent peoples.
As the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this twilight, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Richard Nixon said this when he tried selling an equally delusional war to the American people:
“If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”
The “forces of totalitarianism and anarchy” are us. Every war the US has fought in the intervening half-century has been a strategic and military failure. The United States has become a pitiful, violent giant—lethal and proud, but pitiful just the same. It spends itself into social oblivion for military machinery. It turns the technology of human suppression against its own population with increasing ferocity. As inequality surpasses that of the Gilded Age, software surveils our every move as drones and helicopters hover in the sky.
Every empire in history has eventually turned against its own people, and always at the same historical moment: right before it dies.
Trump and Netanyahu may parade before the cameras like winners, but they carry the stink of losers—moral, spiritual, and tactical losers. They’re pitiful because they’re desperate, and they’re desperate because their realms are dying. The grief of mothers and fathers mean nothing to creatures such as these.
Here’s a silent whisper for the wounded and discouraged, the grim-faced and the grieving, the unseen victims in Palestine and Yemen and Iran and around the globe: may they see with their hearts that time is running out for the Trumps and Netanyahus of their hearts. May they take comfort in the inevitability of their fall.
Yes, they’re still deadly. Of course they are. They’re killers. But so was John Wayne Gacy, and he was a clown.
Notes.
[1]The New York Times report continues: “Saturday is the start of the workweek in the country, and many Iranians had already dropped off their children and headed into their offices as explosions began to shake the capital and many cities across Iran.”
The Norwegian group Hengaw reported that 170 children were in class when the bombs fell on Shajarah Tayyebeh girls’ school. The Iranian Red Crescent said there were 60 fatalities, a figure that has since been revised upward. Other students were reportedly killed when bombs fell on Hedayat High School in Teheran.
If you’re planning to reply by saying there’s still no independent confirmation of these reports, don’t bother. They’ve been supported by two human rights organizations, Hengaw and the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, both of which have reported extensively on the Iranian government’s lethal and indefensible violence against protesters. (The US military’s CENTCOM has not denied these reports, saying only that it is “looking into them.”)
[2] Both killings may have been the result of AI “hallucinations”; this war appears to be the largest full-scale trial of AI to date. Coincidentally (or not), military AI was the subject of a piece that was pre-empted here by the attack on Iran. In any case, the moral responsibility doesn’t change whenever new technology is introduced.
Going Native in the Trump Jungle
How it became Legal to Attack Iran
The allies of the United States have gone native, feral even, in the jungle of international relations planted by President Donald J. Trump. While we keep hearing about how awful Russia’s war against Ukraine is, with its shattering of international law and its dismissiveness of the provisions of the United Nations Charter, the Israeli-US attack on Iran has been given the seal of approval by America’s client states and supporters. Countries such as the UK, France, Germany, Australia and Canada, for instance, were clear in endorsing a UN General Assembly resolution on February 24 supporting Ukraine in the face of Russia’s violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The provision explicitly “prohibits the threat or use of force”, calling on Member states “to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other States.” Nothing of the sort has been seen regarding the illegal assault on Iran that began on February 28.
Most pitiful in the repudiation of the Charter by US allies are the stances of the supposed “middle powers”, a term as flattering as middle management. These middling types – Australia and Canada stand out here – have been keen to wish themselves into abject irrelevance on the issue of international law. This is despite calls from the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that like-minded powers should club together to rectify the collapse of the rules-based international order so cherished under the Pax Americana. At his speech delivered at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Carney extolled the ideas of being principled and pragmatic which would include valuing “sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter”. Nothing of this was evident in the joint February 28 statement from Carney and his Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand: “Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security.”
All craven positions taken by states have slight differences, and the Australian one can be measured by the position that not taking part in the strikes does not mean having to consider their legal nature. “Obviously,” said Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong on March 1, “Australia did not participate in these strikes.” But it supported “action to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security.”
The United Kingdom has gone one better by becoming entirely revisionist. In a March 1 statement, the government of Sir Keir Starmer revealed why the UK would be committing to the conflict against Tehran. This was not about Iran being pre-emptively and unlawfully attacked in the first place but Iran daring to defend itself by attacking regional powers hosting US military bases and personnel. Britain would therefore be mounting, at the insistence of Washington, a “defensive action” by targeting “missile facilities in Iran which were involved in launching strikes on regional allies.” It would also act “in the collective self-defence of regional allies who have requested support.” Any propaganda minister in the annals of history would have been proud of that fatuous formulation.
The propaganda of justification focuses on positions that, were they to become a template, could be applied to any number of regimes in the world. Do they crush and violate the human rights of their subjects, restrict lawful assembly, and fire on protestors? Are they theocracies, or governed by martial law, or traditional police states? Do they destabilise their region with needless meddling, posing “imminent” threats? Along the way, forget the limits on the use of force as stated in the UN Charter: that the territorial integrity of all states should be respected, and that any permission for the use of force should take place via the UN Security Council or be undertaken in cases of self-defence.
With sheer abandon, then, we can justify bumping off the leaders, the commanders, and the top officials – but be selective which theocracies, autocratic thugs and shifty types we want to keep company with. And the one to be selective here is Trump, who has personalised international relations with such dramatic effect as to terrify his allies into complicity and obedience. To condemn the actions against Iran as illegal could lead to frosty dismissal, the imposition of crushing sanctions or tariffs, exclusion from intelligence sharing, the shutting off from cooperative ventures. Be good to Donald, or he will bite. Best be bad to everybody he dislikes.
Important in the apologias for attacking Iran has been the anecdotal gauging of attitudes from the Iranian diaspora to be found in Canada, the US, Australia and Europe. Celebratory gestures of flag waving and ghoulish revelling in the death of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, albeit understandable, have also been used to rationalise the war. The Iranian security apparatus had been brutal in putting down protests by brave citizens. We can forget what follows: greater instability and fractiousness within the borders of that state. The creation of more regional problems. The potential for even greater fanaticism and resolve.
In terms of immediate international consequences, protests against the killing of Khamanei in other Islamic states have taken place, in some cases with brutal results. In Pakistan, security forces have used lethal force, leaving 10 dead in Karachi, eight in Skardu and two in Islamabad. Yet little mention in the corridors of Western power is made about these fallen, presumably because they were not the right or relevant sort.
Both the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the NATO-led attacks on Libya in 2011 offer disturbing lessons, none of which interest the ahistorical outlaws of the Trump Jungle. The crime of international aggression against Iraq demonstrated the importance of lies and inflated threats – in that case deployable Weapons of Mass Destruction that were never found – along with the dismal failure of occupation and nation building. The Libyan example is seminal given the current aerial nature of the Israeli-US campaign against Iran.
In Libya, a NATO-led coalition intervened in the civil war ostensibly to protect civilians against the security forces of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. “When crisis erupted in Libya,” remarked Sir John Sawers, former Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, in February 2015, “we didn’t feel it right to sit by as Gaddafi crushed decent Libyans demanding an end to dictatorship.” But Britain and its partners “didn’t want to get embroiled in Libya’s problems by sending in ground forces.”
Initially framed as an operation to protect civilians, the air campaign became one of support for anti-government militias, leading to Gaddafi’s overthrow and lynch-mob murder. The country duly fractured between rival fundamentalist groups and remains divided to this day. It also became a safe-haven for al-Qaeda and Islamic State forces to conduct operations against the country’s neighbours. “Libya,” recalled Sawers, “had no institutions. Who or what would take over? The answer? Those with the weapons. Result? Growing chaos, exploited by fanatics.” The lessons for the Israeli-US campaign are all too startlingly relevant.
The grotesque cowardice of various representatives, including the clueless fawning by Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte, the unpardonable conduct of the European Commission’s top diplomats Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, and most of the EU governments, has also revealed their feral conversion to a doctrine of force that does away with softening diplomacy and the tenets of international law. It’s almost an embarrassment to read the EU statement on avoiding escalation when the powers escalating the matter were Israel and the US while still insisting that diplomacy would have a role. The Iranians were engaged in diplomacy and were reassured that more talks would follow. This was a charade, a confidence trick that will impair the credibility of the West, or Global North, in terms of its conduct of relations when it comes to addressing threats, actual or perceived. All is permissible in the Trump Jungle.
Published: March 2, 2026
Shortly after the opening salvo of U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, 2026 – with missiles targeting cities across the country, some of which killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – President Donald Trump declared the objective was to destroy Iran’s military capabilities and give rise to a change in government.
Framing the operation as a war of liberation, Trump called on Iranians to “take over your government.”
In the first days alone, Israel dropped over 2,000 bombs on Iranian targets, equal to half the tonnage of the 12-day Israel-Iran conflict in June 2025. Heavy U.S. bombing, meanwhile, has targeted Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as well as ballistic missile and aerial defense sites.
The destruction is real. But, as an international relations scholar, I know that destruction is not the same as political success. And the historical record of U.S. bombing campaigns aimed at regime change shows that the gap between the two – the point at which Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya campaigns all stalled – is where wars go to die.
Destruction is not strategy
Decades of scholarship dating back to World War I on using air power to force political change has established a consistent finding: Bombing can degrade military capacity and destroy infrastructure, but it does not produce governments more cooperative with the attacker.
Political outcomes require political processes – negotiation, institution-building, legitimate transitions of power.
Bombs cannot create any of these. Instead, what they reliably create is destruction, and destruction generates its own dynamics: rallying among the population, power vacuums, radicalization and cycles of retaliation.
The American record confirms this. In 2003, the George W. Bush administration launched “Shock and Awe” in Iraq with the explicit aim of regime change. The military objective was achieved in weeks. The political objective was never achieved at all.
The U.S. decision to disband the Iraqi army created a vacuum filled not by democratic reformers but by sectarian militias and eventually ISIS. The regime that eventually emerged was not friendly to American interests. It was deeply influenced by Iran.
Smoke billows as Libyan rebels move toward Moammar Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte on March 28, 2011, after U.S.-led military operations. Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images
In 2011, the Obama administration led a NATO air campaign in Libya that quickly expanded from civilian protection into regime change. Dictator Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown and killed.
But there was no plan for political transition. Chaos and political instability have endured since. Asked what his “worst mistake” was as president, Barack Obama said, “Probably failing to plan for the day after, what I think was the right thing to do, in intervening in Libya.” Libya remains a failed state today.
The intervention also sent a powerful signal to countries pursuing nuclear weapons: Gaddhafi had dismantled his nuclear program in 2003. Eight years later, NATO destroyed his regime.
Even Kosovo, often cited as the success story of coercive air power, undermines the case. Seventy-eight days of NATO bombing did not, by themselves, compel Slobodan Milosevic, president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to withdraw.
What changed was the credible threat of a ground invasion combined with Russia’s withdrawal of diplomatic support. The political outcome – contested statehood, ongoing ethnic tensions – is hardly the stable governance that air power advocates promise.
The pattern is consistent: The United States repeatedly confuses its unmatched capacity to destroy from the air with the ability to dictate political outcomes.
Why this war?
The recent U.S. attacks on Iran raise a fundamental question: Why is the United States fighting this war at all?
The administration has declared regime change as its objective, justifying the campaign on the grounds of Iran’s nuclear program and missile capabilities.
But that nuclear program was being actively negotiated in Geneva days before the strikes. And Iran’s foreign minister told NBC the two sides were close to a deal. Then the bombs fell.
Iran did not attack America. And it currently does not have the capability to threaten the American homeland. What Iran challenges is Israel’s regional military dominance, and I believe it is Israel’s objective of neutralizing a rival that is driving this operation.
Israel targeted 30 senior Iranian leaders in the opening strikes. Israeli officials described it as a preemptive attack to “remove threats to the State of Israel.” I see the strategic logic for these killings as Israel’s, and Americans are absorbing the costs.
U.S. military bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have taken Iranian missile fire. American service members are in harm’s way – three have already been killed – not because Iran attacked them, but I believe because their president committed them to someone else’s war without a clear endgame.
Smoke rises from a reported Iranian strike in the area where the U.S. Embassy is located in Kuwait City on March 2, 2026. AFP via Getty Images
Each coercive step in this conflict – from the 2018 withdrawal from the nuclear deal, to the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander, to the June 2025 strikes – was framed as restoring leverage.
Each produced the opposite, eliminating diplomatic off-ramps, accelerating the very threats it aimed to contain.
The regime is not one man
Decapitation strikes assume that removing a leader removes the obstacle to political change. But Iran’s political system is institutional — the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts and the Revolutionary Guard have survived for four decades.
The system has succession mechanisms, but they were designed for orderly transitions, not for active bombardment. The group most likely to fill the vacuum is the Revolutionary Guard, whose institutional interest lies in escalation, not accommodation.
There is a deeper irony. The largest protests since 1979 swept Iran just weeks ago. A genuine domestic opposition was growing. The strikes have almost certainly destroyed that movement’s prospects.
Decades of research on rally-around-the-flag effects – the tendency of populations to unite behind their government when attacked by a foreign power – confirms that external attacks fuse regime and nation, even when citizens despise their leaders.
Iranians who were chanting “death to the dictator” are now watching foreign bombs fall on their cities during Ramadan, hearing reports of over 100 children killed in a strike on a girls school in Minab.
Trump’s call for Iranians to “seize control of your destiny” echoes a familiar pattern. In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in the name of freedom.
That produced the Shah, the Shah’s brutal reign led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the revolution produced the Islamic Republic now being bombed.
What comes next? And what guarantee is there that whatever emerges will be any friendlier to Israel or the United States?
What does success look like?
This is the question no one in Washington has answered. If the objective is regime change, who governs 92 million people after?
If the objective is stability, why are American bases across the Middle East absorbing missile fire?
There is no American theory of political endgame in Iran — only a theory of destruction. That theory has been tested in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – and Iran itself over the preceding eight months. It has failed every time, not because of poor execution, but because the premise is flawed.
Air power can raze a government’s infrastructure. It cannot build the political order that must replace it. Iran, with its sophisticated military, near-nuclear capability, proxy networks spanning the region and a regime now martyred by foreign attack, will likely not be the exception.
U.S. law prohibits the assassination of foreign leaders, and instead Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader while American warplanes filled the skies overhead. Washington has called the result freedom at hand, but it has not answered the only question that matters: What comes next?
The Policy of “Maximum Pressure” on Iran Finds Its Ultimate Conclusion
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Americans should not be fooled or led astray by the corporate media or the Beltway consultant class: fact-free fearmongering and warmongering about Iran have been among the most thoroughly bipartisan positions in Washington for many decades. For all of the turgid language within U.S. government and media circles about rogue regimes and state sponsors of terrorism, we almost never get around to mentioning the fact that the United States has long been the world’s greatest offender and violator of international law. It’s important to be clear about the facts of the matter: Iran is not a real threat to the United States, and it is Washington that has always been the aggressor in the relationship. Iran does not have intercontinental ballistic missiles, and Donald Trump himself has claimed repeatedly that Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated” last summer.
The U.S. government itself bears much of the responsibility for the theocratic dictatorship that rules Iran today, the seeds of which grew after the CIA helped to overthrow the country’s elected leader in the summer of 1953. A few years later, with the eager assistance of the CIA and Israel’s intelligence services, among others, the Shah’s regime set up a brutal and repressive domestic security and intelligence service, called SAVAK. SAVAK’s extreme censorship and abuses helped to radicalize Iranians, who correctly associated the regime’s violence and authoritarianism with the foreign powers that helped to train and equip it. With rival political parties and civil society groups stamped out, religious organizations became the vehicle for political revolution, and thus for the revolution that ushered in the Islamic Republic.
Today, the U.S. government’s sanctions regime is a direct attack on innocent Iranians, not on an insulated ruling class in Tehran, which can easily and comfortably withstand the costs of Washington’s economic stranglehold. As scholars and commentators have long pointed out, “The breadth and scope of the United States’ ‘maximum pressure sanctions’ pushed Iranians into poverty and increased income inequality, leading to widespread suffering. They also weakened the population and made Iranians increasingly dependent on the state, which has become more militarized and securitized, leading to an overall sentiment of resignation.”
The Solidify Iran Sanctions Act (SISA), which passed the House last year, is part of the culmination of a decades-long trajectory, removing the sunset provision of the ‘96 Iran Sanctions Act. The SISA would make the earlier law’s sanctions authorities permanent unless repealed. (Senate passage of the SISA is not urgent since the ‘96 law will not expire until the end of the year.) The overwhelming bipartisan support for the SISA is one of many examples of how the “maximum pressure” framework toward Iran has become a permanent feature of U.S. law. Human rights groups have long called attention to the fact that innocent Iranians—who despise the government more than any American politician—bear the brunt of this cruel and inhumane maximum pressure policy.
This policy has long united ruling classes in Washington and Tel Aviv, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s maximalist position on Iran has steadily become the consensus in elite American politics. Israel’s prime minister was the first foreign leader to visit the White House after Trump came back to power, and he has returned more than any other leader, six times in just over a year, with his most recent visit coming earlier this month. This is significant in part because Israel’s longest-serving prime minister (over 18 years over three separate periods of 1996-1999, 2009-2021, and 2022-present) has lobbied the U.S. government for war with Iran obsessively for decades, both inside and outside of his official capacities. Speaking to the Knesset as a member in 1992, Netanyahu warned that Iran would “become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb” within three to five years. He repeated this and similar clearly false claims again and again in subsequent years, including during an infamous address to a joint session of Congress as prime minister in 1996.
But Israel is far from the only foreign country that has pushed the U.S. further toward conflict with Iran. The United States’ key allies in the Persian Gulf, for example, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have maintained deep financial ties with the Washington think-tank and consultancy world, using their immense wealth to influence U.S. policy and press the case for aggressive and militaristic policies toward Iran. More recently, Qatar gave Trump a $400 million Boeing jet described as a “flying palace,” a move widely seen as an illegal and unconstitutional bribe. The UAE, meanwhile, has poured money into the Trump family, raising eyebrows with a “deal to acquire a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the crypto company founded by the Trump family and several allies in the fall of 2024 during Trump’s presidential campaign, was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, one of the most powerful officials in the UAE.”
The United States and Israel have been meddling violently and illegally in the affairs of the Iranian people for close to 75 years now. Both halves of the Washington uniparty bear responsibility for Trump’s latest imperialist foray and the catastrophic consequences it will bring. Whether they admit it or not, congressional leaders in both parties knew this was coming and could have pushed to ensure that the U.S. government would not enter into another war absent congressional action.
The sad truth is that they wanted this outcome, because it aligns with and serves powerful interests clustered around the Beltway, the military-industrial complex chief among them. They just didn’t want to have to vote for it or against it; they want to be reliable partners for those interests and social media celebrities without having to go on the record on anything important. Hence, the imperial presidency.
Americans continue to be surprised that we don’t learn from Vietnam, Iraq, etc., but the truth is our openly corrupt and imperialistic ruling class has learned a great deal, and they are now sure that we will never stand up to their villainy here at home or abroad. The U.S. government long ago abandoned even the merest pretense that its foreign policy of aggressive wars of choice and mass civilian starvation has anything at all to do with the safety or our concrete interests of Americans. What Americans need to learn is not that Washington’s illegal wars have failed, but that they have failed for us and the world while they enrich a tiny elite of war profiteers.
