It looks as if simply yesterday that United States President Donald Trump was pushing a “diplomatic decision” to the Iranian nuclear concern.
Now, the US has joined Israel’s unlawful assault on Iran, placing three Iranian nuclear websites on Saturday in what Trump has boasted was a “very profitable assault”.
As CNN dramatically put it, “a midsummer night time in June 2025 may come to be remembered because the second the Center East modified eternally; when the concern of nuclear annihilation was lifted from Israel; when Iran’s energy was neutered and America’s soared”.
After all, a “concern of nuclear annihilation” has nothing to do with Israel’s present strikes on Iran, which have been dutifully portrayed within the US media as focusing on army and nuclear services however have someway managed to slaughter tons of of civilians. The victims embody 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed alongside together with her household as they slept of their Tehran house constructing.
As is evident as day to anybody not within the enterprise of defending Israeli depredations, the assaults on Iran are merely a conflict of comfort for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s killing all kinds of birds with one stone in his marketing campaign in opposition to Iranian nuclear services.
Along with distracting the world from Israel’s ongoing genocide within the Gaza Strip, the place ravenous Palestinians proceed to be massacred each day as they search meals and different support, Netanyahu has additionally managed to divert consideration from his personal embroilment in quite a few corruption fees at house.
Plus, the conflict on Iran is wildly widespread amongst Israelis, which interprets into massive factors for a first-rate minister who has confronted vital home opposition.
Trump’s preliminary insistence on diplomacy with Iran naturally obtained Netanyahu’s panties into an enormous bunch – however the scenario has now been rectified by the midsummer night time’s bombing, which, based on the president, has “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear websites.
To make sure, Iran has lengthy occupied US crosshairs, with many an institution determine salivating on the prospect of bombing the nation to smithereens. Some have salivated extra brazenly than others, as within the case of John Bolton – a former US ambassador to the United Nations and briefly the nationwide safety adviser within the first Trump administration – who in 2015 took to the opinion pages of The New York Instances with the next recommendation: “To Cease Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”
That the editors of the US newspaper of file didn’t bat an eye fixed in publishing such a blatant name for the violation of worldwide regulation is indicative of the extent to which Iran has been totally demonised in US society and media. Recall that in 2002, then-US President George W Bush appointed the nation to his notorious “axis of evil” together with Iraq and North Korea.
And but, other than being a persistent thorn within the facet of US imperialism, Iran’s behaviour has been quite much less apparently, um, “evil” than sure different worldwide actors – just like the US itself. For example, Iran isn’t the one at present funding a straight-up genocide to the tune of tens of billions of {dollars}.
Neither is Iran the one which has spent the previous a number of a long time bombing and in any other case antagonising of us in each nook of the world – from backing right-wing state terror in Latin America to conducting mass slaughter in Vietnam.
Moreover, the only clandestine nuclear weapons energy within the Center East isn’t Iran however Israel, which has refused to signal the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has by no means allowed UN safeguards on its services.
Those that applaud the strikes on Iran citing the “oppressive” nature of the Iranian authorities would, in the meantime, do effectively to revisit the US observe file of fuelling oppression within the nation. In 1953, the CIA orchestrated a coup d’etat in opposition to Iran’s democratically elected chief, Mohammad Mossadegh, which paved the best way for the prolonged reign of the torture-happy shah.
Historian Ervand Abrahamian notes in his e-book A Historical past of Fashionable Iran: “Arms sellers joked that the shah devoured their manuals in a lot the identical manner as different males learn Playboy.” Certainly, the shah’s obsessive acquisition of US weaponry did a lot to allow his rule by terror, which was put to an finish by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. And the Iranian nuclear programme that Trump has now bombed? It was began by that exact same shah.
Now, arms sellers are presumably not too upset over the midsummer night time’s occasions and the final escalation of the disaster within the Center East. For his half, Netanyahu has gone out of his approach to thank Trump for his “daring resolution” to go after Iran “with the superior and righteous would possibly of the USA”.
In Netanyahu’s phrases, Trump’s motion will “change historical past” – as if making the world secure for extra conflict is something new. And because the US media scramble to justify unlawful assaults on a sovereign nation, the sinister hypocrisy of two closely nuclear-armed nations endeavor to police nuclear “threats” can’t be overstated.
It’s anybody’s guess what Trump, who prides himself on spontaneous and manic behaviour, will do subsequent. However relaxation assured that, no matter occurs, the arms trade received’t be going hungry any time quickly.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
