On February 28, the United States and Israel initiated a major military offensive against Iran, which has now impacted the Middle East, causing casualties and destruction in at least nine countries. The attack on Iran has caused devastation and death of more than 160 little girls from an elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan province and scores of others across the country. The latest estimate put the figure close to 1000+. The US and Israel are now undertaking a massive bombardment aimed at the systematic destruction of the Iranian state and the subjugation of an entire population.
In a social media post Trump said the goal of the attack is to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and "to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime." Trump urged Iranians to capitalise on the attack as the "only chance for generations" to take over their government. Trump's war on Iran is a "war of choice" that "borders on delusion."
US President announced on February 28 evening that the mission to kill the supreme leader (Khamenei was staying at his home in Tehran, refused to go into hiding) was successful. Iran has said it 'will not negotiate with Donald Trump' as the President called on the country to lay down its weapons. But Iran is a huge country. It has 92 million people. It is more than triple the population of Iraq or Afghanistan when the US started disastrous regime change wars with those countries two decades ago.
Despite Trump's call for regime change, so far, there has been no change in political leadership in Iran. As US-Israeli air strikes could not destroy Iran's nuclear energy project, nor did the current strike destroy Iran's political system. War has long been the answer to economic decline, weakening global power, and political desperation at home.
Donald Trump has attempted to counter a simmering anti-Israel backlash in Congress and among his own supporters by denying suggestions that he had been bounced into attacking Iran because Israel had already decided to do so. On March 1, U.S Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the U.S. initiated strikes against Iran after receiving intelligence regarding a forthcoming Israeli attack. He said, "We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties".
Furthermore, as the US and Israel's war with Iran has unfolded, a Washington Post report revealed that the Saudi prince urged Trump to attack Iran -- a report that Saudi Arabia denies.
It took months for the Bush administration's falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to come to light, but for the Trump administration's warnings of an imminent threat from Iran, it took an afternoon.
Jeffrey Robertson, an Australian and British barrister, academic, author, human right activist and broadcaster in an article published in the Age described the US-Israel aggression against Iran as a "war crime". He also described the pretence of "pre-emptive self-defence" is perversion of international law.
It is widely speculated that Trump's immediate driving force to launch an attack on Iran was the pressure created by Israel and Saudi Arabia. AIPAC, the Israel lobby group, holds significant sway over both the White House and Congress. Also, Epstein files remain a major concern for Trump and always a factor in Trump's decisions and attempt to distract.
Former Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vocal Trump ally who recently had a falling out with Trump over the release of the files on Jeffrey Epstein, issued a blistering message on social media over the administration's decision to go to war. The prominent US conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson claims Israel is dragging the US into a damaging war. He said, "This happened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel's war. This is not the United States' war." Carlson also said the war was based on "lies" and led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's manipulations.
Conflict has spread across the Middle East after Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed during strikes launched by the US and Israel, which was followed by a call from US President to overthrow the "Iranian regime". Iran has responded by launching missiles and drones across the region, targeting Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus and ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
Lebanon's militia group Hezbollah has joined the fighting, launching rockets into Israel from its bases in Lebanon. Israel responded with strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. After a video surfaced of a U.S. F-15 crashing to the ground in Kuwait, the Iranian, Kuwaiti and U.S. militaries issued competing claims about what had happened.
Iran's specific targets have included the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Al Dhafra Air Base in the UAE, Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, and Hotels where US army personnel are staying. Amid Iran's retaliation, drone incidents forced shutdowns at facilities linked to Saudi Aramco in Ras Tanura, while LNG operations tied to Qatar Energy were reportedly halted after strikes near Ras Laffan. Tehran has denied directly targeting Gulf energy infrastructure, but oil markets are on edge as the conflict escalates.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and Israeli militaries continue to insist, with no credible evidence, that they have established 'air superiority' over Iran. But the Gulf Arab states are also all against Iran, who want Iran removed as their regional rival. Most of these Arab statelets are a creation of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement (a secret treaty between Britain and France, with Russian assent, that divided the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces into zones of influence) as well as the establishment of settler colonial apartheid state of Israel. All these countries have no historical precedence before that. Now Trump's war is sliding the entire region into chaos.
Tucker Carlson in a video interview lays out what is at stake in an Israeli-led war against Iran. Among the many revelations in his video is the fact that Mossad agents were caught planting bombs in both Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Iran has accused Israel of false flag attacks against Saudi Arabia.
Many political observers opine that the war against Iran is not really about Iran's nuclear facilities keeping in view that Trump last June claimed that he had obliterated Iran's nuclear facility, nor about nationwide protests engineered by Mossad and the CIA, nor even about sanctions and economic strain. Instead, it has far more consequential objective, the "disintegration of Iran" like the destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya giving a freehand to Israel to control the whole of Middle East.
It is widely believed that once Iran is taken out of the picture, next target would be Turkey (former Israeli prime minister Neftali Bennett already called for attack on Turkey), followed by Saudi Arabia and then the job will be complete.
Question arises why the attack took place now? Reasons include domestic turbulence in the United States, ranging from renewed scrutiny around Donald Trump and the lingering shadow of Jeffrey Epstein, to allegations involving Israel's Mossad could be blackmailing.
In contrast to the Trump-Netanyahu strategy of a short war, Iran plans a long war. It knows the longer the war, the weaker Trump and the US will get. Iran is looking at a many months-long conflict, at least to the end of this year. Iran doesn't need to 'win'; it just needs not to lose.
Iran's strategy is not to defeat the US militarily. Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute argues that it is to make the cost high enough, fast enough, to collapse domestic support before Iran loses.
The Trump administration has initiated a war whose consequences they neither foresee nor control. There is an element of insanity in its actions, but it is an insanity rooted in its imperial hubris creating an illusion of power. If the US-Israel war is all about regime change then it is war that cannot be won without enormous loss of human of lives. Overwhelming majority of people in a country of almost 100 million will defend the country till their death.
With no hope of a military victory, now CIA is fomenting a civil war by arming the Kurds in Iran. Douglas Macgregor, a former senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Défence argues a new world is emerging with a new Middle East -- in which Iran will win and Israel may not survive.
Iran has regular military forces, but it also has a huge Revolutionary Guard force that has, effectively, its own army, navy, intelligence service and special forces. They are not the kind of force that is going to disappear when Trump's airstrikes manage to kill Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. However, the Iranian government and its Revolutionary Guard are still in place. Trita Parsi said in an interview that Iran's revolutionary system was built to withstand exactly the kind of pressure it faces now.
George W. Bush lied about Iraq and non-existent weapons of mass destruction to go to war in 2003. Donald Trump lied about an "imminent threat" from Iran to go to war in 2026. The assassination of Khamenei instead of demoralising the supporters of the Islamic Republic, has apparently strengthened their resolve.
The US-Israel military aggression against Iran cannot break the will of Iranian patriotism. Iran, with its 5,000- 6000-year history, has made significant contributions to the cultural development of countries spanning from West Asia to South Asia and beyond. Iran is considered one of the world's oldest civilisations, with its cultural identity linked back as far as 12,000 years.
As the situation stands, Iran will survive the crisis as it has done so many times before in its long history. The future of Iran and the type of regime that will rule the country must be decided by the Iranian people alone, not by any outside intervention.
muhammad.mahmood47@gmail.com