The ‘Great Satan’

“If we see the US, this Great Satan, raising Cain and bringing the devils together around him, it is because the US grip over our country and our resources [has been] curtailed.” —Ayatollah Khomeini. Once again, the United States has demonstrated its enmity toward human life, contempt for international law, and its insatiable apatite for bloodshed and power by unilaterally attacking a UN-member state. It did not even pay us the usual courtesy of “selling” this war against Iran. However flimsy the Bush administration’s story was about an impending Iraqi nuclear attack on the United States, at least they spent about a year trying to advertise that lie. Nowadays the peace movement doesn’t even have time to stage demonstrations before we’re suddenly hearing about the latest murder-spree, whether in Venezuela, Cuba, or Lebanon. Now the Unites States, along with Israel, has once again committed the crime of aggression, which the Nuremberg tribunal famously called “the supreme international crime” because it “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” All the other crimes against humanity, the indescribable suffering of the victims, and the national trauma of living through societal collapse, flows from the opening of that Pandora’s box. When sentencing the Nazis for the crime of aggression, Justice Robert Jackson, the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, said: “We are handing these defendants a poisoned chalice. And if we ever sip from it, we must be treated the same way or else recognize this trial as farce.” The joint US and Israeli attacks on Iran in June of last year, where they struck residential neighborhoods and killed over a thousand people, including at least twenty children, already constitutes a crime of aggression. Even if Iran was developing nuclear weapons, which they deny and nobody has been able to prove they’re doing, that would not give the US and Israel the right to attack a sovereign country. Everybody understands this in reverse: Iran does not get to invade Israel because they have nuclear weapons. Even if everything the Bush administration alleged about Saddam Hussein had been correct—which it certainly wasn’t—they still had no legal right to invade Iraq. Yet in the case of Ukraine, the US and the European Union appeal to the sanctity of international law to condemn Russia. The Western media collectively refer to it as “Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine.” At the same time, they call the Israeli-US genocide  in Palestine, “Israel’s war in Gaza.” The Western media are again complicit in whitewashing the latest unprovoked war against Iran. Following last year’s June attack, a chorus of approval resounded in the Western media. (The following list of quotes were assembled by the media monitoring group FAIR.) New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said Trump’s attack “deserves respect, no matter how one feels about this president and the rest of his politics.” USA Today  published a piece headlined: “Trump Was Right To Bomb Iran. Even Democrats Will Be Safer Because of It.” The Washington Post explained that “Trump didn’t have to ask Congress before striking Iran” because “the operation … derives support from international law as an exercise of collective self-defense in defense of Israel.” (Nowhere in international law does it say one can “preemptively” attack a country that hasn’t attacked you first, nor would that negate the Constitution.) Another USA Today columnist wrote that “If the president is not able to respond to a hostile regime building weapons that could destroy American cities, then I’m not sure what else, short of an actual invasion of the homeland, would allow for him to act.” (Correct! That’s what it would take: an invasion of the homeland. International law says you have to be attacked first in order to retaliate—just like Iran is currently doing.) Meanwhile, the famous Iraq War-hawk, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said that the “Attacks on Iran are part of a much bigger global struggle” between the West that believes in “more decent, if not democratic, governance” and those who “thrive on resisting those trends because conflict enables them to keep their people down.” As for criticism of the attacks, the Washington Post published an opinion piece warning that “decimating Iran’s defenses and then letting them stay in power to terrorize their citizens, dissidents and opponents around the world would be a massive failure.” That apparently is what passes for criticizing war these days. Antony Blinken, Biden’s Secretary of State and génocidaire, wrote a piece in the New York Times headlined: “Trump’s Iran Strike Was a Mistake. I Hope It Succeeds.” Another “critical” op-ed in USA Today read: “If Trump’s bombing of Iran proves successful—and I, of course, hope that it does—it’ll be dumb luck. But if it leads to disaster, it’ll be exactly what anyone paying attention to these reckless hucksters predicted.” A moral condemnation, about as rare as a snow leopard, came from Yasmin Vafa, an Iranian refugee, who wrote in USA Today: This kind of violence doesn’t happen in theory. It happens in living rooms. In kitchens. In schoolyards and in hospitals. And it doesn’t begin with bombs. It begins with words. Words that dehumanize entire nations. … It’s easy to speak of war in the passive voice. Collateral damage. Strategic necessity. Regime change. But I ask those who write or legislate in those terms to consider: What is the name of the child under the blackout curtain? Who is she, and what might she have become if you had let her live in peace? I was that child once. And I promise you, there are millions more like me—in Gaza, in Iran, in Lebanon—whose lives are not theoretical. They are real. They are watching. And they deserve to live in peace. In January, protests erupted in Iran because of an economic crisis manufactured by US sanctions. Remember, sanctions deployed against Venezuela caused a contraction of the Venezuelan economy three times as large as the US economy contracted during the Great Depression. At the time, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo touted the sanctions as a huge success: “The circle is tightening. The humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour,” he told reporters. “You can see the increasing pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering from.” The sanctions regime against Iraq in the ’90s was even worse, killing immense numbers of people due to the manufactured scarcity of medicine and food. The two UN diplomats in charge of the sanctions both resigned in protest. One of them, Denis Halliday, called it “genocidal.” Even the former Democratic whip in the House of Representatives, David Bonior, called the sanctions “infanticide masquerading as politics.” On 60 Minutes, journalist Lesley Stahl asked Secretary of State Madeline Albright about a UN report finding that deaths caused directly by the US sanctions “range from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children.” “That’s more children than died in Hiroshima,” Stahl said. “Is the price worth it?” To which Albright responded: “I think it’s a very hard choice. But the price—we think the price is worth it.” Cuba has been under an illegal sanctions regime since 1962, and now that the US took control over Venezuelan oil, it’s facing island-wide blackouts. Surgeries can’t be performed, dialysis patients might die, food can’t be cooked, garbage trucks can’t run, etc. (I’ll mention a little more about Cuba near the end of this piece.) These sanctions kill. And they almost exclusively kill the poor. Iran has been under strict US sanctions as part of the West’s hybrid war against the Islamic Republic since it came into being in 1979. These sanctions have prevented Iran from developing economically and the constant accompanying threat of regime change has stifled social progress in the country. A government that is rightfully worried about being overthrown will not loosen its control over its civil society, move towards greater democracy, or allow political protests. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last January, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that in late 2025 the Trump administration had manufactured an economic crisis in Iran by intentionally causing a dollar shortage, thereby disrupting the rial: “[It] worked because in December, their economy collapsed,” Bessent boasted. “We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why people took to the streets. This is economic statecraft, no shots fired, and things are moving in a very positive way here.” It was during those protests in January that Israel’s Mossad posted a message in Farsi on their official Telegram channel to Iranians: “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.” Israeli Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu told reporters: “I can assure you we have some of our people operating there right now.” And Israeli Channel 14 correspondent Tamir Morag wrote: “We reported tonight on Channel 14: Foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed. Everyone is free to guess who is behind it.” This is how you manufacture a crisis and give yourself an excuse to invade for supposed “humanitarian” reasons. According to the Iranian government, 3,117 people were killed during these protests, a number that includes both civilians and security forces. Then, suspiciously, a Canadian think-tank claimed 43,000 Iranian civilians had been killed. CBS News  reported 30,000 dead. It wasn’t long before the media openly mused about redrawing the Middle East map. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed titled: “A Fractured Iran Might Not Be So Bad,” because “a pared down Iran would pose a diminished risk to Israel” and “would frustrate the interests of Russia, China and others.” “For the sake of regional and world peace,” the author continued, “the best option may be to help a recession happen and thereby take a downsized Iran … off the geopolitical chessboard entirely.” The Washington Post editorial board published a piece calling for more bombing and sanctions: “Airstrikes alone won’t bring down the regime—or make it behave like a normal country. But Israel and the US have shown in recent years that bombing can cause significant tactical setbacks. And there is always more room for sanctions pressure.” Recent estimates from Gaza, including from UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, put the death toll around 680,000; of those, 380,000 are infants below five years old. Killing children en masse, however, is evidently how the Washington Post believes a “normal country” behaves. The New York Times’ editorial board chimed in with a piece headlined: “Iran’s Murderous Regime Is Irredeemable.” “The Khamenei regime is too depraved to be reformed,” the editors wrote, so they recommended that “The world” should “extend the sanctions it has imposed on Iran” and “Above all, [Trump] should avoid the lack of strategic discipline and illegal actions that have defined the Venezuela campaign. He should ask which policies have the best chance of undermining the regime’s violent repression and creating the conditions for a democratic transition.” The fact that the United States is adamantly opposed to democracy in Iran is conveniently ignored by the paper of record. In 1951, the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, voted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—where “Anglo” referred to the owners and profiteers, and “Iranian” referred to the country the British extracted their oil from. In that year’s elections the Iranian people choose Mohammad Mosaddegh as their Prime Minister. Due to the popularity of Mosaddegh and his party, the National Front, the Shah could neither prevent him from passing the Oil Nationalization Act, nor from founding the National Iranian Oil Company. Iran became the first of the oil lands to redirect the oil profits away from New York and London, which had grown rich by robbing other countries into poverty, and instead would use it to develop Iran and its people. Iran paid a steep price for their attempt at democracy. In 1953, the CIA and British MI-6 orchestrated a coup d’état against Mosaddegh, consolidating power into the hands of the Shah, transforming Iran into a horrifying dictatorship. Immediately, the Shah began a bloody crackdown. The CIA helped him create a secret police force, the SAVAK, that rivaled the Gestapo. The US handpicked its members, provided the funding and the weapons, and instructed them on torture techniques—the same curriculum it taught to Latin American death squads. The SAVAK went on a crusade against Mosaddegh’s National Front and the powerful Iranian Communist Party, called Tudeh (Masses). They killed thousands of party members and supporters, others were arrested and tortured, and tens of thousands were exiled or fled. In 1976, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, Martin Ennals, noted that Iran had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.” And yet, the Shah was deeply beloved by Washington. (And, of course, by Israel and Saudi Arabia.) In 1979, the Iranian people rose up in revolution against this tyrant. It was a genuine people’s revolution. It included large factions of the Left, including the Tudeh Party and the Marxist-Leninist Fedaiyan-e-Khalq, which had trained and armed women as Fedayeen Communist fighters. Women in general played an enormous, often-forgotten role in the 1979 revolution against the Shah. Unfortunately, the right-wing Islamist faction of the revolution, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, managed to take power for themselves and transformed Iran into the Islamic Republic. The Shah, meanwhile, fled to the United States. In retaliation, Iranian students occupied the US embassy in Tehran, demanding the Shah’s return to stand trial and Washington’s promise not to orchestrate another coup. The embassy hostages in particular caused total hysteria in the United States. It is difficult to overstate the manic, apoplectic rage emanating from Washington in those years. Iran has been the great obsession of the United States ever since. Iran has been skilfully elevated into the American consciousness as a great evil. But it’s a spectre that only seems to haunt three countries in particular: the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. When the rest of the world is polled on the issue, even Europeans aren’t convinced that Iran poses an existential threat to world peace. An interesting, mostly forgotten chapter of the embassy story is that candidate Ronald Reagan made a secret deal with the Iranians. The hostage situation was hurting President Carter’s reputation and opened him up to attacks on his alleged weakness. If the Iranians promised to stall negotiations until after Reagan won the White House, he’d give them a better deal than what Carter was offering. Legally this was treason on Reagan’s part. Presidents have long been above the law well before Trump came along and publicly exposed that fact. In June of 1979, the new Republic put hundreds of the Shah’s torturers on trial. According to journalist William Blum, they had damning evidence: “After the 1979 revolution, the Iranians found CIA film made for SAVAK on how to torture women.” One SAVAK interrogator would confess in court to “torturing hundreds of people and murdering dozens in 16 years as key interrogator for the secret police,” the New York Times reported. Sometimes, after a class with guerillas, Tehrani said, he and his colleagues would decide to kill their prisoners. “They were not always shot,” he recalled. “Often, we would torture them to death. We would stick hot iron bars in their noses and eyes. And we would tell the coroner to write suicide as the cause of death.” The prosecutor asked Tehrani about nine guerilla leaders who were reported to have been killed during an attempted prison escape eight years ago. “We took them out of jail and put them in a minibus and drove them to the hills,” said Tehrani. “We had only one submachine gun, an Uzi, among us, so we took turns shooting them.” The prosecutor noted that many of their relatives were in the court and wanted to know if the victims had had any last words. “No, we didn’t give them a chance to make a last declaration,” answered Tehrani. “We blindfolded them arid, handcuffed them and then shot them. I think I was the fourth to shoot. We took the bodies back to the prison and we had the newspapers print that they were killed during a jailbreak. We had the coroner confirm this version.” …Tehrani then lashed out at the [left-wing] fedayeen, accusing them of failing to show respect for women and religion. “I know I have done things I must pay for,” he said. “But people must open their eyes. If they want an Islamic revolution, they should disarm the fedayeen. They are Marxists. They have nothing to do with Islam. What I have done to the fedayeen, let history judge.” Six days later, Reuters reported a curt update: Two former agents of the Shah’s secret police were executed by firing squad today after being convicted of killing and mutilating political prisoners. The two, Bahmaii Naderipour, known as Tehrani, and Fereidoun Tavanagari, known as Arash, made full confessions … Tehrani sought to justify his torture of prisoners by saying it was exclusively against non-Islamic leftists. He offered his services to the revolutionary Government to fight Communism. It turns out that the new government didn’t need Tehrani’s help. Though the new regime in Iran became a counterweight to US domination in the region, eventually forming the famous Axis of Resistance, in certain domestic affairs it picked up where the Shah had left off. Consolidating their power required eliminating the Left. A report by Amnesty International detailed the carnage: Between June and December 1981, several thousand people were executed either without trial or following flagrantly unfair “trials” that lasted only a few minutes and were so arbitrary and summary that they cannot be considered to constitute judicial proceedings. Defendants were not informed of any specific accusations against them, were denied access to a lawyer, and were granted no possibility of appeal. Some were blindfolded during their “trial.” The authorities often did not announce the executions in advance; families learned about the fate of their loved ones through newspapers and the radio. Most of those killed were targeted for real or perceived affiliation with the [Marxist group] PMOI. However, hundreds of individuals affiliated with Kurdish opposition groups and leftist and other political organizations were also among the victims. Among the thousands of individuals executed many had been involved in violent opposition to the Islamic Republic system. However, there were also many others who had never used or advocated violence. They had been primarily arrested because of peaceful political or religious activities such as distributing newspapers and leaflets, taking part in demonstrations, collecting funds for prisoners’ families, or in some cases just because they were associated with people actively opposed to the system. Hundreds of those executed were children who had been caught up in the turmoil of the post-revolutionary period. One of them was 13-year-old Fatemeh Mesbah, an apparent PMOI sympathizer, who was arrested in a demonstration in Tehran on 16 September 1981 and shot dead by a firing squad four days later. On 20 September 1981, Assadollah Lajevardi, the prosecutor of Tehran, was reported to state, “Even if a 12- year-old is found participating in an armed demonstration, he will be shot. The age doesn’t matter.” Thousands were also sentenced to lengthy prison sentences after grossly unfair “trials” before Islamic Revolutionary Tribunals. A substantial number of them were prisoners of conscience, imprisoned solely because of their non-violent political or religious activities. In 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the execution of thousands of prisoners, most of them leftists. I am by no means an apologist for any state, and I certainly have no warm feelings towards a regime that murders my fellow comrades. I would support a workers’ revolution in Iran to transform the so-called Islamic Republic into a people’s republic. However, it is important to remember that all nation states are, by their nature, violent entities. The power of the state rests in their monopoly of violence. Every new government is established on corpses. The Islamic Republic is hardly an outlier. The United States, for instance, was at first a colony, established by the violent conquest for the New World by European powers. It then fought a war against the British Empire to gain independence, and afterwards expanded westward in search of lebensraum, carrying out genocide of the native population, and annexed two-thirds of Mexico in a war of aggression. Germany had to fight for its unification, the Soviet Union emerged out of a workers’ revolution, the People’s Republic of China overthrew the tyranny of the Guomindang, Anglo-Saxon tribes squabbled over Britain for centuries after the Romans departed, and the Global South was forced to spill its blood in the battles against European colonialism. All of these countries subsequently carried out atrocities to one extent or another. Most of them eventually emerged out of that repressive phase, except for the ones subjected to neo-colonial domination and hybrid warfare; those countries were kept poor by the West because they are rich in resources. The establishment of the Islamic Republic was comparatively mild, especially considering that it had to free itself from violent colonial control and tyranny. It was only after freeing itself that the political struggles and processes that happen in all societies—between the forces of power and domination on the one hand, and people’s movements for equality on the other—could begin to make progress. Progress that is now imperiled by the US and Israel’s imperialist war. Iranian- American Professor Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, a critic of the Iranian government, recently echoed this sentiment in an interview with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. “So, you’ve been imprisoned at the notorious Evin Prison, on death row,” Goodman asked. “And yet you warn against the toppling of this regime. Why?” “Because I think that for—in the past 40 years or so, there were so many important events happening inside Iranian society,” Behrooz said. “Iranian society, decade after decade, showed that they are capable of transforming their own society. Issues of social justice remain very prominent in Iranian society. Iranian women were very, very active in changing the conditions of their own life inside the country. And the Iranian labor movement was very strong. Iranian students always were very strong.” “Toppling the government,” he added, “would damage those struggles that people have struggled to maintain throughout these past 40 years.” The struggles he mentions are largely unknown in the West. The unnuanced caricature presented by corporate media of a static, despotic Iran where political progress is blocked was more fitting for the Shah than the Islamic Republic. Iran, like any country, has gone through its own historical and political processes, and it’s worth taking that into account because the muddying of this history is a prerequisite for those who try to sell you this war on “humanitarian” grounds. For starters, while the clerics have a firm grip on power, Iran still holds elections, including for the president—a fact often omitted from the West that still claims Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East,” despite Israel not being a democracy and Iran qualifying at least as much as the United States, where the unelected rule of a rich financial elite mirrors the level of influence of the clerics. Another little-known fact is that Iran is home to the second-largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel. Religious minorities enjoy legal protections in Iran, and around 25,000 Iranians are Jewish. It’s important to remember that Iran is an incredibly diverse country of over 90 million people. It’s comprised of several ethnic groups with long histories, forming a rich cultural tapestry. The Israeli accusation that Iranians are virulently anti-Semitic is largely constructed out of thin air. During WWII, Iranian diplomat Abdul Hossein Sardari, who stayed behind to lead the Iranian consulate in Paris after most of his colleagues fled, saved hundreds of Jews by issuing Iranian passports—including to non-Iranian Jews—that didn’t list their religion. Out of caution, Sardari acted alone without informing the Iranian government of his plan. Though he never bragged or spoke publicly about his actions, he was later hailed as a national hero. An Iranian television show, Zero Degree Turn, based on Sardari’s story aired in 2007. Another obfuscated nuance in the West are the victories of Iran’s feminist movement. While it’s true that Iran forces women to wear hijabs (although those laws are no longer enforced in some parts of the country after President Pezeshkian’s election) and are otherwise oppressed in a number of ways, the notion of a Taliban-style assault on women’s freedoms is, again, exaggerated. Yet “liberating” Iranian women is often cited by Western hawks as a reason to bomb their country—the same way women’s rights were invoked in the 19th century by European elite to justify colonialism In fact, Iranian women are highly educated. According to UNESCO, in 2015 women comprised 34.7% of all science and engineering graduates (in the US that number was 9.9 percent). That didn’t stop Sara Haines, a co-host on The View, from advocating in favor of attacking Iran during last year’s 12-Day War by claiming Iranian women “are not educated” and “can’t own property.” She later had to sheepishly issue a correction on social media: “Yesterday on the show, I spoke about the treatment of girls and women in Iran and misspoke by conflating the theocratic rule of the Ayatollah in Iran with the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan. To clarify: girls and women in Afghanistan are currently banned from attending school, while in Iran, women do have access to education and make up a significant portion of university students. … I was not implying that women in Iran are uneducated or making any pejorative generalizations.” Another surprising fact about the Islamic Republic, given its persecution of gay people, is that while Khomeini opposed gay rights, he did permit and defended the practice of gender-affirming surgery to treat gender dysphoria after meeting with Maryam Molkara, an Iranian trans woman. Maryam knew she was trans from an early age. “When I was very small I used to scream when they tried to dress me in boy’s clothes and when I was taken to toy shops I wanted dolls instead of boy’s toys,” she once explained. “I played at cooking with the neighboring girls and every night I prayed for a miracle but in the morning I looked at my body and it hadn’t happened.” Being a religious woman, she wrote to Khomeini, then a leading shia cleric living exiled by the Shah in Iraq. “Khomeini decided then that it was a religious obligation for me to have the sex change because a person needs a clear sexual identity in order to carry out their religious duties,” she recounted. “He said that because of my feelings, I should observe all the rites specific to women, including the way they dress.” But, after 1979, she was still not legally a woman. Every time she wrote to the government she was told she needed to be “religiously” considered a woman. She wrapped her Quran in the Iranian flag, put on a suit, and traveled to Khomeini’s residence. “The officers stopped me, but Sayyed Morteza Pasandideh, Ayatollah Khomeini’s elder brother, intervened and allowed me to enter. The officers were suspicious of the cloth I had wrapped around my chest. They thought it was explosives. After removing it, they realised it was my bra. The women of the house immediately made a chador for me. I fainted because of all the stress.” Khomeini’s son first spoke to Molkara and was supposedly brought to tears by her story (I can’t verify if that’s true), before deciding she should meet with the Ayatollah. After that meeting, Khomeini issued a fatwa: “In the name of God. Sex- reassignment surgery is not prohibited in sharia law if reliable medical doctors recommend it. Inshallah you will be safe and hopefully the people whom you had mentioned might take care of your situation.” He also wrote another, longer fatwa: “Sex-reassignment surgery from male-to-female is not haram [forbidden] and vice versa, … a sex-reassignment surgery is not obligatory, but the person is still eligible to change his/her sex into the opposite gender.” To be clear, transgender Iranians still face discrimination, intolerance and harassment (like they do in the US), but my point is simply that Iran is not the cartoon-villain ISIS state that’s presented by the Western media as hellbent on global destruction. But the United States and Israel maintain that if Iran obtains nuclear weapons, they will nuke Tel Aviv and Washington. When Sky News interviewed Republicans in Texas, all of them had uncritically swallowed this sentiment. “America First, right? Yes, I—America first, I believe in that. But Iran, they’ve been saying, they’ve been chanting ‘death to America’ for a long time. And me as a patriot, I don’t take that lightly. We’d rather get to them before they get to us first.” “They’re an evil empire,” another said. “So, you can either kick the can down the road or you can do it right now.” This is an impressive distortion of reality. In actuality Iran is one of the leading advocates of establishing a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. They propose it every five years at the United Nation’s Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, where it’s unilaterally blocked by the United States because Washington wants to protect Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Even Obama’s famed nuclear deal with Iran, falsely presented by American state- media as a repudiation of Israel, was him bending over backwards to protect Israeli nukes. Obama rejected Iran’s proposal of a denuclearized Middle East, in opposition of world and US public opinion, never mind the fact that the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which the US is a signatory, requires Washington to support it—and instead offered to lift certain sanctions for a ten-year moratorium on Tehran’s nuclear program. Israel opposed Obama’s nuclear deal because it removed their best casus belli. Without the spectre of Iranian weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) haunting the Israeli consciousness, selling the war that the Israeli military establishment has hungered over for decades became considerably more difficult. The Obama administration, meanwhile, boasted about having stopped Iran’s nuclear weapons program for ten years. Except that Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Their opposition to nuclear weapons is well documented and admirable. In 1980, Saddam Hussein, with full Western backing, invaded Iran. He hoped that the turmoil of 1979 had left the country weak enough to successfully invade. His goal was to crush the revolutionary government in Tehran to prevent its spirit from spreading to Iraq, where the oppressed shia minority dreamed of a similar sunrise, and thereby Saddam hoped to avoid sharing the Shah’s fate. To give the Iraqis an edge, the United States and many of its European accomplices provided Iraq with chemical weapons to use against Iranian soldiers and civilians. They even provided the reconnaissance data to help target the Iranians. To his credit, Ayatollah Khomeini did not respond in kind. In 2014, Mohsen Rafighdoost, who served as the minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) throughout the Iraq-Iran war, told Foreign Policy journal he twice asked the Ayatollah to start a WMD program but was denied. Instead Khomeini issued fatwas forbidding their production: Rafighdoost prepared a report on all the specialized groups he had formed and went to discuss it with Khomeini, hoping to get his approval for work on chemical and nuclear weapons. The supreme leader met him accompanied only by his son, Ahmad, who served as chief of staff, according to Rafighdoost. “When Khomeini read the report, he reacted to the chemical-biological-nuclear team by asking, ‘What is this?’” Rafighdoost recalled.  Khomeini ruled out development of chemical and biological weapons as inconsistent with Islam. “Imam told me that, instead of producing chemical or biological weapons, we should produce defensive protection for our troops, like gas masks and atropine,” Rafighdoost said. Rafighdoost also told Khomeini that the group had “a plan to produce nuclear weapons.” That could only have been a distant goal in 1984, given the rudimentary state of Iran’s nuclear program. At that point, Iranian nuclear specialists had no knowledge of how to enrich uranium and had no technology with which to do it. But in any case, Khomeini closed the door to such a program. “We don’t want to produce nuclear weapons,” Rafighdoost recalls the supreme leader telling him. Khomeini instructed him instead to “send these scientists to the Atomic Energy Organization,” referring to Iran’s civilian nuclear-power agency. That edict from Khomeini ended the idea of seeking nuclear weapons, according to Rafighdoost. The chemical-warfare issue took a new turn in late June 1987, when Iraqi aircraft bombed four residential areas of Sardasht, an ethnically Kurdish city in Iran, with what was believed to be mustard gas. It was the first time Iran’s civilian population had been targeted by Iraqi forces with chemical weapons, and the population was completely unprotected. Of 12,000 inhabitants, 8,000 were exposed, and hundreds died. As popular fears of chemical attacks on more Iranian cities grew quickly, Rafighdoost undertook a major initiative to prepare Iran’s retaliation. He worked with the Defense Ministry to create the capability to produce mustard gas weapons. Rafighdoost was obviously hoping that the new circumstances of Iraqi chemical weapons attacks on Iranian civilians would cause Khomeini to have a different view of the issue. … The supreme leader was unmoved by the new danger presented by the Iraqi gas attacks on civilians. “It doesn’t matter whether it is on the battlefield or in cities; we are against this,” he told Rafighdoost. “It is haram (forbidden) to produce such weapons. You are only allowed to produce protection.” Invoking the Islamic Republic’s claim to spiritual and moral superiority over the secular Iraqi regime, Rafighdoost recalls Khomeini asking rhetorically, “If we produce chemical weapons, what is the difference between me and Saddam?” Khomeini died in 1989 and was replaced by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who took the same position. Khamenei issued his own fatwa in the ’90s: We believe that besides nuclear weapons, other types of weapons of mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons also pose a serious threat to humanity. The Iranian nation which is itself a victim of chemical weapons feels more than any other nation the danger that is caused by the production and stockpiling of such weapons … We consider the use of such weapons as haram and believe it is everyone’s duty to make efforts to secure humanity against this great disaster. I wish that Western leaders would adopt a similar stance on WMDs. Soon after Trump annulled Obama’s nuclear deal, the United States and Israel continued their campaign of international terrorism against the Islamic Republic with full force. Iranian civilian nuclear scientists continued to be assassinated by the Mossad, and in 2020, Trump ordered the assassination of Iran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani. General Soleimani, described as the second most important person in Iran, was instrumental in liberating Iraq from ISIS. With his guidance, Iraqi forces in Amirli became the first to resist an ISIS takeover in 2014. Soleimani also organized the retaking of Tikrit a year later. On January 3, 2020, General Soleimani was in Baghdad on his way to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi. He was there for peace talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which Abdul-Mahdi was mediating. While en route to his meeting, the US killed him with a drone strike. Trump explained he ordered the assassination because Soleimani was “saying bad things about our country.” And if you’re Iranian, that apparently gets you the death penalty. Of course, if Iran had done anything comparable, bombing a famous American general on his way to diplomatic peace talks in London for instance—picture the charred body of General David Petraeus or Colin Powell in the smoldering ruins of Piccadilly Circus—the entire West would furiously march into war. So far, however, Iran has exercised enormous restraint. Then, the Hamas revolt on October 7, 2023, provided the Israelis with an unprecedented opportunity to remake the Middle East. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights documented 31 Israeli attacks in Syria (22 air strikes and 9 rocket attacks by ground forces) in only the first three months of 2024. Those attacks killed at least 129 people, most of whom were Iranian and Iranian-backed forces; at least 12 victims were civilians. On April 1, 2024, the Israelis sharply escalated by bombing the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Another unambiguous violation of international law. Attacking a consulate is not only a crime but also an act of war; legally it is tantamount to striking Iranian soil. Sixteen people were killed, including a Syrian woman and her son who lived on the top floor of the four-story building wherein Iran rented the other three floors to house its embassy. Also killed in the attack were seven high-ranking members of the IRGC. Most notably, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the highest ranking Iranian commander assassinated since Qasem Soleimani. At the United Nations, the Iranian delegate told the international community that if they refused to condemn Israel’s illegal acts of unprovoked aggression, his country would have to respond with force. The United States vetoed the UN condemnation. What followed was a telegraphed show of force: Iran sent Israel a warning that a small attack was coming; it opened with slow-moving drones that were easily shot down by the Iron Dome and US interceptors, and it ended with several missiles hitting an evacuated military airstrip in Israel. No one was killed, one Bedouin girl was injured by mistake and was later released from the hospital. Iran’s message was two-fold: One, we have the technological capability to hit precise targets inside Israel and there isn’t anything your defenses and interceptor missiles can do about it. And two, while we prefer not to escalate matters, we will defend ourselves if you keep attacking us. The response from Washington was to start beating the war drums. During the 2024 election Kamala Harris repeatedly railed against “Iran and Iran-backed terrorists,” said she wanted the “most lethal fighting force” in the world, and touted her endorsement of Dick Cheney. I almost expected her to use the phrase “axis of evil.” “Iran has American blood on their hands, okay?” she said during her 60 Minutes  interview. “What we need to do is ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power. That is one of my highest priorities.” Donald Trump was able to profit from Harris’ open bellicosity by presenting himself as the peace candidate, despite his track record from his first administration that cemented him as one of the most violent presidents in American history. Trump frequently warned that Harris would “invade the Middle East, get millions of Muslims killed, and start World War III.” I will always remember the words of one well-meaning fool who said he voted for Trump because “He speaks of war as something that is bad.” In February of last year, not even a full month after being sworn in again, the Trump administration suddenly froze all federal spending. Eventually the administration only partially thawed the freeze, which was probably part of the strategy—like telling someone you’ll rob them of $500 before giving them a sense of relief by only taking $50. The fact remains that for a window in February, 2025, seventy-two million Americans were suddenly without health insurance. One might reasonably expect a proud “working-class” party to object to such a thing. So what were the Democrats talking about during this time? Well, Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, went to a pro-Israel conference to give a speech: “Iran is at one of its weakest points in decades,” he said. “We can’t take our foot off the gas pedal until Iran is brought to its knees—for the good of the world.” It’s now one year later and the leopards have still not changed their spots. Last month, on February 20, Drop Site News reported that many Democrats were quietly hoping for a war against Iran: The foreign policy aide, whom Drop Site agreed not to name, explained that a substantial number of Senate Democrats believed that Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats. …If Trump manages to topple the Iranian government, the ensuing chaos could prove a drag on Trump as the country heads into the November [midterm] elections. An attack would put American servicemembers at more serious risk than after past strikes, particularly if Iran makes good on its threat to unleash much heavier attacks than in its previous retaliatory strikes. And if the US takes dozens, or even hundreds, of casualties as a result of Trump’s war of choice, that would also be damaging to the GOP. Trump’s America First base—promised their leader would end wars, not launch new ones—would see its divisions deepened, particularly around the increasingly polarizing subject of Israeli influence over Trump. The cost of a war in Iran, with likely thousands killed and a nation immiserated, has not registered so far with Democratic leaders as something worth considering in the cost-benefit calculation. In the lead up to the war, Trump told the same lie he once criticized George Bush for telling: that his chosen enemy was building nuclear weapons. “We are absolutely not pursuing nuclear weapons, and however they wish to verify it, we are prepared,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on February 17. “In what language should we say we don’t want nuclear weapons? We are ready for any kind of verification in this regard.” In fact, that verification already exists. The United States’ own intelligence agencies, as well as the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), have for decades verified that Iran is not building nuclear weapons. Most recently, in 2025 IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told Al Jazeera: “We did not find in Iran elements to indicate that there is an active, systematic plan to build nuclear weapons.” On February 24, Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi tweeted: “Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.” Later that same day, a few hours after Araghchi’s tweet, Trump said in his State of the Union address: “They were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, in particular nuclear weapons. Yet they continue. They’re starting it all over. We wiped it out and they want to start all over again, and are this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions. We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal but we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’” But that is precisely what the Iranians have said repeatedly.