For decades now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pressed for confrontation with Iran. He has lobbied successive American administrations, publicly and privately, to support military action against the Iranian state. His ambition to see Iran's clerical regime destroyed by foreign bombs has never been a secret. What we are witnessing now is the result.
In Donald Trump, he has found an American president willing, and gullible enough, to do it.
The justifications being offered to the American public and to the world deserve no confidence. "Imminent threat." We've heard this before. It was the phrase of choice when Washington made the case for Iraq in 2003. That war produced not safety but two decades of bloodshed. The language hasn't changed, nor has the dishonesty behind it.
This war will not stabilise anything. The United States has made this same promise before every intervention it has launched in the Middle East. Afghanistan and Iraq alone should settle the question. Each time Washington pledged order, and each time it left behind wreckage. Why should anyone believe otherwise now?
I want to say something about the history, because it matters more than most Western commentators seem willing to acknowledge. In 1953 the CIA and MI6 engineered the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and handed power back to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He ruled for nearly three decades on Western arms and Western approval. That is the history that fed the revolution of 1979. It brought the clerical regime to power in the first place. Those who now insist that bombs will fix Iran have learned nothing from the mess their own governments helped create.
I want to be direct. I have advocated for the fall of the clerical dictatorship for decades. The Iranian regime is repressive. It brutalises its own people. But that doesn't hand any outside power the right to overthrow it through air strikes and invasion. If it did, half the governments on earth would be legitimate targets.
And this isn't only a question of principle. Every time a powerful state has torn apart a weaker one in this region, the people living there have suffered for it. Not the politicians in Washington or London or Tel Aviv. The people on the ground. That pattern has held for generations and there is nothing about this war that will break it.
I urge people everywhere to speak against what is being done. Bombs don't build nations. Foreign governments don't get to decide who rules Iran. That is a right that belongs to Iranians, and force won't settle it.