On the Decision to Bomb Iran (and Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and...) (c) JS Henry June 19, 2025
Most Americans probably don't know the sordid history of Iran's relationship with the US and Israel.
Clearly President Trump does not.
So, on the cusp of his “decision,” lets quickly review the panorama:
… how we + the Brits overthrew the popular secular leader Mossadegh in 1953 to get the oil...
…how we replaced this demo-elected gov with a phony young repressive monarch, the Shah, who proceeded to rule by force til he was finally overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979...
…how we gave asylum to this murderer when he got cancer, because feckless Jimmy Carter could not resist the lobbying of Henry Kissinger and the Shah's private banker, David Rockefeller;
…how that led to the empowerment of religious extemists, the taking of US hostages, and ultimately the dirty tricks by Reagan that led to the October 1980 backdoor deal that sealed Carter's defeat;
…how we + Saudi then egged on our then-ally Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq -- where we had also overthrown Qasem, another popular leader -- to attack Iran in late 1980, which led to an 8 year war that cost 1 mm Iranian+ Iraqi lives, at the end of which both countries were bankrupt;
… how Saddam was then suddenly told that all the Saudi $$$ he had got to buy US + Eur arms were loans, not grants -- a key reason for his invasion of Kuwait in 1990;
…how the US, with Israel's urging, then seized on that as a chance to turn on him + invade, at a cost of 500,000 Iraqi dead kids -- as Sec Albright admitted in 1996;
… how US neocons -- fanned by Israel and supported right down the line by ambitious “neoliberals” like Senator HRC, Senator John Kerry, Senator Joe Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer, WAPO's David Ignatius and the NYT’s Thomas Friedman -- then concocted the lies about Saddam's nuke program that led to the 2003 US invasion, another 1-2 mm dead, and 20 years of terror, including ISIS.
So now comes Iran - an NPT signatory, with no nukes to show for 20 years of research, no proof that it is developing them, a postwar history of no invasions except when it is attacked, and having negotiated for years simply to have the right guaranteed to all NPT signatories to develop nuke power plants if it wants to -- like, indeed, multiple US companies are doing right now with SMRs to power the AI Revolution.
Trump says he has not yet made up his mind. That begs more questions than a Salvation Army convention. In Trump World this is probably just his way of getting Miriam Adelson to give him another call, to raise her bid for the mega bomb.
So Iran definitely needs to prepare for the worst. It is already being ravaged by Israel, the Middle East’s only ethnodemocracy, and its only nuclear-tipped genocidal aggressor + non-NPT signatory. Once Trump has finished psssing the hat, probably by Sunday, Israel will almost certainly be joined on the Iran battlefield by its US patron……
And this is not because Iran is anywhere close to actually having a nuclear weapon, let alone having any practical delivery systems.
It is simply because, as this brief survey clearly indicated -- IRAN IS COMPLETELY UNTRUSTWORTHY !!!
© JSH 2025.