Israel's U.S.-Backed Aggression Reaches Its Iraq-War Moment

If Oct. 7 was Israel's Sept. 11, now it's at the phase of making an unsupportable WMD claim to launch the war it's long wanted. But we say no to war with Iran

Edited by Sam Thielman

THESE ARE THE WORDS of the U.S. intelligence agencies in their consensus global threat assessment from March. You can find them on page 26 of this document. Their emphasis: 

We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so. In the past year, there has been an erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public that has emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decisionmaking apparatus. Khamenei remains the final decisionmaker over Iran’s nuclear program, to include any decision to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran is not on the verge of nuclear breakout. A war with Iran would not be justified even if it were—certainly not one launched by an undeclared nuclear power unconstrained by the Non-Proliferation Treaty and supported by a nuclear superpower that broke the only nuclear accord it ever reached with Iran. But it is not, and that matters. 

U.S. intelligence famously bent the knee to Bush administration warmongers in 2002 and manipulated the facts of Iraq's unconventional weapons capabilities. It is not doing so with Iran, even as it provides other forms of conciliation to the Trump administration. "They [the Iranians] are not developing a bomb right now," Susan Miller, the former CIA station chief in Israel, told SpyTalk's Jonathan Broder on Saturday. 

Before the Iraq War, when you spoke with the many theoreticians and advocates of the coming disaster, whether neoconservatives or liberals— back then, these were most of the people I worked with at The New Republic —it was understood that the weapons-of-mass-destruction argument the Bush administration presented was simply a convenient pretext. It's not that they didn't believe Iraq had such weapons, it's that they understood predicating a war on those (phantom) weapons was the easiest way to avoid making the war seem like the naked aggression it was. The weapons were not the point.

The point was to redraw the map of the Middle East to favor enduring American power, which meant American dominance, now that 9/11 (in their view) showed the urgency of doing so and the War on Terror provided the opportunity. "For reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason" for the invasion, Deputy Defense Secretary and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair's Sam Tanenhuas a month after the U.S. took Baghdad.

Like George W. Bush before him, Benjamin Netanyahu called the war he launched on Thursday "preemptive." And similar to Bush, the only real difference between a preemptive war and a war of aggression is the proximity to the hegemony of the state launching it. Israel walks a road the U.S. paved and then guaranteed. It is determined not to learn any of Washington's lessons – in fairness, neither is Washington – and eager to substitute for those lessons a certainty that superior force will yield the results it wants.

Already Netanyahu is making it no great secret that his hope for the war is not to prevent a nuclear Iran but to destroy the Islamic Republic as a stretch goal. Israel does not have the capability to destroy the hardened facility at Fordow, to say nothing of the buried uranium-enrichment functions at Natanz, without U.S. airpower and penetrator munitions, which is why Trump's deployment of B-2s and then B-52s to Diego Garcia earlier this spring was alarming. If forced to cease his open-ended bombing campaign, Netanyahu will settle for the degradation of Iranian ballistic-missile capability and the perhaps-more-important psychological sense amongst the Iranian people that death can rain from above at any time. These are central pillars of Netanyahu's security perspective, evident for at least 15 years during his second and third premierships. I think Seamus Malekafzali makes a strong point in this American Prestige episode from Friday that a crippled Islamic Republic is more valuable to Israel than the chaos and uncertainty that would follow regime collapse. But no one can predict where this war will lead. 

Whether or not President Trump commits the U.S. to partnered offensive operations with Israel against Iran, he, like Joe Biden before him, has already made the U.S. an accomplice to Israeli regional aggression. I don't often agree with Michael R. Gordon, but he is absolutely correct that Trump's nuclear "diplomacy"—more on that in a moment—was cover for the Israelis to attack. It is a further matter of record that the Israelis informed the Trump administration of the attack a week ago, providing the U.S. with the opportunity to move personnel out of Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain as a precaution. Events are moving past Trump, who now has to decide how thoroughly to commit the U.S. to this latest imperial misadventure. 

Biden laid the groundwork for this by his refusal to stop the post-Oct. 7 regional war by forcing Israel to end its genocide in Gaza. All this was predicted, at FOREVER WARS and elsewhere. The potency Israel felt by slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, decapitating Hezbollah, taking advantage of the fall of Bashar Assad and assassinating Hamas' Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, all without any reprisal by the United States, led directly to this moment. Israel's destruction of Iranian air defenses last year was an unmistakable signal that the bombing was only getting started. There has been an unmistakable elation felt by Israel and its allies about Iranian weakness since the summer of 2024 that resembles the elation felt by Washington after the Taliban fell in November 2001 and again after Baghdad fell in April 2003. Netanyahu is taking advantage of an opportunity. U.S. foreign policy circles are not yet absorbing that in Syria and Lebanon, Israel has conquered territory and redrawn its borders. But that's not surprising from a cohort that refuses to acknowledge Israel's genocide and the U.S.' role in it.  

None of this needed to happen. Trump's "negotiations" with Iran took the position—inconsistently at first, but then rigidly—that Iran had to abandon the right to enrich uranium entailed within the Non-Proliferation Treaty. (Article IV: "All the Parties to the Treaty undertake to facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.") Particularly given that the Americans never guaranteed the Iranians sanctions relief, the negotiations gave Iran no path to a deal, only a path to surrender. Even if the Iranians agreed, there would still be no way for them to trust the U.S., since it was Trump and not Iran that ripped up the hard-negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018. Republican and Democratic rejectionism of the Iran Deal created a glide path to this moment by blocking off alternatives—and that was the point of such rejectionism. Malekafzali is right that there is no way for the Iranians to trust anything any American administration says. I fear that Murtaza Hussain, too, is right that the lesson subsequent generations of Iranian policymakers will draw—and not only them—is that shuttering the nuclear weapons program was a historic mistake. 

Absolutely all of this was a choice, not an inevitability. After 9/11, the Iranians made a historic decision to explore detente with the U.S. on the basis of a shared enemy in the Taliban. The Bush administration rejected that outreach, declared Iran part of an "Axis of Evil" that suggested an intent to launch hostilities, and invaded Iran's western neighbor in addition to its eastern one. Faced with such a threat, Iran adopted Qassem Soleimani's strategy of strategic depth. That strategy helped make the U.S. occupation of Iraq sheer agony, in addition to benefiting from American miscalculation. But we absolutely do not need to hand it to him. 

Now Soleimani's strategy is as dead as he is, while prominent voices in the U.S. and Israel hunger for more. Murdoch media and others, like they did before Iraq, are encouraging Trump to join in on the assault. The rest of us must oppose them, clearly and unequivocally. No war with Iran, under any conditions.