Nobody Wants This War
People know intrinsically that an attack on Iran is an act of insanity.
On Saturday morning, the United States and Israel launched an illegal, unprovoked, unjustifiable attack on Iran—the kind of full-blown assault the world has been dreading for years. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but we should be clear about a few things that we already know for sure.
The first thing, obviously, is that this is a despicable decision by the U.S. and Israel. It is a flagrant act of imperialist aggression against a sovereign state, with no legal basis either domestically or internationally. You couldn’t find many clearer examples of a war crime if you tried. Already, civilians in Iran are being massacred; Israel got started right away by indulging in one of its favorite pastimes—murdering dozens of little children. Trump has barely tried to make a case for any of these crimes, with the exception of a gruesome and insulting video he posted in the middle of the night on Saturday in which he spewed random lies and called for regime change in Iran while wearing a ludicrous “USA” baseball cap.
This is evil stuff.
The second thing we know is that we have been lied to over and over again about this war. The U.S. and Iran have been engaged in negotiations all week about Iran’s nuclear weapons program—you know, the one that has never been proven to be anywhere near operative, and that Trump claimed to have obliterated less than a year ago. Less than 24 hours before the strikes, Vice President JD Vance was telling the Washington Post, “I think we all prefer the diplomatic option. But it really depends on what the Iranians do and what they say.” Now we learn, via Reuters, that all of that was a sham: “An Israeli defence official said the operation had been planned for months in coordination with Washington, and that the launch date was decided weeks ago.” That’s not surprising, but it’s still unconscionable.
In the same Post interview, Vance said something he probably shouldn’t have.
