The Hypocrisy of Bombing Iran

December 17,2024

Ted Snider

President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly expressed concern that Iran could develop a nuclear bomb on his watch. In considering his options to prevent that, The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is considering the possibility of airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Reports that Trump could be open to such an action are not inconsistent with his character or past performance. General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the first Trump administration, says he feared that Trump would launch missile strikes on Iran that could trigger an all out war. “If you do this,” Milley told him, “you’re gonna have a fucking war.”

The Journal reports that, given the weakened position of Iran after the taking apart of its front line proxy defense and deterrent in Lebanon and Syria, “[t]he military-strike option against nuclear facilities is now under more serious review by some members of his transition team.” Military considerations are still in their “early stages” and could change as the transition team solidifies into a fixed cabinet.

But that Trump is considering bombing Iranian nuclear facilities because he is concerned that Iran could build a nuclear bomb during his term as president is laden with hypocrisy almost too obvious to mention. There are three glaring hypocrisies.

The first is that Iran’s potential pathway to a nuclear bomb was diplomatically blocked in 2015 when the Obama administration joined the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China in signing the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran. The deal was a success. The pathways to a bomb were closed.

For all the complexity of the negotiations, for all the complexity of the clauses, the deal was pretty simple: if Iran keeps its promise to limit its civilian nuclear program, the U.S. would keep its promise to lift sanctions. Iran did; the U.S. didn’t. In 2018, Trump unilaterally and illegally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA nuclear agreement.

As long as Iran was in compliance with the limitations on its nuclear program, the U.S. was obliged to honor its commitments under the agreement and hold back on sanctions. If Iran was not in compliance, then – and only then – could the U.S. pull out of the agreement and snap back sanctions. But Iran was completely and consistently in compliance with their commitments under the agreement, as verified by eleven consecutive International Atomic Energy Agency reports.

So, there would be no risk of Iran developing a nuclear bomb during Trump’s second term had Trump not killed the JCPOA nuclear deal in his first term.

The second is that there is no intelligence basis for Trump’s concern nor for his consideration of airstrikes on Iran. Trump has no reason to believe that Iran is building a nuclear bomb.

There was no reason to believe that leading up to the JCPOA nuclear agreement. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), representing the collective conclusions of all of America’s many intelligence agencies, said with “high confidence” that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The 2011 NIE said that “the bottom-line assessments of the [2007] N.I.E. still hold true. We have not seen indications that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program”. In 2012, former Trump CIA director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta asked, “Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon?” and succinctly and pointedly answered: “No”.

And there is still no reason to believe that after the breaking of the JCPOA nuclear agreement. The 2022 U.S. Department of Defense Nuclear Posture Review concludes that “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.” In 2023, CIA Director William Burns said that “[t]o the best of our knowledge, we don’t believe that the supreme leader in Iran has yet made a decision to resume the weaponization program.” Burns was saying the same thing a year later when, in October 2024, he said, “No, we do not see evidence today that the supreme leader has reversed the decision that he took at the end of 2003 to suspend the weaponization program… We don’t see evidence today that such a decision [to build a bomb] has been made. We watch it very carefully.”

So, Trump is considering airstrikes on nuclear facilities to prevent activity that the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. Department of Defense are telling him is not happening.

The third is the hypocrisy of considering pre-emptively bombing a sovereign country while lecturing the world on international law.

The U.S. has attempted to rally the world behind it in alliance against Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in violation of international law. U.S. President Joe Biden called Russia’s attack on Ukraine “an assault on the very principles that uphold global peace.”

But the U.S. long ago substituted the rules-based order for international law. Here the U.N. is instrumentalized by the U.S. when it advances the American agenda and disregarded by the U.S. when its laws stand its way. The U.S. now consistently applies international law inconsistently, prioritizing their own foreign policy interests over universal application of international law.

There is brazen hypocrisy in condemning Russia for violating Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity while defending America’s right to violate Iran’s by bombing it preemptively when there has been no Iranian attack or threat of attack on the United States.

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, once told me in the context of a different US threat against Iran, that “a preemptive war against Iran because it seemed to be crossing or had crossed the nuclear threshold would be contrary to the substantive provisions of the UN Charter and international law.”

Such a hypocrisy could have consequences for the U.S. beyond Iran. Bombing Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities may finally and radically challenge the reign of the rules-based order and U.S. hegemony. Just as America’s demonstration of its capacity to weaponize the international financial system against Russia panicked other countries and pushed them to explore alternative financial architectures to protect themselves from US financial warfare, so the abuse and double standards of the rules-based order demonstrated by bombing Iran may force countries to explore alternative international architectures that stress multipolarity and the reestablishment of the primacy of the United Nations to protect themselves against US military warfare.

Much in Trump’s White House is still in flux, and it is premature to assume that Trump will give serious consideration to airstrikes on Iran. But if the consideration that is in the early stages by Trump’s transition team survive into his fixed cabinet and evolve into serious consideration, that consideration would be laden with hypocrisy that could harm the U.S. as much as it harms Iran.

 

Now Iran’s turn. The spectre of a new “1989”

Dimitris Konstantakopoulos

In my previous article on Syria I argued that there is a “Damascus-Tehran (not forgetting Lebanon and Palestine) train that is now preparing to depart”.

The ink on the article did not have time to ‘dry’, so to speak, since no ink is used anymore, and the train started to whistle for departure.

The Prime Minister of Israel himself, after congratulating himself for the “triumph” in Syria, rushed to address a speech in English to the citizens of Iran, promising “regime change” much sooner than he thought, with the help of Israel itself of course. Judging by what happened in Syria, we can imagine what fate awaits the Iranians and their country if these plans come to fruition.

According to the Times of Israel, the Israeli armed forces have already begun preparations for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, considering that, after the destruction of Syria, a “window of opportunity” has been created. Netanyahu accused Iraq and Iran as early as 1992 (!) of being ready to build nuclear weapons, accusations that were never proven, rather the opposite, but served as an excuse for the US-British invasion of Iraq, of which he himself was the architect. In an attempt perhaps to restrain Israel’s hotheads, CIA chief William Burns stressed last October that there was no sign of a change in Tehran’s decision not to build nuclear weapons. Similar assessments have been made by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the US Pentagon.

Of course Israel wants to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme. But as in the case of Iraq, the alleged existence or preparation to acquire nuclear weapons serves as a pretext. The real aim is to overthrow the regime in Iran, if not to dismember that country, in accordance with the Yinon and Cohen strategies and the neoconservative Middle East war programme drawn up under the supervision of the current Israeli Prime Minister.(see for example the important article by the distinguished Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the article and Ekaterina Matoi’s article on the geopolitics of Zionism)

Besides, the constant aggression and threats against Iran tend to act as a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that may eventually push Iran to build nuclear weapons.

The American factor

Mr. Netanyahu knows, however, that Israel’s forces are not sufficient for such a purpose. Despite Israeli triumphalism, despite Israel’s great recent successes, Iran remains a powerful military force and a serious state. No one can be sure what an attack on it will mean and what the results of an attack on it will be.

That is why Netanyahu wants both the approval and the assistance of the Americans. And because he has tried many times to get it, often by methods of deception and misinformation, he has created a kind of “antibodies” inside the American state, especially in the armed forces, to some extent in the CIA, and even in part of the US political staff, despite its unprecedented dependence on the Lobby.

But Netanyahu’s forces are already working in Trump’s environment to get the approval of the newly elected American President who, in his first four years of government, has more or less acted as a Netanyahu’s proxy. The assistance of Israel’s intelligence services also apparently played a decisive role in his election in 2016. Trump abrogated the international Iran nuclear deal that Obama had concluded, thus paving the way for the wars now being fought and the much larger ones that threaten to break out.

After all, Trump himself urged Netanyahu last October to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, either because he shares this goal or because he wanted to get more support from the Israeli lobby. Of course he did not say what America should do. He remembers and even said it once that he agreed with Netanyahu for a joint operation to assassinate one of Iran’s leaders, General Suleymani, but in the end Israel left him in the cold to carry it out on his own, causing a near war between the US and Iran.

 Trump, of course, faces two problems. The first is that he was elected promising Americans to stop the wars, not start new ones, even if deception and promise reversal has now,  for structural reasons,  become the bread and butter of Western politics. All tendencies of the Western establishment make policies contrary to the expectations of the vast majority of citizens. Even if they don’t want to, most Western politicians are forced to lie.

 When jihadist and Turkish forces invaded Syria, Trump said it was none of his business, it was a Syrian affair. Of course, the American, British and Israeli secret services have close ties with the jihadists, Turkey is a member of NATO, even NATO’s secretary Rutte was in Ankara on the eve of the attack on Syria, where the head of the Israeli spy agency, Shin Bet, also went. But in the absence of a direct, visible American involvement Trump could say it was none of his business. And the American magazine Time, which did a long interview with the new president made sure not to ask him anything about Syria.

 The second problem Trump faces is that Iran is a critical strategic ally of Russia and China. He must be confident that these two states will not decisively assist Tehran in the event of an attack on it.

To deal with the first problem, he has already begun to prepare public opinion. Speaking to Time, he did not rule out the possibility of the United States being at war with Iran, and the magazine itself helped him by raising the unsubstantiated, if not outrageous, theory that Tehran had tried to assassinate him. The whole interview, moreover, constitutes a statement of adherence to Netanyahu’s Middle East agenda, with Trump neither defending the long-standing position of two states in Palestine nor disapproving of the possibility of Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. At the same time, his “transition team” staff leaked to the Wall Street Journal information that he is seriously discussing attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Stick to Tehran, carrot to Moscow

But Trump has also to calm down Moscow, if he plans an attack on Iran. 

In the same interview to Time, Trump decried Western long-range missile strikes deep into Russian territory and stressed the need to stop the conflict in Ukraine, even saying at one point that Kiev should back off a bit, but avoiding being even remotely specific about the kind of agreement he seeks and believes possible. Of course, the disapproval of the strikes came more than a month late and after Moscow responded with a warning military escalation. It is, after all, unlikely that Biden would not have briefed Trump in his meeting with him before the strikes were launched or that Trump would have strongly disagreed and not made his disagreement public in time.

 Of course, what Trump will do about the Ukrainian issue after assuming the presidency remains completely uncertain. For now, what is certain is what is happening in the Middle East.

The heart of the Empire—the true power behind the increasingly absurd Western governments—now appears to be divided into various factions. However, most of these factions share a common strategic goal: maintaining the West’s global dominance at any cost. This may involve instigating a world war while striving to avoid nuclear annihilation, though the likelihood of completely avoiding this outcome over the long term seems very improbable. 

There are of course serious tactical differences between the various sections of the ruling oligarchy in the West, including the choice of targets and the timing of the attacks. Some give priority to Russia, others to Iran, others to China. Those who may possibly realise that all this is dangerous and dead-end adventurism probably constitute a small and marginalised minority. Maybe some do understand that NATO is unable to realise its ambitions,  that it has already been defeated, and think it would be well advised to recognise reality and move on to other fronts, undistracted from Ukraine. But even them they would like before doing it to get as much as they can from Russia. Others consider probably a disaster to acknowledge reality, that is, defeat in Ukraine. We cannot know now which part will prevail. 

Iran, key to the world situation

The speed at which Netanyahu is moving, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, with parallel strikes in Iraq and Yemen, is somewhat reminiscent of the “lightning wars” that Germany waged between 1939 and 1941, occupying one after another European countries before taking by surprise the Soviet Union, which thought it had an alliance with it, in June 1941.

It is also reminiscent of the period from 1989 to 1991, when one after another the Eastern regimes collapsed before the players had time to fully realise the stakes and organise their defences.

The destruction of Syria is certainly a serious blow to the world forces resisting American-Israeli hegemonism and the quest for the reconstitution of a unipolar world, but it is also a great victory for the forces of Chaos and the “Clash of Civilisations”  in reality the War against Civilization. It would not make sense to deny the reality. But the overthrow of the Iranian regime and the dissolution of Iran would be a world-class catastrophe. It would plunge the entire Middle East into chaos, torpedo all Chinese plans and Beijing’s access to essential energy resources, and turn it into a privileged base of aggressive campaign in the former USSR, Russia and China and elsewhere, while further encouraging a Western aggression already manifesting itself strongly and simultaneously from Moldova, Romania and Georgia to South Korea, Venezuela and Cuba.

 Such an outcome would be an immense strategic victory of the collective West, which of course includes Israel to its rank and with a special “leading” role. Of course, even is such a scenario will come true in the long and very long run the West (the Empire) does not have the ability to take over the whole planet. But it has the ability to destroy human civilization, as events in Syria prove. 

Instead of going to a world of cooperation, necessary to manage productive forces and technologies that can destroy life on Earth, we are going back to the mentality of Alexander the Great, the Roman Emperors, Napoleon or Hitler, which except of being morally reprehensive, are also unrealistic, they will get all of humanity to annihilation. If we want to save humanity, we must all mobilise to turn this page.

Mankind may once again stand at a pivotal moment in its history, one potentially as significant as 1989, or at the very least, of great historical importance. We find ourselves at a new crossroads in world history, perhaps equally crucial to the transformative period of 1989–91.

The outcome in Iran will decide the direction our world will take for decades. 

 

PS. One can’t help but wonder about China’s conspicuous absence during the Middle East crisis. Could Beijing have not extended even a modest form of financial aid to Syria, which was being bombarded by sanctions and airstrikes from all sides? What is China’s strategy in allowing others—many smaller nations in particular—to be crushed by the overwhelming force of Western military, economic, and political pressure, while it sits idly by, accumulating wealth, and in dollars at that? Is Beijing waiting for the U.S. to arrive in the Taiwan Strait or the Korean Peninsula before taking action? By then, it will be too late, and the costs will be far higher.