The Hubris of Dead Men Walking, as Trump and Netanyahu Launch Deranged and Grotesquely Illegal Attacks on Iran

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Beware the sick old men with hate in their hearts. As their earthly virility fades, they may well decide to take the whole world down with them.

As Israel and the US this morning launched massive and entirely unprovoked attacks on Iran, which has already led to retaliation against both the aggressors, and which may well destabilize the whole of the Middle East, both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump — sick, old and full of perpetual rage against the dying of the light — may well have decided that, as their power fades, they will take vengeance on life itself.

23 years ago, it took many long months for George W. Bush and Tony Blair to manufacture a false case for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Dodgy dossiers were compiled, and Congress and the UN Security Council had to be convinced to approve an illegal war on the fictional basis that Iraq posed an existential threat to the west.

in the new world order of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, however, none of these complicated webs of lies and deception are even needed anymore.

When the State of Israel struck Gaza in revenge for the October 7 attacks, it did so on a claimed basis of “self-defense” that was, from the beginning, legally and morally void.

Instead, it was a front for Israel’s unbearably dark and long-cherished aim of solving, once and for all, the Palestinian “problem” — of a people who refused to bow to permanent subjugation — through the implementation of the “Final Solution”: the genocidal erasure of an entire people, fully supported by western leaders who, 23 years before, would have blanched at endorsing even a fraction of the human hell that has rained down incessantly on the people of Gaza for the last 876 days.

Under Donald Trump, any notion that either Congress or the UN Security Council should endorse any of his military actions has been entirely swept aside. In the last year, he has launched a paramilitarized fake “war” against immigrants and US citizens on the US mainland, and has directed deadly attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and elsewhere that have no legal basis whatsoever, and in recent months he has kidnapped a head of state (President Maduro of Venezuela), has imposed a deadly economic stranglehold on Cuba, and has backed plans to take over Gaza and remake it as a techno-futuristic “Riviera of the Middle East” in which the Palestinians themselves are noticeably absent.

And now, for the second time, Iran has become a target for completely unjustifiable military attacks.

Last June, Trump obliged Israel by bombing alleged nuclear facilities, even as official negotiations regarding its nuclear program were ongoing. However, after just 12 days, a dangerous escalation was avoided when Israel backed down, alarmed that Iranian missiles had pierced its vaunted “Iron Dome” missile protection system, subjecting Israeli targets, for the first time, to a small fraction of the horrors that they had been subjecting the Palestinians to for the previous 20 months.

This time around, the attacks on Iran are simply inexplicable.

Trump’s deranged video message declaring war on Iran

No excuse whatsoever exists for launching “major combat operations”, as Trump stated in a deranged rant this morning, and for pretending that the joint attacks are aimed at “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”, who, he added, in a escalating crescendo of hysteria, are “a vicious group of very hard, terrible people”, who, for 47 years, have “armed, trained and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts.” As, presumably, dictated by Israel, he also called Hamas “Iran’s proxy.”

To be clear, there are no “ imminent threats” from Iran. The destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities was the object of the massive US bombing raids last June, and, until today, Trump has always boasted about how successful those raids were. Yet now, suddenly, Iran is once more a nuclear threat.

In a particularly incoherent section of his speech this morning, Trump yet again boasted about how “we obliterated the regime’s nuclear program at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan”, but followed up by stating, “After that attack, we warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again, they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil.”

Claiming, without any evidence, that, since last June, Iran has “attempted to rebuild their nuclear program”, and also claiming that they “continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland”, he called on those listening to his bellicose drivel to “imagine how emboldened this regime would be if they ever had, and actually were armed with, nuclear weapons as a means to deliver their message.”

He then promised to “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground”, to “annihilate their navy”, to “ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world”, and to “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.”

He also called on “the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and all of the police” to lay down their weapons “and have complete immunity, or in the alternative, face certain death”, and called on the Iranian people to take shelter until the US’s bombing stops, and then, “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.”

In an alarming twist, Trump also breezily conceded that, unlike last June, “the lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties”, claiming, sickeningly, that “we’re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.”

Let’s step back for moment, and reflect on what is actually happening here. The President of the United States, in a pre-recorded video message on his social media account, has, with Israel, illegally launched unprovoked hostilities against a sovereign nation, suggesting that US soldiers would lose their lives, without, for a moment, even considering that Congress — and Congress alone — has the right to declare war.

Will anyone resist his transformation of the US into a “very wicked, radical dictatorship” — words he used, in his video message, to describe the Iranian government — or has the notion of necessary checks and balances to retain unfettered executive power completely evaporated since he took office for the second time last January?

And will all those mainly libertarian voters, who were duped into believing his promise that he would put “America First”, and bring to an end the expensive folly of endless military escapades abroad, willingly allow themselves, or their sons and daughters, to die in this grotesquely illegal war, or will they ask — as they should, as they must — why their president is doing solely what Israel wants, while pretending that Iran poses any kind of direct threat to the US?

Is it because he is owned by Israel, through bribery or, even worse, through blackmail, based on the Israelis’ possession of incriminating evidence from the Epstein Files? Or is is just that, like Netanyahu, Trump is a vile old man, nearing the end of his wretched existence, who clings to life solely to deliver as much death and misery as he can to as many people as possible?

Underestimating Iran

Whatever the case, both Trump and Netanyahu are blindly underestimating how, for the last eight months, Iran has had plenty of time to ensure that it can retaliate in an even more robust manner than it did last June, with a senior Iranian official telling Al Jazeera that “all American and Israeli assets and interests in the Middle East have become a legitimate target”, and that “there are no red lines after this aggression.”

Already, Israel’s “Iron Dome” has been breached once more, and Iran has also launched numerous strikes against US bases and other US assets in the Middle East, including Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Both Israel and the US, it must be admitted, deserve everything that is coming their way. Iran, of course, has the right to defend itself against entirely unprovoked military attacks, and neither Israel nor the US should be defended in any way by its allies, as they have both so flagrantly shredded all constraints on unprovoked aggression.

They need to be stopped before they take the world down with them.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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