Americans should not pay the price for Zionist military adventurism

For months, Americans have been told that our leaders were negotiating with Iran to avoid more war with the Gulf nation after bombing its nuclear facilities on behalf of Israel last June. Our alleged terms forever shifted, as the goal posts were continuously moved by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at each Iranian capitulation. It is now clear that those negotiations were merely a ruse to prepare for a long-planned attack by Israel to finally get the U.S. to start a war it had been provoking for decades.

On the eve of the illegal regional war that the United States co-launched, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, a key mediator in the US-Iran nuclear talks, expressed much optimism about a potential breakthrough. Iranian officials had capitulated to turn over all enriched uranium, renounce the accumulation of nuclear material capable of creating a bomb, agree to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium, and accept full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran’s calculus seemed to be that by giving President Donald Trump a deal that surpassed even the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama, whom Trump has always been contemptuous of, he could claim victory, gloat about being a better dealmaker, and resist Netanyahu’s push to engage in an expensive, unpopular war ahead of the midterm elections. The only thing Iran resisted was the most recent additional term issued by Israel: completely abandon your ballistic missile program.

Just hours later, the US and Israel launched military strikes on Iran that included a particularly gruesome bombing of an all-girls' school that killed 165 people, mostly children. The site was not near any strategic target, and no reason for it has been given. Hours later, a sports hall was hit where teenage girls were killed while practicing. Other strikes took out Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and more than a dozen other top Iranian officials.

It seems Netanyahu likely feared that Middle East Envoy Steve Whitkoff could come home with a deal too good for our Congress, which had been set to vote on a War Powers Resolution on Tuesday, to pass up, while giving Trump an off-ramp in a war he and nearly every member of his cabinet promised the American people they would not start. The War Powers Resolution, introduced by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA), the same courageous congressmen who led the fight for the release of the Epstein Files, was supposed to go to the floor last week but was conveniently delayed until after the strike. Congress is scheduled to vote on it on Thursday.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now alleged that the decision to strike Iran was made because Israel threatened to do it with or without the United States. He says the administration made the decision because it stood to absorb more casualties if U.S. bases in the region were struck in retaliation for Israel’s attack on Iran, and it had no choice but to join the war in order to reduce the potential for casualties among American service members.

If you’re thinking that Israel is a small nation of 9 million people and is a client state of the U.S. that cannot afford to prosecute its military adventurism and Netanyahu’s Greater Israel dream without hundreds of billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers, you are correct. If you are wondering why, despite this, Netanyahu has consistently had to do little more than pay a visit to Washington to shift Trump’s position, despite his top military leadership advising him that such an operation would likely be long, expensive, and messy, join the club.

In his announcement tweet of the war, President Trump traced his reasons back to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. That’s an interesting place to start. As I’ve written in the past, to understand American-Iranian relations, one needs to go back to at least August of 1953, when Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d'état instigated by British MI6 and the CIA. Iran had long been a monarchy, but the populist Mosaddegh had gained enormous popularity and successfully consolidated parliamentary power, surpassing even the Shah in terms of influence.

For decades, the royal family had given away vast concessions, including oil, that made the royals rich at the expense of the rest of the developing nation. Mosaddegh argued that the people of Iran had seen very little from the oil fortunes the British had been harvesting from the country for half a century. He sought to nationalize the country's oil production to fund education while combating poverty and disease. This was a bridge too far for the Brits, and while President Eisenhower initially resisted Winston Churchill's suggestion of regime change, he ultimately gave in, and Mosaddegh was jailed after the Western-led coup. The Shah consolidated power, and the people lived under a fairly brutal authoritarian rule until the Islamic Revolution, which ended in 1979 and saw the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran has ruled the country since.

Following the revolution, the U.S. immediately backed Iraq under Saddam Hussein, who attacked Iran in what would become a brutal eight-year war from 1980 to 1988. Around half a million casualties were suffered in what has been called the deadliest conventional war ever waged between regular armies of developing nations. The war would famously include the first use of chemical nerve agents on the battlefield, when Iraq deployed sarin gas against the Iranians, following approval of the sale of those materials from the United States.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has indeed also been a brutally oppressive regime, not unlike other theocracies in the region, including many of our allies, such as Saudi Arabia, which continues to lead the world in public beheadings. For that reason, the idea that this is a noble mission to free the Iranian people does not come close to passing the smell test. Trump himself said during a visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates last May, that the United States would no longer give “lectures” to Gulf nations on how to live or govern themselves, effectively abandoning even the pretense that democracy or human rights are a U.S. concern in the region.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has attempted to convince every president since George W. Bush to invade Iran. After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Netanyahu told Israelis that it would be very good for Israel, as the United States would move for their long-sought regime change in Iraq, followed by an Invasion on Iran. While warmongers like John McCain, John Bolton, and Lindsey Graham egged Bush on, he managed to resist such folly. It is also worth noting that the bulk of the long-debunked "intel" on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links to 9/11 terrorists (which many U.S. intel sources decried as untrue at the time) came from Israel's intelligence network.

President Barack Obama had no interest whatsoever in invading Iran, which angered Netanyahu enough to disrespect him by addressing Congress without an invitation from the President and disparage the former president in his memoir. Indeed, there has not been a U.S. President in history who managed to be as resistant to Israeli influence. Trump, who spent years on a media campaign falsely claiming Obama was not an American citizen and therefore an illegitimate leader, famously said that Obama had “no ability to negotiate” and would get us into a war with Iran that would be a “disaster.” Yet, Obama managed to secure a nuclear deal that satisfied everyone but Israel and its vassals in Washington.

Despite Joe Biden having received $11 million from pro-Israel lobbying sources over his career, supporting the Iraq war, and abiding Israel’s genocide in Gaza—which a recently leaked DNC autopsy suggested cost Kamala Harris the 2024 election—even he knew better than to follow Bibi into Iran. As Netanyahu said after the invasion, he had relished this moment for 40 years. All it took was Donald Trump to be reelected President. Even Kamala Harris warned that Trump would get rolled by Netanyahu and start a war with Iran during the 2024 campaign.

Trump said this week that the U.S. is prepared to be at war for as long as it takes, and that more U.S. soldiers are likely to die. According to our military leaders, we do not possess nearly the interceptor capacity for a long, drawn-out conflict in the region. The asymmetrical nature of a war in which we are using weapons that cost hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars to take out drones that cost $20,000 or less is financially unsustainable, even if we could produce them fast enough—which we can’t. God forbid a superpower adversary, or two, take advantage of that fact. This war will weaken the United States and make it more vulnerable, not safer.

The administration says this is not a regime-change war, and it is correct. This is a regime collapse war, which is why Israel immediately targeted any opposition to the regime it decapitated. Israel’s goal seems to be creating a civil war in a country ten times its size that will result in a massive failed state. And President Trump and his lackeys seem more than willing to stick U.S. taxpayers as well as future generations of Americans with the bill, which will include not only blood and treasure but also generational blowback.

I wonder if FIFA will want its award back …

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. Mitch's 2015 novel, A Long Road Home, was recently released in its third edition. His other books can be found here. He can be reached at editor@thebradentontimes.com.