Photo: Hossein Zohrevand, Tasnim News Agency. Creative Commons, Wikipedia.
Israeli or American bombing of Tehran.
By Evaggelos Vallianatos
Prologue
The war of the Trump administration and Israel against Persia / Iran is bringing humanity ever closer to catastrophe. Both Israel and Iran are theocratic regimes designed to overcome each other, no matter the consequences. They replay the crusades of the dark ages. They have sacred books promising paradise, should they exterminate their enemy. But why is the United States in this deadly war? It knows Israel very well. It is its arms supplier. But should it also fight its wars? Americans don’t want such a state of subordination.
Second, the raging war in the Middle East is certain to exacerbate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the management of nuclear weapons, other military plans, strategies and conventional weapons. That means the war Israel provoked against Iran becomes even more dangerous. Israel and the US have nuclear bombs. And Israel is determined to destroy Iran. In such paroxysms of hubris, logic, history and justice take a vacation. Passions rule.
This unnecessary, destabilizing and destructive war will delay world nuclear disarmament and peace for a very long time. In fact, the war against Iran may become global with unforeseeable calamities and other adverse consequences. Russia has already expressed support for Iran. And China probably has done the same thing. So, without knowing, we may be on the eve of World War III.
War in the Middle East
Trump campaigned for peace. Yet American and Israeli missiles are raining on Tehran. A US airforce strike over the Iranian capital, Tehran, killed school girls. On March 8, 2026, Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said that killing children is “unforgivable under any circumstances.” He is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “But the fact that this was one of our first targeting decisions, that this mistake was made on the first day of war, I think speaks to the incompetence of our leadership at the Department of Defense.”
However, the US and Israel cannot win. Persia is a large country with a large population of 90 to 100 million people. But Persia’s greatest asset is that Persians know who they are. Their theocratic government may be divisive but, in general, Persians love their country. Persia / Iran is thousands of years old. The war against it violates international law and the Charter of the United Nations. It is also thoughtless. And it is unconscionable that a giant country like America is fighting Iran on behalf of a tiny state like Israel. This is no speculation. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, admitted that this is Israel’s war. Israel led the United States into war.
The war against Persia / Iran by the United States and Israel started on February 28, 2026. No one expected the war because for several days Iranian and American officials were talking how to avoid the conflict. And yet, in the midst of negotiations, Trump unleashed the US-Israeli bombing of Tehran, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader and several other officials. The rhetoric of Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, made no sense, suggesting that Iran was a national security threat that had to be disarmed and its government destroyed. The prime minister of Israel, Benjamyn Netanyahu, kept repeating that Iran had to be destroyed because its nuclear program was an existential threat to Israel. Of course, he never suggested that nuclear-weapons armed Israel was a much greater threat to the entire Middle East.
The war the US and Israel against Iran “has unleashed chaos across the Middle East.” According to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran has attacked at least 27 US bases in the Middle East, including military installations in Israel. Iran has also launched missile strikes against Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates. In addition, an Iranian drone struck a British military base in Cyprus.
Israeli and American hegemony
Oil is one of the reasons why the US joined Israel’s hegemonic attack on Iran. “America’s economy is more than 40 percent more oil-intensive than China’s.” It’s also the disappearing of trust and professionalism. There are “profound apprehensions about the military strikes in Iran. We can’t trust that they got the degree of deliberation that war demands.” This mirrors the corrupt plutocratic culture of the Trump administration: Senior government officials showing off “their fundamental sloppiness, selfishness, disregard for proper procedure, evasion of accountability. They simply don’t do their jobs — or at least don’t do them earnestly, maturely or competently.”
However, in the midst of this disturbing chaos, hegemony of the planet is the ultimate goal of US foreign policy. Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics and advisor to world leaders, described the hegemonic ambitions of America this way:
“Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN and the international rule of law—an attempt that will fail. Israel’s objective is to establish a Greater Israel, destroy the Palestinian people, and assert its hegemony over hundreds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East (from the Nile to the Euphrates, as US Ambassador Huckabee recently asserted).
“The United States’ delusional efforts at global hegemony are proceeding region by region. The US has recently claimed, in a wholly twisted supposed revival of the Monroe Doctrine, that it controls the Western Hemisphere and can dictate how Latin American countries conduct their economic and political affairs…. Today’s war against Iran aims to prove that the US similarly owns the Middle East. The war is part of a 30-year campaign, initiated by the Clean Break doctrine, to overthrow all governments that oppose US and Israeli hegemony in the region.”
An even more damning picture of the role of the United States in the war against Iran comes from retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell during the George W. Bush administration. He spoke to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now on March 10, 2026. He said:
“[F]or the second time, we violated international law… and just common human decency… I come from an administration of George W. Bush… that committed war crimes, war crimes that Colin Powell and his lawyer Will Taft and I agonized over in trying to present some message to the American people about them. This administration has committed more war crimes in the last few days than I think any country since Adolf Hitler committed….
“We have bombed civilians relentlessly. We have bombed a school. We have bombed a hospital. We have struck… Iran’s oil capacity that is now putting black poison all over 10-plus million people. And we are essentially not bombing ballistic missile sites and bombing war materiel. We’re bombing people….
“And on top of all of that — and this is the real serious problem here for America — Trump and Hegseth and Rubio… have completely misjudged the nature of this war, as has, to a certain extent, Bibi Netanyahu. This is a country [Iran] as big as Western Europe, with 93 million people, probably 90 millions of whom will fight us to the bitter death, who live in terrain that almost killed Alexander the Great. It is entirely inhospitable to military operations. And Trump is talking about — actually talking about putting ground forces there….
“[I]n Bahrain, they [Iranians] have taken out billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. radar and equipment, including the vertical missile loading cranes… They have essentially obliterated our capacity to carry out combat actions from a number of places in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates….
“We have not really damaged their ballistic missile capability. And the media blackout on Israel is keeping the American people from seeing the enormous degree of destruction to Israel… Haifa is being taken down much the way Eilat was taken down by the Houthis, the Allah Ansar, in the Red Sea… The Bab al-Mandeb will be closed once the Houthis have gotten into action full time again. And 60% of the world’s commerce passes through the Red Sea. It’s not oil and gas exclusively. It’s all manner of things — foodstuffs, commodities and such.
“So, this is a war with long legs. Trump has completely misinterpreted it. The only one who’s interpreted it correctly is Bibi Netanyahu, and I think he’s ready to use a nuclear weapon, should it become as bad as it looks like it might right now, because Iran has not even begun to shoot its most sophisticated missiles. And now the second and third class of those missiles is getting through almost without opposition. Imagine what these Mach 3, Mach 4 missiles, with huge warheads that have maybe a hundred different other warheads they display all across an area, are going to do to Israel once they’re fired. And they’re still there, and they’re still ready to fire.”
Col. Wilkerson has the experience and knowledge and the ethical standards that compel him to speak the truth. Trump’s war is not going well. Why should they be bombing civilians? Don’t they know that is a war crime? And even pretend they are winning on the face of the enormous damage Iran is inflicting on US military bases all over the Middle East? The grim reality in Israel may even turn the war into nuclear war. Doesn’t this prospect frighten them? The US and Israel?
Epilogue
Wars are unpredictable in the measure and intensity of the violence they employ to achieve even Pyrrhic victories. Hegemony and war go together. Hegemony has been tempting politicians and states for millennia. But hegemony demands kings, emperors, tyrants or presidents and prime ministers who think of themselves as kings, emperors and tyrants. Hegemony of a state over another is colonialism. The institution thrived for centuries before and after the invention of democracy by the ancient Greeks.
The US-Israel war against Iran is unjust and illegal. Netanyahu and Trump areresponsible for this unprovoked conflict harming the entire Middle East, including America. If America’s NATO steps into this war, then we will have a World War III. Russia and possibly China are helping Iran. With the Biblical slogans about a greater Israel and the second coming of Christ, we resurrect darkness. Therefore, this war against Iran takes on a religious and theocratic crusading vision and purpose that has no end before the annihilation of Iran.
But down to the understanding of most Americans, higher prices of petroleum and the disruption of energy markets might bring the American war in the Middle East to an end. On March 9, 2026, Trump said the war was “an “excursion” that would be over soon,” primarily because of “spiking oil prices, troop casualties, allies under attack and low support among the American public.” A commentator of PBS News Hour, Tamara Keith, zeroed in on gas prices that explain Trump talking about his Iranian war as an excursion. She said:
“I think [rising price for gas] is very clearly weighing on the president, whether he admits it or not, and that is oil and gas prices. That is something that affects voters immediately the second they go to fill up their gas tanks. And it undercuts the affordability agenda that the president has been talking about. I mean, he’s mostly been dismissing affordability and he has repeatedly, including in his State of the Union, touted these… very low gas prices… were going to be the solution to all of the ailments, everything that ails everyone on affordability. And he’s saying that they knew that oil prices would rise as a result of this war. But they are rising now, and he is suddenly talking about this as, oh, this is just an excursion, this is a very short-term excursion. We are going to fix this because we need to fix the oil prices.”
Keith is right. Low gas prices are certainly important to Trump. Rising gas prices are even affecting Australia. But the war against Iran is more that rising gas prices. It is corruption, hubris, hegemony, ignorance of history and destruction. Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence Wilkerson made clear the United States has a history of provoking and fighting utterly unethical and illegal wars.
But in the case of the February 28, 2026 war against Iran, the US and Israel failed to calculate that Iran was preparing for such a war for decades. Its missiles are harming Israel and US military bases in the Middle East. “Satellite imagery,” said Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News in an email, March 10, 2026, “has shown that Iranian attacks have damaged or destroyed advanced AN/TPY-2 and PAC-3 missile defense radars for the THAAD and Patriot systems as well as other radar domes at U.S. bases in the Gulf. In addition to reducing ballistic missile defense effectiveness for the entire region, the disabling of defensive facilities at airbases may force operations to be carried out farther from Iran, further reducing the number of sorties that the U.S. can carry out on a daily basis.”
That’s exactly what Wilkerson also confirmed. The US and Israel are losing the war. And such a defeat might convince Netanyahu to blast Iran with a nuclear weapon, which will destroy the entire Middle East, including Israel.
So, Trump has more than rising oil prices in mind in considering an “exit” from the war. He even differs from Netanyahu’s long-term vision on the outcome of the war.
Bit in order to prevent this abuse of power, Americans must strengthen their constitution to prevent a president from becoming a tyrant. At the same time, they should take money out of elections and politics. And the government should stop giving tax cuts to billionaires. These superrich Americans have too much money already. They are fueling a colossal inequality between rich and poor.
Putting a brake to the greed of the superrich may prevent the undermining of democracy. Democracy matters. It’s the civilized link to living together in peace and security. And on issues of war, the Constitution says Congress should be the sole deciding factor, not the president.
For reasons of justice and truth and national security, the Trump war against Iran should end. Trump even called Vladimir Putin of Russia for facilitating an exit from this war. Finally, the US must tell Israel it does not support its Biblical vision / nightmare of hegemony over the Middle East.
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Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., is a historian and ecological and political theorist. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US EPA. He also taught at several universities. He is the author of hundreds of articles and 9 books, including Freedom: Clear Thinking and Inspiration from 5,000 Years of Greek History (Universal Publishers, 2025) and Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards (World Scientific, 2026).
