Vijay Prashad

The illegal attack on Iran

 

Israel’s consistent attacks on Iran since 2023 have all been illegal, violations of the United Nations Charter (1945).

Iran is a member state of the United Nations and is, therefore, a sovereign state in the international order. If Israel had a problem with Iran, there are many mechanisms mandated by international law that permit Israel to bring complaints against Iran.

Thus far, Israel has avoided these international forums because it is clear that it has no case against Iran. Allegations that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, which are constantly raised by the US, the European Union, and Israel, have been fully investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency and found to be unfounded. It is certainly true that Iran has a nuclear energy program that is within the rules in place through the IAEA, and it is also true that Iran’s clerical establishment has a fatwa (religious edict) in place against the production of nuclear weapons. Despite the IAEA findings and the existence of this fatwa, the West — egged on by Israel — has accepted this irrational idea that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and that Iran is therefore a threat to the international order. Indeed, by its punctual and illegal attacks on Iran, it is Israel that is a threat to the international order.

Over the past decades, Iran has called for the establishment of a Middle East Nuclear-Free Zone, a strange idea coming from a country accused of wanting to build a nuclear weapon. But this idea of the nuclear-free zone has been rejected by the West, largely to protect Israel, which has an illegal nuclear weapons program. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a nuclear weapon, although it has never tested it openly nor acknowledged its existence. If Israel was so keen on eliminating any nuclear threat, it should have taken up the offer for the creation of a nuclear-free zone heartily.

Neither the Europeans, who so often posture as defenders of international law, nor the United Nations leadership have publicly pushed Israel to adopt this idea because both recognise that this would require Israel, not Iran, to denuclearise. That this is an improbable situation has meant that there has been no movement from the West or from the international institutions to take this idea forward and build an international consensus to develop a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.

Israel does not want to build a nuclear-free zone in the region. What Israel wants is to be the sole nuclear power in the region, and therefore to be exactly what it is – namely, the largest US military base in the world that happens to be the home to a large civilian population. Iran has no ambition to be a nuclear power. But it has an ambition to be a sovereign state that remains committed to justice for the Palestinians. Israel has no problem with the idea of sovereignty per se, but has a problem with any state in the region that commits itself to Palestinian emancipation. If Iran normalised relations with Israel and ceased its opposition to US dominion in the region, then it is likely that Israel would end its opposition to Iran.

Israel and the US prepared the way

In January 2020, the US conducted an illegal assassination at Iraq’s Baghdad Airport to kill General Qassim Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Soleimani, through the Quds Force, had produced for Iran an insurance policy against further Israeli attacks on the country. The Quds Force is responsible for Iranian military operations outside the boundaries of the country, including building what is called the “Axis of Resistance” that includes the various pro-Iranian government and non-governmental military forces. These included: Hezbollah in Lebanon, various IRGC groups in Syria that worked with Syrian militia groups, the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, several Palestinian factions in Occupied Palestine, and the Ansar Allah government in Yemen. Without its own nuclear deterrent, Iran required some way to balance the military superiority of Israel and the US. This deterrence was created by the “Axis of Resistance”, an insurance policy that allowed Iran to let Israel know that if Israel fired at Iran, these groups would rain missiles on Tel Aviv in retaliation.

The assassination of Soleimani began a determined new political and military campaign by the US, Israel and their European allies to weaken Iran. Israel and the US began to punctually strike Iranian logistical bases in Syria and Iraq to weaken Iran’s forward posture and to demoralise the Syrian and Iraqi militia groups that operated against Israeli interests. Israel began to assassinate IRGC military officers in Syria, Iran and Iraq, a campaign of murder that began to have an impact on the IRGC and the Quds Force.

Taking advantage of its genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel, with full support from the US and Europe, began to damage the “Axis of Resistance”, Iran’s insurance policy. Israel took its war into Lebanon, with a ruthless bombing campaign that included the assassination of the Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September 2024. This campaign, while it has not totally demolished Hezbollah, has certainly weakened it. Meanwhile, Israel began a regular bombing campaign against the Syrian military positions around Damascus and along the road to Idlib in the north. This bombing campaign, co-ordinated with the US military and with the US intelligence services, was designed to open the roadway for the entry of the former al-Qaeda fighters into Damascus and to  overthrow the government of Assad on 8 December 2024. The fall of the Assad Government dented Iran’s strength across the Levant region (from the Turkish border to the Occupied Palestinian Territory) as well as along the plains from southern Syria to the Iranian border. The consistent campaign by the US to bomb Yemeni positions further resulted in the loss of Ansar Allah’s heavy equipment (including long-range missiles) that fundamentally threatened Israel.

What this meant was that by early 2025, the Iranian insurance policy against Israel had collapsed. Israel began its march to war, suggesting an attack on Iran was imminent. Such an attack, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows, would help him in a domestic political fight with the ultra-orthodox parties over the question of a military exemption for their communities; this will prevent his government from falling. Cynical Netanyahu is using genocide and the possibility of a horrendous war with Iran for narrow political ends. But that is not what is motivating this attack. What is motivating this attack is that Israel smells an opportunity to try to overthrow the Iranian Government by force.

Iran returned to the negotiations brokered by the IAEA to prevent such an attack. Its leadership knew full well that nothing would stop a scofflaw such as Israel from bombing Iran. And nothing did. Not even the fact that Iran is still at the negotiating table. Israel has taken advantage of Iran’s momentary weakness to strike. And that strike might escalate further.

 

Republished from CounterPunch, 13 June 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.

 

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/06/the-illegal-attack-on-iran/

 

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Trump: ‘Everyone Should Immediately Evacuate Tehran’    The apparent threat comes amid indications that the US may begin bombing Iran directly

     by Dave DeCamp | Jun 16, 2025

President Trump on Monday appeared to threaten Iran, writing on his Truth Social account that Iran should have signed a “deal” and calling for the “immediate” evacuation of the Iranian capital of Tehran.

“Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign. What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” the president wrote.

Trump’s post came after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that he ordered the deployment of additional US capabilities to the Middle East. US officials confirmed that a massive deployment of tanker aircraft was related to the Israel-Iran war, and the US also redirected a second aircraft carrier to the region.

Sources familiar with the matter have told Antiwar.com Editorial Director Scott Horton that the Trump administration is poised to enter Israel’s aggressive war against Iran directly by launching airstrikes, which will almost certainly provoke attacks on US bases in the region.

Israel started bombing Iran on Friday, two days before the US and Iran were due to hold another round of nuclear negotiations. Trump had been demanding Iran eliminate its nuclear weapons program, which was a non-starter for Tehran. Despite the apparent impasse, Iran was set to present a counter-proposal to the US, but the talks were canceled after Israel launched its war. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the war under the pretext of stopping Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, but it has been the consensus of the US Intelligence Community that there was no evidence Tehran was working toward a nuclear weapon.

https://news.antiwar.com/2025/06/16/trump-everyone-should-immediately-evacuate-tehran/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

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the legacy of sir halford mackinder is on track.......

 

The World’s Most Dangerous Man and His Enabler
PATRICK LAWRENCE

 

It is some years since I described Benjamin Netanyahu as the most dangerous man in West Asia. That was back when we heard all about the menace of the Assad regime in Damascus, the Beelzebub otherwise known as Iran’s supreme leader, and other such unthinkably malign figures.

The Israeli prime minister just graduated. By any serious reckoning he is the world’s most dangerous man as of the shockingly reckless, altogether nihilist attacks he launched against the Islamic Republic in the early hours of Friday, June 13. I will get to Donald Trump’s place in the ratings in a sec.

In his initial announcement of Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu asserted that Iran presents “an existential threat” to Israel and that he had no choice but to order an attack. This is nonsense, but we had better pay attention to the nonsense. With this loaded phrase, Bibi has effectively licensed the Zionist state to launch a nuclear weapon if these attacks fail to destroy all of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programs, as seems likely. This is my read.

There is indeed an existential threat abroad as of last Friday. But it extends well beyond Iran and, indeed, West Asia. As the self-defined Jewish state’s long, dreadful record makes plain, it appears to recognize no limits to the violence it will inflict on others, its breaches of international law and the norms of the human cause, and the risks it will inflict on the world in the name of what amounts to a biblically authorized project of subjugation and domination.

To finish this point, the obsessed leader of a nuclear-armed nation never subjected to the terms of the Non–Proliferation Treaty has just attacked a non-nuclear nation it calls a mortal danger to Israel’s survival because of the nuclear weapons it does not possess. You do the math, as the expression goes.

“Operation Rising Lion,” for the record, is a reference to the Prophecy of Balaam, an infidel with a very mixed record but who impressed the ancient Israelites with his exceptional powers of divination. In the Revised Standard Version of Numbers, 23:24, we find him saying, “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion: he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain.” So does Bibi, who has the Palestinians down as evil Amalekites straight out of the Old Testament’s mythologies, once again state his purpose.

Israel and Iran are now at war, as one Tehrani told The New York Times after she listened to explosions and watched the flicker fires out her window last Friday evening. All is changed now. Netanyahu has craved this war for decades, always justifying his lust — a clinically psychotic lust, it is right to say — by way of endless lies and an apparently bottomless paranoia. These lies and this paranoia just put the world in danger of a global confrontation. We are all Iranians now: I am perfectly willing to say this.

As to President Trump and the American role in this, there is no need any longer for any of us to deceive ourselves. I continue to insist, against many who think otherwise, that the Zionist state is to be understood as a recklessly over-indulged client and not the Übermeister of U.S. policy. It is a complex dynamic, I mean to say, but the Zionist state just got done what the imperium wants in its broader ambition to “reshape the Middle East,” as the neoconservative cliques who direct U.S. policy have long put it. As I have noted previously in this space, borrowing from spookspeak, Israel does Washington’s wet work in West Asia.

■

As many commentators have remarked in many places, the Israelis have a well-established practice of lying in matters to do with events, policies, the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces, and so on. All governments lie, as I.F. Stone famously contended on many occasions, but the Israelis are in a class of their own among the officially mendacious, it is fair to say.

The thing about the Israelis is that they continue to lie even after a given lie is exposed. Netanyahu, a ready-to-hand case in point, still goes on about how the Hamas militias who attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, raped men and women, beheaded some babies and baked others in ovens, and so on. All of this has been exposed as false, the product of Israel’s hasbara apparatus, the constantly-in-motion machine that produces propaganda for the consumption of international audiences. But Bibi nonetheless continues to retail these smears.

And this is the case with Netanyahu’s claims that, as of last week, Iran was on the very brink of producing nuclear weapons, and it was therefore urgent to stop it.

When he announced Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu asserted, “It could be in a year, it could be within a few months — it could be less than a year.” Read this carefully. It is sheer fear mongering, not a stated fact in it. There is no more substance to these assertions than there has been since Netanyahu first started carrying on in this fashion in the early 1990s. Anyone aware of the record knows this is merely another in the long line of statements Netanyahu has made of this kind. Bibi knows all his “coulds” and predictions are groundless — Israeli intel and the Central Intelligence Agency have told him so — and he cannot but know those paying attention know he knows this. Now this transparent lie proves enough to start a war with two sides and risk a war with many.

https://www.unz.com/plawrence/the-worlds-most-dangerous-man-and-his-enabler/

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.