Source:
https://www.renegadetribune.com/america-throws-its-service-members-into-an-unjust-war-for-israel/
Via Brian McGlinchey at Stark
Realities
President Trump’s decision to join Israel in launching a regime-change war on
Iran has so far cost the lives of at least 13 American service members.
More than 200 have
been wounded, dozens seriously
enough to require evacuations to military hospitals in Europe and the United
States. Among them are individuals who’ve suffered traumatic brain injuries,
burns and shrapnel wounds. One was facing potential amputation of
an arm or leg.
As much
as these service members and their families are victims of Iran’s justified
retaliation for a surprise attack perpetrated amid ongoing negotiations, they’re
victims of a betrayal perpetrated by their president and the joint chiefs of
staff, who cast them into an unconstitutional war of aggression, packaged in
lies and initiated to advance the agenda of a foreign government, while
undermining the security of their own country.
Of
course, US casualties comprise a small subset of the total bloodshed. In
executing this unjust war, Americans have collectively inflicted far more
death and dismemberment than they’ve endured, teaming up with their Israeli
counterparts to kill more than 3,000 Iranians,
including some 150 schoolgirls – mostly between age
7 and 12 – whose school was destroyed by Tomahawk cruise missiles at the
war’s very start.
Though
it should have already been apparent, Operation Epic Fury should make clear that
– service members’ good intentions aside – combat waged under the US flag
rarely has anything to do with American security. Moreover – and I say this
as former Army Reserve enlistee and Regular Army officer – anyone thinking of
starting or extending a military career should understand that their
government may send them to be killed, maimed or psychologically damaged, and to
slaughter foreign innocents, so long as it helps those in power remain in the
good graces of the extremists who rule Israel, and their powerful
collaborators inside the United States.
Under
international law, a war of aggression is considered a supreme war crime unto
itself, and Operation Epic Fury is precisely that. Like so many of
America’s wars before it, this one was launched on false premises. Contrary to
the US-Israeli narrative…
1.
Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. In
2007, the US intelligence community assessed that
Iran halted any effort to develop a nuclear weapon in 2003. Since then, the
intelligence community has periodically re-validated that
conclusion, most recently in March
2025. Belying Trump’s claim that the United States had only two
weeks in which to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon, Director of
National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this week testified that Iran had made
“no efforts” to rebuild its enrichment capacity after it was devastated by
last summer’s US bombing.
Note
that, in 2005, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa
– a formal interpretation of Islamic law – asserting that “the production,
stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the
Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.” In the opening act
of their latest warfare on Iran, the United States and Israel collaborated to
kill him.
2.
Iran did not stray from the 2015 nuclear deal until Trump did. When
Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),
Iran was in full
compliance. Among other things, the JCPOA required Iran
to eliminate its medium-enriched uranium, slash its cache of low-enriched
uranium by 98%, limit future enrichment to 3.67%, agree to even more external
monitoring than it was already submitting to, and render its heavy-water reactor
worthless by filling
it with concrete. After Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA
in 2018 and reinstated sanctions, Iran waited a year, but then began straying
from its own commitments, using elevated enrichment as a lever to push for a new
agreement and relief from suffocating sanctions. Iran says the JCPOA
permitted it to suspend its commitments after Trump’s withdrawal, citing
language governing “material breaches” and “significant non-performance.”
Iran is
a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and has long cooperated with
international inspections and monitoring required by the NPT. On the other hand,
Israel has refused to join the NPT and has some 200 nuclear
warheads, a situation that makes every
dollar of American aid to Israel illegal under US law.
In
2002, Netanyahu assured Congress that “Saddam is hell-bent on achieving atomic
bombs” and “guarantee[d]” that a US invasion of Iraq would have “enormous
positive reverberations on the region”
3.
Iran wasn’t the problematic negotiation partner. When
historians write about the run-up to this latest of American regime-change
disasters, they’ll surely emphasize that fact Trump assigned Steve Witkoff
and Jared Kushner to represent the United States in negotiations. While
people rightly scoff at their lack of credentials, it’s far more important to
appreciate their intimate ties to the Israeli government and Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu – who has been trying to maneuver the United States into
a war with Iran for decades.
As
Branko Marcetic writes in an excellent account of the negotiations at Responsible
Statecraft,
Witkoff is known as a staunch supporter of Israel. He counts pro-Israel
megadonor Miriam Adelson as a “dear friend” and carries a custom pager gifted to
him by Netanyahu and senior Mossad officials, in a reference to an operation in
which Israel remotely detonated thousands
of pagers that allegedly belonged to Hezbollah officials…
Kushner, meanwhile, has been steeped in
the pro-Israel community his entire life.
He counted Netanyahu as a family friend growing up, with the future Israeli
prime minister occasionally borrowing the teenager’s bedroom during visits.
Kushner reportedly consulted with Netanyahu officials to pen Trump’s 2016 speech
to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and he is both friends with
hardline pro-Israel figures and has donated
money to illegal West Bank settlement-building.
In
addition to their glaring conflicts of interest, Witkoff and Kushner refused
to bring nuclear experts to their meetings with the Iranians, which
reportedly left the Iranians perplexed about
how any progress could be made in negotiating such a highly technical subject.
Iran
put forward a fresh offer less than 48 hours before being attacked. In the last
meeting before bombs dropped, Iran offered concessions
that included dilution of its 60%-enriched uranium, a multi-year pause on new
enrichment, subsequent enrichment capped at 20%, and expanded IAEA oversight.
Sources say UK national security advisor Jonathan Powell, who attended that
meeting, was surprised by
the strength of the Iranian offer, and saw it as reason to be optimistic
about reaching a deal.
After learning that Witkoff was grossly mischaracterizing Iran’s
stance – if not outright lying about it – Oman’s foreign minister, who’d
been mediating the discussions, made an urgent trip to Washington to tell the
administration and anyone who’d listen that Iran had made substantial
concessions, some of which surpassed the provisions of the JCPOA. His mission
failed. In the aftermath, a Gulf diplomat bluntly told the Guardian, “We
regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a
war he wants to get out of.”
4.
Iran’s ballistic missile program wasn’t built for offense. In
an example of moving goalposts that would be laughable if the context weren’t so
tragic, the Trump administration reopened nuclear negotiations with a new demand
– that Iran surrender its conventional ballistic missiles. The White House
claimed Iran was building a “conventional shield” that would enable future
“nuclear blackmail,” but anyone who’s been paying attention could see the
demand sprang from last summer’s 12-Day War, when Iran effectively used
cutting-edge ballistic missiles to retaliate against Israeli aggression.
That
use is consistent with US intelligence’s characterization of Iran’s military
posture as primarily defensive. As the US Defense Intelligence Agency wrote in a
2019 report, “Iran’s
conventional military strategy is primarily based on deterrence and the ability
to retaliate against an attacker…If deterrence fails, Iran would seek to
demonstrate strength and resolve, [and] impose a high cost on its adversary…this
strategy is unlikely to change considerably in the near term.”
The
demand for Iran’s conventional disarmament and the demand for the
scientifically-advanced country to end any nuclear enrichment had something in
common: both were made knowing they’d be refused. Here’s how Joe Kent – the
former National Counterterrorism Center Director who resigned this
week in protest of the war – characterized the enrichment demand in his
in-depth, post-resignation interview with
Scott Horton:
“I really frankly don’t think the Israelis cared that much about…nuclear
enrichment…What
I think the Israelis care about is regime change. They wanted to push this war
as fast as they could, so they came up with this talking point that zero
enrichment was the starting point, knowing that was a non-starter for the
Iranians.”
5.
Iran hasn’t been waging war on the United States for 47 years. To
the contrary, the hostilities have overwhelmingly originated in Washington, and any
thorough survey of the history should go back at least 73 years, to 1953.
That’s when the United States and United Kingdom orchestrated the ouster of
Iran’s democratically-elected prime minister, and the installation of the Shah. The
ledger should also include US support of Iraq’s eight-year war on Iran in the
1980s, which included giving artillery targeting intel to Iraq, with
the knowledge those targets would be hit with chemical weapons. Then
there’s decades of economic blockades, which, mirroring
the morality of Al Qaeda, intentionally inflict suffering on civilians with
a goal of forcing political change. Last summer brought America’s unprovoked
bombing of Iran’s imaginary nuclear weapons program. The ceasefire that ended
the so-called 12-Day War turned out to be a mere strategic pause before all-out
warfare was initiated by Israel and the United States on Feb 28.
A
central line in the “47-year war” narrative blames Iran for killing “thousands”
of Americans in
Iraq, by supposedly directing Shia militias to target Americans, and equipping
them with improvised explosive devices (IED). In a concise treatment at his Substack,
former Marine officer Matthew Hoh, who led counter-IED efforts in Iraq,
dismantled that well-entrenched narrative. His key points:
·
The great majority of American service members killed in Iraq died at the hands
of Sunni resistance groups. Iran provided some support to Shia militias, but Hoh
calls out the hypocrisy of US officials saying Iran alone has blood on its
hands, pinning no such blame on US-aligned Gulf monarchies that backed Sunni
militias in Iraq.
·
Americans were an occupying force in a country that US forces had devastated and
which was beset by civil war, which means both Shia and Sunni militias had
their own reasons for using violence against US troops. Hoh notes that the
now-decades-old narrative that Iraqis were killing American soldiers and Marines
on orders from Iran “not only helped justify a longed-for war with Iran but also
bolstered the fiction of the American occupation as a benevolent and liberating
one.”
·
The charge that Iran killed Americans with IEDs centers on the claim that Iran
provided Shia militias with a special type of IED called an explosively formed
penetrator (EFP). “Anyone with a simple understanding of explosive principles
and a half-decent machine shop can make
an EFP,” says Hoh. Given the abundance of explosives and other materials
around war-torn Iraq, Hoh says “Shia forces were able to mass-produce EFPs in
Iraq. Smuggling in EFPs from Iran was unnecessary.”
6.
Iran isn’t the “world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.” If
that title were awarded on the merits, top contenders would include Saudi
Arabia, the United States and Israel. The US government selectively applies the
“state sponsor” label to vilify countries and – more importantly – as the basis
for imposing economic sanctions. As we’ve seen in the case of Cuba and others,
American secretaries of state have full discretion to slap the “state sponsor of
terror” label on and pull it off, with no due process or burden of proof
required.
“The
US’s list of terrorist organizations is at this point really laughable, because
we take groups off willy-nilly based on whether we like them politically or not
– not whether they’ve actually engaged in or continue to engage in terrorism,”
said Trita Parsi, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft co-founder, in a
recent appearance on Judging
Freedom. “The Sudanese got off the State Department’s terrorist list by
simply agreeing to normalize relations with Israel – nothing else.”
It’s
true that Iran has sponsored various groups in the Middle East that seek to
thwart US and Israeli hegemony in the region. At times, some of those groups –
like Hamas – have used violence against civilians to achieve political ends,
which is the honest definition of terrorism. However, US and Israeli
condemnation of Iran’s support for such groups is intensely hypocritical,
considering the United States and Israel have themselves backed forces that have
carried out terrorism. Indeed, if sponsorship of Hamas is damning for Iran,
it’s also damning for Israel and Netanyahu, who long fostered the rise of Hamas even
after it turned to terror.
Then
there’s the regime-change campaign in Syria, which saw the United States and its
Gulf allies empowering head-chopping terrorists, and saw Israel patching
up al Qaeda members and sending them back into Syria to raise hell. Keep in
mind, Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Shia militias were instrumental in beating
back ISIS, the monstrous terror entity that sprang from the Syria regime-change
campaign carried out for Israel.
The war
on Iran isn’t about nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles or state-sponsored
terrorism. It’s the continuation of a long-running Israeli program to achieve
total dominance over the Middle East by repeatedly shattering surrounding states
and territories. Here’s how the University of Chicago’s John
Mearsheimer has described it:
“The
Israelis want to make sure that their neighbors are weak and that means breaking
them apart, if you can, and keeping them broken…The Israelis want Syria to be a
fractured state. They want Lebanon to be a fractured state. What do they want in
Iran? …What the Israelis want to do is to break Iran apart. They want to
make it look like Syria.”
For
many in Israel, this strategy isn’t merely about safeguarding the current
version of Israel. Rather, it’s a means of achieving an expansionist dream of “Greater
Israel.” While interpretations vary, this vision typically goes far beyond
annexing the West Bank and Gaza, also taking Egyptian territory east of the
Nile, along with all or portions of what is now Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia
and Iraq.
The
US government has aided and abetted this ruthless strategy in
a variety of ways, from the arming of Israel, to running covert operations to
foment unrest and equip militant groups, to direct use of American military
force. The human cost has been incalculable. In the regime-change wars
against Iraq and Syria alone, more than a
half million people have been killed, and several times more are believed to
have died from secondary causes like disease.
Sadly,
it seems it’s now Iran’s turn to be shattered in the pursuit of Israeli
supremacy. Iran has been Netanyahu’s white whale: After the launch of
Operation Epic Fury, Netanyahu gushed that
Trump’s collaboration meant Israel was finally doing what Netanyahu had “yearned
to do for 40 years.”
Underscoring the cold-blooded and maliciously dishonest nature of the
regime-destruction campaign, consider that Israel and the United States have
framed their surprise attack on Iran as a virtuous endeavor meant to liberate
the Iranian people from theocratic rule. On the day Israel and the United States
launched this new war on Iran, Netanyahu called on
Iranians to rise up: “Do not sit idly by, very soon the moment will come when
you must take to the streets to finish the job and overthrow the totalitarian
regime.”
However, at the same time Netayahu was calling for an Iranian uprising,
senior Israeli officials were privately telling US diplomats that “the
people will get slaughtered” if they act on those exhortations. Of
course, any such slaughter would serve the Israeli agenda, since it could be
used to propagandize for more vigorous regime-change action, up to and including
what is likely Netanyahu’s greatest wish: a US ground invasion.
It’s
hard to imagine, but there could be something even worse than committing one’s
self to the defense of America, only to be killed or maimed in a campaign to
advance the agenda of a foreign government that is far less an ally than a
parasite – and that’s killing, wounding and immiserating innocent people for
that same government.
Through
March 19, more than 3,000 Iranians
have been killed by American and Israeli attacks, according to HRANA, an
Iran-focused human rights group. Of that total, 1,394 were civilians, including
those several dozen schoolgirls killed on day one; 639 deaths have yet to be
classified as military or civilian.
There
have been more than 1,100 Iranian military fatalities. Among those dead Iranian
service members are 87 sailors whose lightly-armed ship was sunk by an American
torpedo off the coast of Sri Lanka. The ship was not only far away from the war
zone, but it was reportedly lightly-armed as it was returning from a largely-ceremonial,
multi-national exercise hosted by India in the interest of building
international maritime cooperation.
Given they
died on the receiving end of an unjust war of aggression, these and other
dead members of the Iranian military were likewise innocent victims of America’s
war for Israel. Note too that, unlike every American who’s dishing out death
from the sky, land or sea, most
Iranians in uniform are conscripts, not volunteers.
That
said, there’s reason to empathize with volunteer American service members
who’ve now been ordered to wage this war. Ahead of their enlistment or
commissioning, most are ill-equipped to peel back the patriotic
red-white-and-blue veneer and discern the true nature of US military service. In
a sense, they’re victims of a grand fraud. Millions of their fellow
citizens are oblivious collaborators in that fraud, to the extent they help
perpetuate the false assumption that military service is inherently virtuous and
invariably serves the American people.
With
Marines now steaming toward the Persian Gulf, the 82nd
Airborne Division gearing up and Netanyahu cryptically referring to the
necessity for a “ground
component”, the number of dead, wounded, dismembered and PTSD-inflicted
Americans could soar higher. Given the unjust nature of this war, many are
certain to face a lifetime dealing with a lesser-known type of wound – moral
injury, which is psychological and emotional distress springing from having
witnessed, participated in, or failed to prevent acts that go against one’s
moral convictions.
Importantly, the suffering that springs from this war of aggression isn’t
confined to the United States, Israel, Iran and Gulf states hosting US bases. People
around the world are already coping with growing scarcity and increasing cost of
oil and gas. Asian countries are particularly vulnerable, and they’re already taking
measures like rationing fuel, cutting workweeks, urging more people to work
from home and closing hotels hit by diminished air travel – all this after less
than three weeks of the Strait of Hormuz being closed to most traffic.
There’s
much more to this Pandora’s box of harms. For example, the world’s supply of
medicine is in growing jeopardy. “Nearly half of U.S. generic prescriptions
originate in India, which relies on the Strait of Hormuz for the arrival of key
inputs in drug manufacturing,” explains CNBC.
The Gulf also supplies about half the world’s urea – a fertilizer component –
and the price US corn farmers are paying for fertilizer has jumped upwards
of 70%.
That presages higher food costs all over the world, with malnourishment and
starvation a distinct risk in some parts of the globe.
Clearly, if the war continues and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, it’s
certain to result in a global health catastrophe, a devastating economic
depression, surging crime and social unrest. America’s standing will be
profoundly and irreparably damaged in a world united in outrage over a US
president’s lawless decision to launch this demented war of choice in service to
Israel. American citizens are likely to suffer terrorist acts inspired by this
latest savagery inflicted on a Muslim country.
And
it will have all started with weapons fired by American service members…
…service members who swore to defend the Constitution, but were given
unconstitutional orders to wage war without congressional authorization
…service members who joined the military to defend America, but became attack
dogs for a foreign country that saps America’s wealth, depletes America’s
arsenal, undermines America’s security and standing, exerts alarming influence
on America’s institutions, and inspires terrorism against Americans back home
…service members who should now recognize a stark reality – that they are cogs
in a machine that repeatedly inflicts death, dismemberment, disease and
destitution on countless innocents in service to the expansionist State of
Israel.
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