The United States is, once again, on the precipice of entering another war in the Middle East. After months of productive negotiations between the Trump administration and the Iranian government to reach a new nuclear deal, the talks were broken off by a series of Israeli airstrikes on June 13, last Friday.
The Israelis targeted the homes and apartments of top Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) officials, nuclear scientists, and negotiators who had been working with the US. They also hit Iranian nuclear facilities and various military sites Iran would rely on to defend against Israel’s attack and eventually retaliate.
Israeli officials and their allies in the media have called these strikes “preemptive” without providing evidence that an Iranian attack on Israel was imminent. What the attack did preempt, however, was the next phase of the US-Iranian negotiations, which was scheduled to begin on Sunday.
Trump, who had made numerous public statements opposing Israel’s interest in bombing Iran before the strikes actually happened, turned around and declared that he had simply been lying to all of us to help make the operation as successful as possible.
Regardless of whether Trump was lying then or is lying now to cover for Israel ignoring his wishes, his response has surely destroyed the credibility of those in Iran who were arguing that negotiations with the US were worthwhile and that the American president could be trusted—of course, a number of these officials were also killed by Israel in the last few days.
The stated aim of Israel’s operation is to destroy Iran’s civilian nuclear program to prevent it from ever developing a nuclear weapon. But many of the chosen targets and rhetoric from Israeli officials suggest that regime change may be the true, overarching goal. The operation’s name—Rising Lion—could even be a reference to the old Iranian flag from the days before the current regime came to power during the 1979 revolution.
But regardless of how far the Israelis are hoping to go in this current fight with Iran, it’s quickly become clear that they need the US to help them carry this operation out. Even if they’re exclusively going to target nuclear infrastructure from now on, the depth of these facilities can only be reached by US bunker-buster munitions. An all-out regime change war would require a lot more—likely direct operations by the US military.
So, a widespread effort has begun to convince the American people that it would be good for our government to get more involved in this war. Some are claiming it’s simply a straightforward way to prevent the impending annihilation of Israel without requiring much from us. Others are going as far as to say that, unless stopped, Iran is planning to soon hit targets in the continental United States.
Overall, this is being framed almost exactly like the situation in Iraq was over twenty years ago: a uniquely evil Middle Eastern regime is scrambling to acquire and use WMDs and needs to be stopped by the international community. But conveniently, we’re told, this regime is also hated by most of the people living under it—just like Saddam Hussein—so it will be easy to topple and replace with a stable, western-friendly government.
This is all nonsense. Like all the other regime change wars Washington and its allies have attempted in the region since 9/11, a full-on war with Iran will be far from a cakewalk.
Iran is a much bigger, more populous, and more advanced country than Iraq or Afghanistan. The mountainous terrain around most of the most strategically important cities would also be a lot harder to invade than the relatively flat desert American forces faced in Iraq.
Even if no ground troops were deployed and US forces remained confined to air and naval theaters, that would still be an enormously complex and costly operation. The recent campaign against the Houthis of Yemen—who were not nearly as powerful, numerous, and technologically advanced as the Iranians—was called off after a few months because US forces were not seeing notable results, weapons stockpiles were depleting quickly, and the military was burning a billion dollars a month.
The Houthis also got close to striking US naval ships on a few occasions with some relatively low-tech rockets and drones. Iran has a much stronger ability to target and kill American troops, not just on nearby ships but at the many US bases near Iran’s borders. Even if an American boot never touches Iranian soil, a direct air and sea war has the potential to be very deadly for the American side.
Economically, the American people have so far been forced to pay over two trillion dollars to fund two decades of wars in the Middle East. The wars made a few well-connected firms very rich, but for the rest of us, they only contributed to our escalating national economic crisis. A war with Iran has the potential to be a lot more expensive than any of the terror wars we’ve fought so far—it’s the equivalent of pressing down harder on the gas as we drive toward the lip of our fiscal cliff.
On top of all of that, it’s not even clear that a joint US-Israeli war to overthrow the current regime in Tehran would even bring a lot of benefits.
The entire basis of this effort has been that Israel, the United States, and the world as a whole cannot afford to “let” Iran have a nuclear weapon. Well, why not?
The narrative advocates of this war have pushed is that the Iranian regime’s sole aim is to develop nuclear weapons as fast as possible and then to immediately launch them at Israel, even though that would assuredly result in the Israelis destroying Iran with most or all of their arsenal of around a hundred nuclear warheads.
This is rarely said outright because it’s absurd. If Iran’s leaders were truly not just willing but actively trying to sacrifice their own lives, the lives of their families, and the lives of most Iranians, along with the thousands of years worth of historically and culturally significant sites in their country, in order to bring Israel down with them, they would be acting differently.
They certainly wouldn’t have chosen to not build nuclear weapons despite being only a few years, months, or even weeks away—as Israeli and American officials have claimed. And they wouldn’t have agreed to—or been trying to again agree to—stringent, internationally-enforced inspections and restrictions on their civilian nuclear programs just to get some sanctions relief for the people they’re allegedly ready to sacrifice to Israeli nukes.
The Iranian regime is absolutely immoral and authoritarian (that’s what powerful governments are, after all) and they clearly view Israel as their enemy. But many try to portray Iran’s hatred of Israel as some kind of thousand-year-old blood feud. It isn’t.
As Trita Parsi details extensively in his book Treacherous Alliance, Iran and Israel have allied up and helped each other out numerous times when the dynamic in the Middle East made it advantageous to both—including after the 1979 revolution.
What the Israeli-Iranian rivalry really is is a classic geopolitical struggle for regional dominance dressed up by both sides as some kind of inescapable religious war.
That is truly why Israel and its allies in Washington do not want Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Because a nuclear-armed Iran will be much harder to exert pressure on and will all but guarantee that Israel will never be the true unipolar power in the Middle East.
It makes sense, then, why the American politicians and media figures who are obsessed with maintaining a global empire, whatever the domestic cost, see a war with Iran as being in their interest.
But for the economically-struggling American people who will be forced to spend trillions of additional dollars and sacrifice the lives of potentially thousands more of their children, siblings, and parents, a brand new war to protect Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East is clearly not worth it.
