As with every US conflict in recent times, the war on Iran quickly generated plenty of articles, videos and social media posts claiming, it was all because of ONE thing. These ranged from astute geopolitical analysis to IT WAS THE ILLUMINATI WOT DUN IT type of thinking. Whilst these can often make a valid case for A reasoning behind the war, things are rarely as simple as that.
If we had to pick one reason, Israel would have to be at the top of the list, but even then this is not the whole story. Israel’s motivations are largely regional, with Iran remaining the single biggest obstacle to their dreams of a Greater Israel. Whilst Israel’s hold over US politics is a big driver of events, the US has long had broader motivations of its own to overturn Iran’s government and more so now than ever.
Guiding all major foreign policy decisions is the need to retain US hegemony in world affairs. This doesn’t require complete control over every nation: either sufficient subservience to keeping the dollar as the world’s reserve currency or insufficient power to interfere in US designs around the globe will do in most cases. In recent years Russia and China have become a challenge to these demands, particularly with the formation of the BRICS organisation, creating something of a unified bloc. Iran’s incorporation into BRICS only made it a bigger thorn in the side of US hegemonic power and its Middle Eastern aspirations.
Being yet another war in the Middle East, oil was always going to play a part in events, but this has several facets. No doubt oil industry execs, rubbing their hands with glee at the inevitable rise in oil and gas prices a war in the Gulf would bring, were among the coterie of voices in Trump’s ear. But that’s a big group and includes arms industry execs, always a big motivator behind any war and the US government’s insatiable thirst for over priced weapons systems. Big tech, Palantir in particular, is heavily invested in war support. Oil is just one among a range of resources that, in a rare moment of insight, Trump realised that control was slipping out of US hands. Recent actions in Venezuela and Greenland were driven by this need. In the civilised world, a sure supply of essential resources can be created by building respectful, constructive relationships with countries holding those resources. The US has of course never been civilised in this respect and even less so with Trump.
This is where these motivations collide with the previous set of US hegemony and the threat posed to it by BRICS, particularly China. A regime change in Iran, imposing a US compliant dictatorship would serve both interests. A democracy would be of no use whatsoever, as millions of Iranians would have no interest at all in serving the wishes of the Great Satan. This compliant regime would be a vital source of numerous raw materials and resources, simultaneously denying them to BRICS and removing a powerful regional actor from the organisation. Israel would be happy with Iran collapsing into civil war and chaos, it just needs a weakened power that can’t interfere with it’s plans.
The rise of China has been a bugbear to both Republicans and Democrats and so taking away an important supplier of it’s oil and gas requirements was seen as a vital weapon. China was ahead of the game though, with it’s massive investment in renewables, nuclear and creating vast stocks of oil for just such an occasion, while still keeping progressively cleaner coal power a big part of their power generation portfolio. The US has never been much good at learning the lesson written by China’s master of military strategy, Sun Tzu, nearly 2500 years ago: know your enemy. Vietnam and Afghanistan being another two pertinent examples and which Iran is about to add to.
Grieving family of a victim of the US bombing of a girl’s school
A big reason why America keeps going to war and abuses international law with impunity is because it has not just been allowed to, but usually, actively supported by western nations and the media. Every president for decades has demonstrably been a mass murdering war criminal but their crimes are almost invariably endorsed throughout the West. No senior politician or major media outlet will dare point out this fact. If this wasn’t completely obvious beforehand, it should have been within the early days of the genocide in Gaza. Barely a word of complaint from any western leader, while the media dutifully churned out every bit of preposterous Israeli propaganda to justify their actions.
The likes of the New York Times and the BBC have never seen a US led war or coup they didn’t like, and these organisations are laughably referred to as the “trusted media”. The occasional murmur of discontent is graciously delegated to the comment pages to maintain the illusion of impartiality, yet virtually never getting anywhere near the editorial section. Consent for war on Iran has been manufactured for years, awaiting the eventual, inevitable war.
Of course the Iranian government merits legitimate criticism on some issues, such as human rights, but numerous allied states are equally worthy of such criticism but are rarely worth a mention. Every claim against Iran, no matter how scant the evidence or how dubious the source, who almost invariably is funded by the US, is treated as incontestable fact. Counter evidence is routinely ignored or dismissed as Iranian propaganda, no matter how obviously it can be shown to be western propaganda. Often the claims don’t even pass a basic logic test but are accepted uncritically by the media. Take the claims that the Iranian government killed 30,000, or even many more protesters recently. This scale of deaths in a matter of days is comparable to some of the greatest, most deadly battles in history. This would be squads of soldiers blasting away on full automatic machine gun fire at huge crowds of people in dozens of cities; streets drenched in blood; multiples of these numbers injured; hospitals overrun with patients; doctors and nurses pushed to their limit, working long shifts to cope with the catastrophe. It took months of carpet bombing, artillery barrages, and starvation to kill this many in Gaza. Yet, in a country with millions of people owning mobile phones, where we were provided with countless images of the protests, there’s not a single video to back up this fairytale. You can find some scraps of evidence for attributing a few deaths to security forces certainly, but nothing remotely on any great scale. Not one major media outlet bothered to question any of this and now it’s being used by some to justify this blatantly illegal war. You can find some criticism of war, particularly as Trump is rightly unpopular in many places, but consent for his actions has been built over decades of narrative construction by the media, in service to establishment interests.
The bulk of coverage has always favoured opponents of the government. Often we have seen huge protests in support of the government, vastly outnumbering the anti government protests, but completely ignored by our media. Journalists are almost never sent to interview Iranians who might have a more nuanced view on events, who may for example criticise both their own government as well as the debilitating US sanctions that have immiserated their lives. The same can be said of every country that the US has deemed to be the enemy.
A popular social media claim for the, “real reason for the war”, is distraction. It’s certainly true that governments often use distraction techniques, to push the public focus away from inconvenient subjects. Certainly the Epstein scandal was becoming a massive headache for Trump but it’s a bit much to claim that it warranted starting a war, even if it has given him a bit of relief from the subject. However it’s clearly not going to go away and the war has predictably only caused an even bigger crisis for Trump. As with UK politics in recent years, distraction tactics have tended to get lost in a rolling clusterfuck of incompetence, scandal and corruption. The morning’s scandal that required distraction from, is overwhelmed by the afternoon’s scandal and so on each day, so headline writers have trouble keeping up.
More personal motivations and traits of presidents play a role in going to war, especially with Trump. The dangerous combination of vanity, hubris and dementia have been a key feature of his second term in office. Biden was clearly senile but was kept out of the decision-making loop and when he uttered some nonsense in public, his support team immediately hit action stations to correct any misapprehension. Trump blurts out such a constant stream of often contradictory ramblings that it would defy any PR teams ability to manage but much of the time they are happily endorsed by his team. His and the administration’s justifications for the war have swung wildly from one flimsy excuse to the next as they attempted to mask the fact that negotiations were only ever a cover for a decision to go to war decided long before.
Although on a personal level Trump is probably one of the least religious presidents of recent times, his submission to the whims of the evangelical lobby is as strong as any of them. Even those presidents not particularly close to this highly influential group were always under pressure from them in Middle Eastern policy. The evangelicals needed Jews back in the Promised Land to fulfill their Judgement Day prophecies. The fact that they would also require the Jews to burn in Hell as part of this tends to get overlooked.
As much as more out there conspiracy theories would have you believe, that a small group of shadowy figures make all the decisions, reality has a complex web of interacting and sometimes competing sets of powers and interests that lead up to any war, often over a long period of time. No doubt that bankers, freemasons, secret societies, the deepstate, or whoever your preferred mysterious power is, were probably somewhere in that mix, but you can ague about that among yourselves. Plans to overturn the Iranian government were first hatched back in the 90s and protests in the country have been hijacked on several occasions in an attempt to achieve that, as we saw recently yet again. It has finally come to fruition now, as Zionists and neocons saw the opportunity slipping away. Iran was increasingly integrating with Russia and China, which would have eventually weakened the effects of sanctions and solidified the government’s rule.
If there’s one side of the war that has understood the importance of Sun Tzu’s, maxim, know your enemy, it’s Iran. My money is on them coming out on top, albeit at a great cost.
