14 March 2026

Trump’s War Has No Plan But It Does Have a Goal – To Destroy Opposition to US & Israeli Hegemony in the Middle East - Whatever the Cost

 What the War Exposes is the Underlying Weakness and Brittleness of US Domination & the Complicity of the Arab Regimes With Zionism & Genocide

John Mearsheimer: No Winning in Iran for the U.S.

The war against Iran and Trump’s threat to escalate it are a perfect example of the madness of capitalism and its military-industrial complex, which is based on destruction for its own sake. Having got himself into a war Trump doesn’t have what John Mearsheimer describes as an off-ramp.


Trump and Hegseth’s only strategy is to go yet further up the escalation ramp and to threaten even more devastation unless Iran stops blocking the Straits of Hormuz. This is highly unlikely to work. On the contrary Iran has the ability to take out nearly all of the neighbouring Arab state’s oil facilities, meaning there will be no need to block the straits.

Desalination plants are crucial to the very existence of the Gulf states. In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, the figure is 86% in Oman, about 70% in Saudi Arabia, 42% in the UAE, 90%  and about 50% in Israel.

There have already been attacks –  by the US on a desalination plant on the island of Qeshm, in the Straits of Hormuz and an Iranian attack the next day on a Bahranian plant. Iran is less dependent on desalination but if the US military or Israel is mad enough to attack its plants then Iran could strike back.


It goes without saying that an attack on desalination plants is a war crime but Israel has continually attacked water treatment plants in Gaza. In March 2025 two desalination plants in Deir al-Balah were forced to close after Israeli forces cut electricity supplies.

Before the war broke out I agreed with Mearsheimer that there was a good chance that the US would not attack Iran. Why? Because it was impossible to see what the end game was. But that was to ignore the essential irrationality of US imperialism and its drive for hegemony in the Middle East.

Even Starmer understood that you can’t effect regime change from the air, which is why he initially refused to allow the US to use British bases. This attracted the wrath of Britain’s most notorious war criminal, Tony Blair, for whom war is like a love potion. Starmer then reversed his decision.

It appears that the sole reason for the war is to inflict as much damage on Iran and if possible to make it a failed state. It is blood letting for its own sake. The purported reason for the attack, the issue of nuclear weapons, is a fiction since not only was Iran not building such a weapon but the assassinated President Khameini had issued a fatwa in 2003 prohibiting their development. US intelligence concurred.



 

Nor was the war intended to liberate the Iranian people from an oppressive regime. On the contrary it is inflicting as much pain as it can on them including murdering over 175 people, mainly school girls in Minab, an all-girls elementary school.

This has been verified by Bellingcat among others. Our own miserable ‘Defence’ Secretary John Healey condemned ‘indiscriminate’ Iranian attacks on Bahrain military bases but refused to condemn US attacks on Iran, including the bombing of the school. Trump simply denied US responsibility claiming that Iran had done it.


Why America is Losing the War With Iran (w/ John Mearsheimer) | 

The Chris Hedges Report

The war in Iran is not though simply a war fought on the whim of an incontinent and deranged felon who became President because of the lack of an alternative.

It would also be wrong to describe the war as having been fought on behalf of Israel, despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio having said that if Israel had not given notice that it would attack Iran regardless, there would probably have been no war. Trump apparently feared that the US’s bases would be targeted by Iran in the case of an Israeli attack.

It would however have been quite possible for the US to tell Israel that it was on its own if it attacked Iran. It could even have informed Iran that in the event of an Israeli attack it wouldn’t be joining in or defending Israel from its missiles, which would have meant that Iran would have concentrated solely on Israel. However this would fly in the face of US foreign policy which is to defend Israel at all costs.


John Mearsheimer: U.S. Already Lost Iran War - No Off-Ramp in Sight

There is not surprisingly a deep scepticism and disbelief about the incoherent and contradictory reasons given for the attack on Iran - nuclear enrichment, support for ‘terrorist’ groups and ballistic missiles.

That explains why the belief that Trump is trying to knock Epstein off the front pages is so strongly held. Democrats agreed with this by an 81-14 margin. Even a quarter of Republicans believe that Trump launched the war as a distraction from Epstein.

The irony is that both the US and Israel possess nuclear weapons and Israel has hinted that in the event of a threat to its existence, even from conventional weapons, it would put into operation the Samson Option, i.e. destroy everybody.

It is important to understand that even if Trump didn’t want the war to begin at a time of Israel’s choosing, he was forced to join Israel’s attack, not because of the Lobby but because it can’t allow its rabid attack dog, Israel, which is the projection of US power in the Middle East, to be battered by Iran’s missiles. A defeat for Israel would be a defeat for American prestige and power in the region.

Those who think that Israel and ‘The Lobby’ controls American Foreign Policy, like e.g. David Miller, can’t explain how a tiny country with few natural resources can control a superpower many times its size and power. Which explains Miller’s belief that a Global Jewish Empire has arisen which has successfully captured the US (& British) states!

What the war has done, with Iran’s attack on US bases in the Gulf, is exposed both the complicity of the Arab regimes with US domination of the Middle East and their fragility. Every single Gulf regime harbours US bases, whose main purpose is to protect the regimes against their own people as much as any external enemy. The regimes are junior allies of the Americans in the oppression of their peoples.

Given that Israel is supported to the hilt by the US, and the genocide in Gaza could not have happened without its support militarily, these Arab regimes are fully complicit in both the genocide and the annexation and terror on the West Bank.

Politically what this means for the Palestinian struggle is that the Arab regimes are no less an enemy than Israel and Zionism. Their relationship to US imperialism and therefore Israel is much like that of a prostitute to a pimp.

War on Iran threatens global energy supply

What Trump has also demonstrated is that the US Empire has no rationale or justification beyond its assertion that might is right. There was no logic or rationale in attacking Iran. Trump did not pretend, as Bush and Blair did in 19723 in Iraq, that this was a war for democracy and nation building.

Trump paid lip-service to Iran’s protesters. His promise to protect them was hollow. His only concern was about the interests of the Empire and its main ally Israel. This is not something that an Empire confident in itself would do. It suggests that the days of a unipolar world are coming to an end and that the US Empire is overstretched, militarily and economically.

Trump was accused of trying to effect regime change but even this is doubtful. The killing of Khameini by Israel was an end in itself. It is unlikely that his assassination was seen as likely to cause the regime to crumble. Creating a failed ethnically divided state seems to have been the main objective.

There will be no nation building or pretence that there is anything good likely to come out of the attack on Iran.

Trump is an ideal representative of the decline of US imperialism. He personifies mafia capitalism. Apart from the allegations of rape, child abuse and paedophilia against him he is incapable of telling the truth (a trait Starmer shares), amoral, narcissistic and venal. His corruption, racism and authoritarianism mark him out.

The fact that European leaders  such as Merz, Macron and Starmer do their best to placate and praise him demonstrates that servility, deference and fawning are the main qualities needed in bourgeois politics today.

The US went into Venezuela and kidnapped its President in order to steal its oil. There used to be a fiction that imperialism benefitted those it oppressed. It was the White Man’s Burden. We drained India of its riches on the pretence that we were bringing it civilisation despite the natives’ ingratitude. Trump doesn’t even pretend to be serving a greater good.

The US blew fishermen’s boats out of the water in the Caribbean and then ‘War Secretary’ Pete Hegseth instructed the military to kill any survivors in a ‘double tap’ strike.

Judges of the International Criminal Court are sanctioned as is the UN Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese. Trump even threatened to invade Greenland. The attack on Iran is part and parcel of the criminality that Trump has made into an art form. Israel is his ideal partner.

Meanwhile the Zionist state, which should be seen as the United States’ crazy diseased dog in the Middle East is indulging its own blood lust in Lebanon as part of Netanyahu’s Greater Israel fantasy.

Despite the terrorist pager attack last year, Israel has been surprised by Hezbollah’s defence of Lebanon. Hezbollah realises that if it doesn’t strike now then it will suffer later.

Cabinet Ministers such as Clare Short and Robin Cook resigned from Blair’s government at the time of the Iraq War. It says everything you need to know about the Labour government today that not even one of Starmer’s cabinet has anything approaching a backbone.

War demonstrates US weakness in Middle East

What the war also demonstrates is the fundamental weakness of Trump’s policy in the Middle East, its incoherence and the failure to articulate the reasons for the attack on Iran. This is reflected in the fact that the war is unpopular even in the United States, in contrast to the support the Iraq War had. This is compounded by the fear that the attack on Iran has weakened rather than strengthened the US position in the Middle East.

The war is also unpopular in Europe. Only in Israel is the war popular, some 93% of Israeli Jews supporting it. Blood letting is one of the few things that bind Israelis together.

The attack on Iran left America’s Arab allies vulnerable whilst being unable to take out a regime hostile to it. An attack on what you perceive an enemy without a clear aim or goal is not a sign of strength. Trump simply ignored the economic consequences of his war.

Absurdly Trump demanded that he should have a say over who was Iran’s new leader before demanding unconditional surrender. His narcissistic behaviour is more akin to a child who can’t get his own way issuing threats and indulging in bluster.  Trump is a child in charge of a deadly military.

What is amazing is that Iran’s blocking the Straits of Hormuz was not anticipated. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the region could have forecast that. What is hurting the United States government today are the economic repercussions and the rise in the price of oil above $100. Economists forecast it could go above $150 a barrel.

A War Based on a Lie

Truth is always the first casualty in a war. If you only watched the BBC you’d be forgiven for believing that no Iranian missiles have struck Israel. Israel has strict censorship and the BBC is happy to comply in spirit and deed.

In 2003 we had WMD in Iraq but none is so dishonest as Trump’s claim that he had launched the war in order “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”

No one in their right mind could seriously believe that the United States was under ‘imminent threat’. Yet Trump justified his war of aggression by claiming that:

we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it. ... They just wanted to practice evil.

But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades, they rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can't take it anymore.

In fact negotiations were in progress when the United States launched its attacks. Trump’s lies are not even convincing.

This after Trump had claimed in the summer that he had ‘obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability.’ In fact a deal had almost been reached, according to Oman’s Foreign Minister, when Trump attacked.  A carbon copy of what happened in the summer.

The claim that Iran was developing nuclear weapons was entirely bogus. Iran’s threat was to Israel’s domination of the region. Slightly more plausible is Iran’s support for resistance organisations in the region – Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. As for their final demand, to remove their ballistic missiles, this was in effect demanding that Iran render itself defenceless against future Israeli attacks.

Despite Israel’s assertion that Iran is an existential threat to it, in 1985 it behaved very differently. As Peter Beinart writes

Israel sold Iran 100 anti-tank missiles. Israel spent much of the 1980s arming Iran in its war against Iraq, which the Jewish state saw as a much graver threat.... When Iran acquired its first ballistic missile in 1985, in an effort to counter Iraq, Israel supplemented the Islamic Republic’s arsenal with shorter-range missiles of its own. Haaretz has even reported that some of the anti-tank missiles later fired by Hezbollah at Israeli forces were likely sold by Israel to Iran in the 1980s.... (as) Trita Parsi (noted) in his book A Single Role of the Dice, “Throughout the 1980s, no one in Israel said anything about an Iranian threat—the word wasn’t even uttered.”

Beinart goes on to say that

In May 2003, after the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran sent the US government a secret message: If the US lifted sanctions, ceased trying to overthrow the Islamic Republic, and accepted Tehran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy, Iran would end its support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, pressure Hezbollah to disarm, place its nuclear program under international inspection, and support the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative,

In 1996, according to Parsi’s book, Treacherous Alliance, Iran pressured Hezbollah to accept a ceasefire after a 16-day skirmish with Israel. If the claim that Iran poses a grave threat to Israel is far-fetched, the claim that it poses a grave threat to the United States is even more absurd

In other words this is a war fought on lies to defend the indefensible. And contrary to the propaganda of the BBC and other media, support for Iran against imperialism’s attack is not defence of the regime itself.

Tony Greenstein

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