Trump’s war against Iran smacks of terrorism: What Trump and Netanyahu are doing in Iran is pure evil and must be condemned. No leader, no matter how powerful, has the right in the 21st century, to invade another country, decapitate its leadership and impose surrogates on the hapless citizens. When a man with so much powers is unhinged and transactional, humanity suffers. That is the existential crisis that is confronting the entire world. Truth be told, Donald Trump is a bigger threat to global peace than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who he murdered. The earlier the world comes to this realization, the better. And who knows which country will be his next target after Iran. Cuba? Time will tell.
By Ikechukwu Amaechi
It is no longer news that the U.S. and Israel, on Saturday, February 28, launched blistering attacks on Iran, an operation Donald Trump dubbed “Epic Fury,” thereby putting the Middle East on tenterhooks. The biggest irony of the tragedy? It is orchestrated by a man who vowed that under his watch, the U.S. will rein in its insatiable appetite for wars.
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In his election night victory speech in November 2024, Trump told his supporters: “I am not going to start a war. I am going to stop wars.” Two months later, in his inaugural address, he enthused further: “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
Pushing the patently deceitful narrative that Trump’s second coming will be pro-peace, Senator JD Vance, while auditioning for the vice presidency in 2023, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”
But typically, Trump was lying to Americans and deliberately so, knowing that he would wilfully reverse himself sooner than later. In his first year back in office, he bombed seven countries: Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia and Venezuela. Now, not just satisfied with hauling bombs from a distance, he has launched his most extensive military campaign so far: a war against Iran, which has raised a fundamental question. Is this war inevitable?
Typically, the reasons advanced by Trump for the war have been changing according to his whims. Hours after the offensive began on Saturday, he claimed his objective was to eliminate alleged imminent threats from the Iranian regime.
Iran’s “menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies throughout the world,” he said on his Truth Social. In a second video on Sunday, Trump said the military operation was “necessary to ensure that Americans will never have to face a radical, bloodthirsty terrorist regime armed with nuclear weapons and lots of threats.” On Monday, he informed the Congress that he authorised the strikes “to protect United States forces in the region, protect the United States homeland, advance United States national interests … and in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.”
It is worthy of note that this war ensued in the middle of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, during which the mediators said substantial progress had been made. But just as President George W. Bush accused Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, of possessing and developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), primary justification for the 2003 invasion – allegations which post-war investigations found to be false – Trump’s claim that Iran was stalling on the negotiations, an act of bad faith was also false.
Why?
On Friday, hours before the attacks commenced, the Omani foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, who mediated the talks in Muscat and Geneva, told Margaret Brennan of CBS News Face the Nation that “substantial progress” was being made and a deal was “within our reach.” Iran, he said had agreed it will “never, ever have … nuclear material that will create a bomb. Now we are talking about zero stockpiling and that is very, very important because if you cannot stockpile material that is enriched, then there is no way you can actually create a bomb.”
It is, therefore, not surprising that when the bombs started raining on Saturday, al-Busaidi expressed consternation. “I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined,” he wrote on X. “Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer. I urge the United States not to get sucked in further. This is not your war.”
And he was right. This is by no means a U.S. war, a fact which was confirmed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Two days after the attacks ensued, he told reporters that the Trump administration decided to attack because Israel was planning to strike Iran, and “we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.” For that reason, he said, the U.S. chose to strike Iran “preemptively” to take out many of its missiles.
Simply put, Israel forced U.S. hands in waging a war of blame against Iran. But discerning Americans are not deceived. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, “I saw no evidence that Iran was on the verge of launching any kind of preemptive strike against the United States of America.”
On Monday, he maintained the same stance after Rubio briefed members of Congress. Not only did he insist that Iran’s missiles posed no imminent threat to the U.S., even when he agrees that they did pose a significant threat to Israel, the lawmaker was categorical: “This is still a war of choice that has been acknowledged by others was dictated by Israel’s goals and timelines.”
The international community has enough reason to be worried about the reckless behaviour of the man in the White House, arguably the most powerful human being on earth.
Donald Trump has worked harder than any other world leader to destroy the rules-based international order, a post-WWII framework of norms, laws, and institutions designed to govern state behaviour through cooperation rather than raw power. He actively promotes a Trumpian reality – the doctrine of might is right.
He accuses the Iranian leadership of terrorism, yet in the first year of his second coming, he has become a threat, literally, to the international community – the terrorist-in-chief – using the enormous powers of his office and country to change the world in inconceivable ways. Under his watch, the president of the sovereign state of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, were snatched from their bed in the dead of night and spirited to the United States to face Trumpian justice. In the process, he seized Venezuelan vast oil resources against all known international laws. He has invaded Iran without recourse to the United Nations and authorisation of the U.S. Congress. He threatened to impose a full trade embargo on Spain for refusing to allow the U.S. to use the jointly run bases at Morón and Rotafor to strike Iran.
He accuses Iranian leaders of killing their own people. Yet, in the U.S., he is orchestrating the brutal murder of fellow Americans in Minneapolis, Minnesota including Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse for a veterans affairs hospital, who were fatally shot by federal agents.
Truth be told, Trump and Netanyahu are bloody war mongers. It is cheap for Western leaders to label Iran as the principal source of instability and terror in the Middle East. But the country has been fighting for survival since the 1979 revolution that transformed it into an Islamic Republic. Iranians are victims of Western conspiracy, not villains. And this needless carnage is the reason why the country refused to dismantle its nuclear programme. Had the country been a nuclear-armed nation like North Korea and Israel, this calamity that has befallen it wouldn’t have been possible.
Those who blame Iran forget that they previously reached a deal with the U.S. to limit their nuclear programme, in exchange for sanctions relief, with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action under President Barack Obama. But Trump removed the U.S. from that agreement during his first term, thus plunging the Middle East into this avoidable crisis.
It is a shame that the U.S. has allowed Israel to drag it into this war of blame. That is not a sign of strength.
On Wednesday, the Iranian state media said 1,045 people have been killed in five days of US-Israeli attacks. That includes the 165 pupils killed when a bomb struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, a city in the Hormozgan province of southern Iran, on Saturday. Ninety-six other people were injured. Most of these victims were innocent, the same people Trump claims he wants to save from the Ayatollahs. What an irony.
What Trump and Netanyahu are doing in Iran is pure evil and must be condemned. No leader, no matter how powerful, has the right in the 21st century, to invade another country, decapitate its leadership and impose surrogates on the hapless citizens.
When a man with so much powers is unhinged and transactional, humanity suffers. That is the existential crisis that is confronting the entire world. Truth be told, Donald Trump is a bigger threat to global peace than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who he murdered. The earlier the world comes to this realization, the better. And who knows which country will be his next target after Iran. Cuba? Time will tell.
