The nauseating spectacle of European leaders grovelling before Trump at the NATO summit.
https://theaimn.net/the-nauseating-spectacle-of-european-leaders-grovelling-before-trump-at-the-nato-summit/ 27 June 2025
“I May Vomit”
Those are the immortal first words spoken by the man arriving in “Man Who Came to Dinner” – in the classic 1939 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Why did this come to my mind as I watched the evening news tonight?
Oh yes – I just felt like that man, as I learned how , one after another, these pathetic sycophants, including Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, dutifully bowed and scraped before the Donald Deity, – (as they promised to buy ever more weapons from American manufacturers.) By the way, Trump snubbed NATO’s Indo-Pacific partners, which includes Australia. But Australia’s getting used to accepting being snubbed by Trump and his war-mongering lackey, Pete Hegseth.
The ABC’s Europe Correspondent, Elias Clure, might have felt a bit the same way, as he reported on the meeting:
“Donald Trump was given a royal welcome by the monarch of the Netherlands as he arrived at the NATO summit in The Hague. He left feeling like a king.
Member nations agreed to lift their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP over 10 years and Mr Trump was quick to take credit, describing it as a “big win” for the United States.……………………………… the event, which aims to hear from delegations of the 32 NATO countries and many more partners and allies, seemed to revolve around the presence of one man.”
Clure went on to describe the gushing of the NATO Secretary-General. Mar Rutte, who was fulsome in his praise of America’s bombing in Iran:
” – the signal it sends to the rest of the world that this president, when it comes to it, yes, he is a man of peace, but if necessary, he is willing to use strength”
So – we all think it’s beaut that America decided to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites – bombing being apparently a great way to get peace? I mean – all this is, as Richard Marles loves to tell us, to preserve the “global rules -based order”
But do these pathetic flunkeys in their tax-payer funded jobs have any idea of what the international rules-based order actually is?
It’s the Charter of The International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg which set up international law on war crimes. The “supreme” war crime is explained by world international law expert Geoffrey Robertson – the war crime of aggression:
“It is constituted by using armed force against a felloe United Nations member with such “character, gravity and scale” that it violates the UN charter prohibition on one member country attacking another. A “spectacular military success, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities may have been, but it was, as a matter of international law, no different from Russia’s attack on Ukraine, or the George W Bush Tony Blair, John Howard invasion of Iraq. These a all cases of a breach of the world order agreed after the last war and likely to encourage emulation.”
The Donald worshippers also don’t seem aware that Iran is a member of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and there is no evidence that it’s making a nuclear weapon. Iran has always allowed IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities. Like many other nations it has enriched uranium for medical and other industrial purposes, and this is legal.
Israel, on the other hand, is widely believed to have nuclear weapons – estimated at anything from 90 to 200 nuclear warheads. Israel has refused to join the NPT, and refused to allow IAEA inspections.
Donald Trump and his nefarious acolytes are not content with wrecking America’s national civil institutions, – a process made easier, now that the Supreme Court has put Trump above the law .
Now Trump is moving on to destroy international law.
I can’t go on, I am feeling too sick.
Trump’s rap sheet is long, but this may top them all
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has not blown the whistle as claimed by the Australian government, nor has the UK or our European allies.
any resolution to condemn the bombing of Iran will be vetoed by the US , presumably with the support of Australia
The Age, Geoffrey Robertson , 24 June 25, – (print version)
Although few may bother to point this out, Trump has just committed a crime much worse than all the others on his rap sheet.
It is the war crime of aggression- the “supreme” war crime, according to the judgement at Nuremberg. It is constituted by using armed force against a felloe United Nations member with such “character, gravity and scale” that it violates the UN charter prohibition on one member country attacking another. A “spectacular military success, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities may have been, but it was, as a matter of international law, no different from Russia’s attack on Ukraine, or the George W Bush Tony Blair, John Howard invasion of Iraq. These a all cases of a breach of the world order agreed after the last war and likely to encourage emulation.
This is not about saving Iran, or the danger of making Putin look better. If any government in the world deserves to be destroyed, it is the mullahs without mercy in Iran. Many of them were involved in the mass slaughter of political prisoners in1988 – the worst crime against POWs since the Japanese death marches. – and ever since their record of killing peaceful protestors, women and dissidents has been disgusting. Iran has bankrolled terrorist organisations and wagedpropaganda wars against the Big (US) and Little (UK) Satan, but it has not invaded Israel or done anything to America to justify its aggression.
Were some hypothetical war crimes court ever to get its hands on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it would reduce his sentence by taking Iranian provocation into account – but the man would still be guilty as charged. He could not argue self-defence, which requires the threat defended against to be reasonably proximate. The threat of Iran building and using nukes is much further away than the threat of Israeli submarines, said to be already stationed within range of Tehtan.
It is not even clear that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon – several dozen countries also signatory to the nuclear weapons treaty by which they forswear any such development. could build nukes within a few months. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has not blown the whistle as claimed by the Australian government, nor has the UK or our European allies.. And just like Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” there is no reason to think Iran has completed a project that in fact started under .the Shah in the 1970s.
Only last wee, Trump said in effect to the Ayatollah, in the tone of a gangster “Wee know where you live”, but he promised the cleric he would be safe “for now” and gave him two weeks. He bombed three days later (This is a man on whose word Australia has just made a down payment for AUKUS).
The true disaster of Trump’s attack is that it is another nail in the coffin of the rules-based world order that provided some protection for international pdeace and security since it was put in place in 1945.
It is now unfit for its purpose declared in the UN Charter to stop the slaughter of war. The General Assembly is a talking shop, while all power resides in the permanently poleAxed Security Council which cannot function because of the big power veto.
Resolutions for peace in Ukraine are vetoed by Russia, for peace in Gaza they are vetoed by America on behalf of Israel, and any resolution to condemn the bombing of Iran will be vetoed by the US , presumably with the support of Australia.
Besides, the problem with Iran goes beyond nuclear weapons. It’s a conflict between the rights of its people and the wrongs of its dictatorship. That is a conflict that only its people can resolve, however much the West may wish to help.
Trump has already made a mockery of US law, from which his Supreme Court has declared him immune. Hewill now make a mockery of international law, roo.
Geoffrey Robertson KC is an expert in international and human rights law. He is the author of Mullahs Without Mercy and Crimes Against Humanity.
Donald Trump dominated extraordinary NATO summit that saw European defence spending increase – NATO chief calls Trump ‘Daddy’
ABC News, By Europe correspondent Elias Clure at The Hague, 26 June 25
Donald Trump was given a royal welcome by the monarch of the Netherlands as he arrived at the NATO summit in The Hague.
He left feeling like a king.
Member nations agreed to lift their defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP over 10 years and Mr Trump was quick to take credit, describing it as a “big win” for the United States.
He’d been calling for more spending and had made threats about the future of the alliance if it wasn’t agreed upon.
“They said, ‘You did it, sir, you did it sir.’ Well, I don’t know if I did it, but I think I did,” Mr Trump said.
When the commitment was finalised by members in an official summit declaration, NATO members proclaimed the summit a huge success.
But the event, which aims to hear from delegations of the 32 NATO countries and many more partners and allies, seemed to revolve around the presence of one man.
Trump insists damage was done
Mr Trump’s first official engagement at the NATO summit HQ was with Secretary-General Mark Rutte.
The president arrived at the meeting with US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and State Department boss Marco Rubio. The meeting began with Mr Rutte lauding America’s actions in Iran.
“The great thing is you took out the nuclear capability of Iran. This was crucial. You did it in a way which is extremely impressive. But the signal it sends to the rest of the world that this president, when it comes to it, yes, he is a man of peace, but if necessary, he is willing to use strength,” Mr Rutte said.
When the American delegation was probed by the press on the validity of the White House’s claims that Iran’s nuclear capabilities had been comprehensively demolished, it pushed back.
Mr Hegseth accused sceptics of being “politically motivated”, saying the damage was, in fact, “severe”.
Mr Rubio declared that the damage to the enrichment facilities was so bad “you can’t even find it on the map … it’s totally wiped out”.
Not to be outdone, Mr Trump then provided the most vivid description of Operation Midnight Hammer’s success, comparing the raid to the most destructive bombing in history.
“That hit ended the war. I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki. But that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war. This ended that war,”
Mr Trump said.
Mr Rutte watched on in silence.
NATO chief calls Trump ‘Daddy’
The NATO secretary-general has been quite transparent in his attempts to flatter the president.
Mr Trump seemed so taken by the gushing display of admiration by Mr Rutte that he leaked a text message reportedly sent to him by the alliance boss.
“Mr. President, dear Donald, Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do. It makes us all safer,” Mr Rutte reportedly wrote in the message.
Mr Rutte said at the summit that he was not embarrassed by the message, and he was actually happy for it to be made public.
“There’s nothing in it that had to stay secret,” he said.
At Mr Rutte’s meeting with Mr Trump, he was asked about what he thought about the commander-in-chief’s use of the f-word when describing Israel and Iran.
Mr Trump said that the two countries “had a big fight, like two kids in a schoolyard”.
Mr Rutte’s response was light-hearted but telling.
“Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.”……………………………………….
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-26/donald-trump-dominates-extraordinary-nato-summit/105461646
US didn’t destroy Iran’s nuclear programme: Here’s what new intel says
US President Trump doubles down on his assertion that the Iranian nuclear programme has been set back by decades.
By Al Jazeera Staff, 25 Jun 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/25/us-didnt-destroy-irans-nuclear-programme-heres-what-new-intel-says
The United States’ strikes on three key Iranian nuclear sites on Sunday failed to destroy underground facilities, and set Tehran’s nuclear programme back only by a few months, according to an assessment of a confidential American intelligence report.
The “top secret” document prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) – the intelligence arm of the Pentagon – and published by major US news outlets on Tuesday is at odds with President Donald Trump’s claims about the strikes. Trump has insisted that the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were “obliterated” by a combination of bunker busting and conventional bombs.
Trump and his administration’s senior officials are dismissing the intelligence report and calling out the reporting over the DIA’s assessment as “fake news”.
Speaking at a NATO summit in The Hague, the US president said he believed Iran’s nuclear programme was set back by decades.
So, what did the DIA assessment say about US strikes? What has Iran said about the attacks? And how does the intelligence report contrast with the Trump administration’s public claims?
What did the DIA report say?
A preliminary report prepared by the DIA noted that rather than obliterating Iran’s nuclear programme, the US bombings had only set it back by a few months.
Before Israel attacked Iran on June 13, US agencies had noted that if Iran rushed to assemble a nuclear weapon, it would take it about three months.
The DIA’s five-page report now estimates this to be delayed by less than six months, reported The New York Times. As per the early findings, the US strikes blocked the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse the underground facilities.
The DIA report also reveals that the US agency believes that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes, which destroyed little of the nuclear material.
Shortly after the US strikes on June 22, Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the chairman of the Iranian parliament, claimed that the authorities had evacuated the Fordow facility in advance. “Iran has been expecting strikes on Fordow for several days. This nuclear facility was evacuated, no irreversible damage was sustained during today’s attack,” Mohammadi had said.
The US president on Wednesday said he doesn’t buy Iranian claims that they moved enriched uranium out of the Fordow nuclear facility. “I believe they didn’t have a chance to get anything out because they acted fast,” said Trump. “If it would have taken two weeks, maybe, but it’s very hard to remove that kind of material… and very dangerous.
“Plus, they knew we were coming,” Trump added. “And if they know we’re coming, they’re not going to be down there.”
CNN first reported on the DIA report, quoting unnamed officials that the US strikes’ effect on all three sites – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – was largely restricted to aboveground structures, which were severely damaged.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration told the United Nations Security Council that the US strikes had “degraded” the Iranian facilities – short of Trump’s earlier assertion that the attacks had “obliterated” the sites.
The strikes have reportedly badly damaged the electrical system at the Fordow facility. However, it was not immediately clear how long Iran could take to gain access to the underground facilities and repair these systems.
On Monday, Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA, said that while “no one, including the IAEA, is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage at Fordow”, it is expected to be “very significant”.
Two people familiar with the DIA’s assessment told CNN that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed and the centrifuges are largely “intact”.
Some analysts cautioned against drawing final conclusions. Analysts told the Reuters news agency that the extent of damage to the Fordow uranium enrichment facility would not necessarily be revealed if the assessment was based on satellite imagery.
How did the US strike Iranian nuclear sites?
After 10 days of fighting between Israel and Iran, the US had militarily intervened on June 22 by hitting the Iranian nuclear sites.
Fordow is a highly fortified underground uranium enrichment facility reportedly buried hundreds of metres deep in the mountains in northwestern Iran. While Natanz is Iran’s largest and most central enrichment complex, containing vast halls of centrifuges, some underground, Isfahan is a major nuclear research and production centre that includes a uranium conversion facility and fuel fabrication plants.
How did the US strike Iranian nuclear sites?
After 10 days of fighting between Israel and Iran, the US had militarily intervened on June 22 by hitting the Iranian nuclear sites.
Fordow is a highly fortified underground uranium enrichment facility reportedly buried hundreds of metres deep in the mountains in northwestern Iran. While Natanz is Iran’s largest and most central enrichment complex, containing vast halls of centrifuges, some underground, Isfahan is a major nuclear research and production centre that includes a uranium conversion facility and fuel fabrication plants.
The US forces dropped 14 30,000-pound (13,000kg) bunker-buster bombs, while Navy submarines are said to have coordinated strikes by cruise missiles at the Natanz and Isfahan sites.
The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) – the most powerful bunker-buster bomb in the US military arsenal weighing nearly 13,000kg (30,000lb) – was used in the strike.
The US intervention was understood to be critical for the Israeli campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities, especially Fordow, due to its depth that kept it out of reach for the Israeli military.
How did the DIA report contrast with Trump’s claims?
In March this year, the US spy chief Tulsi Gabbard had informed Congress that there was no evidence Iran was building a nuclear weapon, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he had earlier suspended in 2003.
On June 17, as Israel and Iran continued to trade ballistic missiles, Trump was returning to Washington from the G7 summit in Canada, when he snubbed his own administration, including the spy chief Gabbard, saying she and the intel agencies had gotten it “wrong”.
He claimed that Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear weapon. On June 22, the US struck Iranian nuclear facilities. “The strikes were a spectacular military success,” Trump said in a televised address. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
The next day, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “The damage to the Nuclear sites in Iran is said to be ‘monumental.’ The hits were hard and accurate. Great skill was shown by our military. Thank you!”
On Wednesday, at the NATO summit, he reiterated his stance. “The last thing they [Iran] want to do is enrich anything right now… They’re not going to have a bomb and they’re not going to enrich,” he said at The Hague.
Top officials from his administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have repeated the obliteration claims since then.
“Based on everything we have seen – and I’ve seen it all – our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons,” Hegseth said in a statement provided to Reuters.
“Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target – and worked perfectly. The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran; so anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission.”
How has Trump, the White House reacted?
Trump spent a good amount of time letting off steam on his Truth Social platform after the DIA report dropped.
“THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!” Trump wrote in all-caps, referring to the reporting by The New York Times and CNN.
“FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY,” Trump said in a post.
The US president also posted a series of apparently bizarre videos, including one of B-2 bombers taking off to a “bomb Iran” song in the background.
Trump is currently in the Netherlands, attending this week’s NATO summit, and reiterated to reporters that the damage from the strikes was significant. “I think it’s been completely demolished,” he said, adding, “Those pilots hit their targets. Those targets were obliterated, and the pilots should be given credit.
“That place is under rock. That place is demolished,” Trump responded to a question on the possibility of Iran rebuilding its nuclear program.
He took further shots at CNN, saying: “These cable networks are real losers. You’re gutless losers. I say that to CNN because I watch it – I have no choice. I got to watch it. It’s all garbage. It’s all fake news.”
He said the intelligence following the strikes in Iran was “inconclusive”. “The intelligence says we don’t know. It could’ve been very severe. That’s what the intelligence suggests.”
“It was very severe. There was obliteration,” he reiterated on Wednesday.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called the DIA assessment “flat-out wrong” and leaked to the press “by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community”.
“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” she said in a statement. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: Total obliteration.”
Plutonium Levels in Sediments Remain Elevated 70 Years After Nuclear Tests
June 24, 2025,
https://www.marinetechnologynews.com/news/plutonium-levels-sediments-remain-650328
Researchers from Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia have confirmed plutonium levels in sediment up to 4,500 times greater than the Western Australian coastline.
Three plutonium-based nuclear weapons tests were conducted at the Montebello Islands in the 1950’s, which introduced radioactive contamination to the surrounding environment. The first nuclear test, coded Operation Hurricane, had a weapon’s yield of some 25kT, and formed a crater in the seabed, while the second and third tests, dubbed Operation Mosaic G1 and G2, had weapons yields of around 15kT and 60kT, respectively.
The three tests released radioactive isotopes including plutonium, strontium (90Sr) and caesium (137Cs) into the surrounding marine environment.
“Plutonium is anthropogenic, which means that it doesn’t exist on its own in nature. The only way it is introduced into an environment is through the detonation of nuclear weapons and from releases from nuclear reprocessing plants and, to a lesser extent, accidents in nuclear power plants,” said ECU PhD student and lead author Madison Williams-Hoffman.
“When plutonium is released into a coastal setting in the marine environment, a significant fraction will attach to particles and accumulate in the seabed, while some may be transported long distances by oceanic currents.”
The region is not inhabited by humans and has not been developed, however it is visited by fishing boats, so collecting data on the levels of contamination in the marine environment is important.
Currently, the protected island archipelago and surrounding marine areas also reside within the Montebello Islands Marine Park (MIMP). The MIMP is ecologically significant due to the presence of numerous permanent or migratory species, and its high-value habitat is used for breeding and rearing by fish, mammals, birds and other marine wildlife.
The water and sediment quality within the MIMP are currently described as ‘generally pristine’, and it is fundamental to maintain healthy marine ecosystems in the region.
The concentrations of plutonium at Montebello Islands were between 4 to 4,500 times higher than those found in sediment from Kalumburu and Rockingham from the Western Australian coastline, with the northern area of the archipelago, close to the three detonation sites, having four-fold higher levels than the southern area.
The concentrations of plutonium found in the sediment at Montebello Islands were similar to those found in the sediment at the Republic of Marshall Islands (RMI) test sites, despite 700-fold higher detonation yields from nuclear testing undertaken at RMI.
Plutonium is an alpha emitter so, unlike other types of radiation, it cannot travel through the skin and is most dangerous when ingested or inhaled.
The research was undertaken by Williams-Hoffman, under the co-supervision of Prof. Pere Masqueand at ECU and Dr Mathew Johansen at ANTSO.
How the US and Israel Used Rafael Grossi to Hijack the IAEA and Start a War on Iran
Rafael Grossi, director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
Israel began working on a nuclear weapon in the 1950s, with substantial help from Western countries, including France, Britain and Argentina, and made its first weapons in 1966 or 1967. By 2015, when Iran signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a leaked email that a nuclear weapon would be useless to Iran because “Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran.”
The agency’s chief has not only continued its subservience to U.S. and Western interests, but also its practice of turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons.
Medea BenjaminNicolas J.S. Davies, Jun 23, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/how-the-us-and-israel-used-rafael-grossi-to-hijack-the-iaea-and-start-a-war-on-iran
Rafael Grossi, director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
On June 12th, based on a damning report by Grossi, a slim majority of the IAEA Board of Governors voted to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations as an IAEA member. Of the 35 countries represented on the Board, only 19 voted for the resolution, while 3 voted against it, 11 abstained and 2 did not vote.
Rafael Grossi, director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
On June 12th, based on a damning report by Grossi, a slim majority of the IAEA Board of Governors voted to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations as an IAEA member. Of the 35 countries represented on the Board, only 19 voted for the resolution, while 3 voted against it, 11 abstained and 2 did not vote.
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The United States contacted eight board member governments on June 10th to persuade them to either vote for the resolution or not to vote. Israeli officials said they saw the U.S. arm-twisting for the IAEA resolution as a significant signal of U.S. support for Israel’s war plans, revealing how much Israel valued the IAEA resolution as diplomatic cover for the war.
The IAEA board meeting was timed for the final day of President Trump’s 60-day ultimatum to Iran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement. Even as the IAEA board voted, Israel was loading weapons, fuel and drop-tanks on its warplanes for the long flight to Iran and briefing its aircrews on their targets. The first Israeli air strikes hit Iran at 3 a.m. that night.
On June 20th, Iran filed a formal complaint against Director General Grossi with the UN Secretary General and the UN Security Council for undermining his agency’s impartiality, both by his failure to mention the illegality of Israel’s threats and uses of force against Iran in his public statements and by his singular focus on Iran’s alleged violations.
The source of the IAEA investigation that led to this resolution was a 2018 Israeli intelligence report that its agents had identified three previously undisclosed sites in Iran where Iran had conducted uranium enrichment prior to 2003. In 2019, Grossi opened an investigation, and the IAEA eventually gained access to the sites and detected traces of enriched uranium..
Despite the fateful consequences of his actions, Grossi has never explained publicly how the IAEA can be sure that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency or its Iranian collaborators, such as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (or MEK), did not put the enriched uranium in those sites themselves, as Iranian officials have suggested.
While the IAEA resolution that triggered this war dealt only with Iran’s enrichment activities prior to 2003, U.S. and Israeli politicians quickly pivoted to unsubstantiated claims that Iran was on the verge of making a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies had previously reported that such a complex process would take up to three years, even before Israel and the United States began bombing and degrading Iran’s existing civilian nuclear facilities.
The IAEA’s previous investigations into unreported nuclear activities in Iran were officially completed in December 2015, when IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano published its “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program.”
The IAEA assessed that, while some of Iran’s past activities might have been relevant to nuclear weapons, they “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.” The IAEA “found no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material in connection with the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”
When Yukiya Amano died before the end of his term in 2019, Argentinian diplomat Rafael Grossi was appointed IAEA Director General. Grossi had served as Deputy Director General under Amano and, before that, as Chief of Staff under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.
The Israelis have a long record of fabricating false evidence about Iran’s nuclear activities, like the notorious “laptop documents” given to the CIA by the MEK in 2004 and believed to have been created by the Mossad. Douglas Frantz, who wrote a report on Iran’s nuclear program for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, revealed that the Mossad created a special unit in 2003 to provide secret briefings on Iran’s nuclear program, using “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere.”
And yet Grossi collaborated with Israel to pursue its latest allegations. After several years of meetings in Israel and negotiations and inspections in Iran, he wrote his report to the IAEA Board of Governors and scheduled a board meeting to coincide with the planned start date for Israel’s war.
Israel made its final war preparations in full view of the satellites and intelligence agencies of the western countries that drafted and voted for the resolution. It is no wonder that 13 countries abstained or did not vote, but it is tragic that more neutral countries could not find the wisdom and courage to vote against this insidious resolution.
The official purpose of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, is “to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies.” Since 1965, all of its 180 member countries have been subject to IAEA safeguards to ensure that their nuclear programs are “not used in such a way as to further any military purpose.”
The IAEA’s work is obviously compromised in dealing with countries that already have nuclear weapons. North Korea withdrew from the IAEA in 1994, and from all safeguards in 2009. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China have IAEA safeguard agreements that are based only on “voluntary offers” for “selected” non-military sites. India has a 2009 safeguard agreement that requires it to keep its military and civilian nuclear programs separate, and Pakistan has 10 separate safeguard agreements, but only for civilian nuclear projects, the latest being from 2017 to cover two Chinese-built power stations.
Israel, however, has only a limited 1975 safeguards agreement for a 1955 civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States. An addendum in 1977 extended the IAEA safeguards agreement indefinitely, even though the cooperation agreement with the U.S. that it covered expired four days later. So, by a parody of compliance that the United States and the IAEA have played along with for half a century, Israel has escaped the scrutiny of IAEA safeguards just as effectively as North Korea.
Israel began working on a nuclear weapon in the 1950s, with substantial help from Western countries, including France, Britain and Argentina, and made its first weapons in 1966 or 1967. By 2015, when Iran signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a leaked email that a nuclear weapon would be useless to Iran because “Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran.” Powell quoted former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asking, “What would we do with a nuclear weapon? Polish it?”
In 2003, while Powell tried but failed to make a case for war on Iraq to the UN Security Council, President Bush smeared Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” based on their alleged pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Egyptian IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei, repeatedly assured the Security Council that the IAEA could find no evidence that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon.
When the CIA produced a document that showed Iraq importing yellowcake uranium from Niger, just as Israel had secretly imported it from Argentina in the 1960s, the IAEA only took a few hours to recognize the document as a forgery, which ElBaradei immediately reported to the Security Council.
Rafael Grossi, director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
On June 12th, based on a damning report by Grossi, a slim majority of the IAEA Board of Governors voted to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations as an IAEA member. Of the 35 countries represented on the Board, only 19 voted for the resolution, while 3 voted against it, 11 abstained and 2 did not vote.
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The United States contacted eight board member governments on June 10th to persuade them to either vote for the resolution or not to vote. Israeli officials said they saw the U.S. arm-twisting for the IAEA resolution as a significant signal of U.S. support for Israel’s war plans, revealing how much Israel valued the IAEA resolution as diplomatic cover for the war.
The IAEA board meeting was timed for the final day of President Trump’s 60-day ultimatum to Iran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement. Even as the IAEA board voted, Israel was loading weapons, fuel and drop-tanks on its warplanes for the long flight to Iran and briefing its aircrews on their targets. The first Israeli air strikes hit Iran at 3 a.m. that night.
On June 20th, Iran filed a formal complaint against Director General Grossi with the UN Secretary General and the UN Security Council for undermining his agency’s impartiality, both by his failure to mention the illegality of Israel’s threats and uses of force against Iran in his public statements and by his singular focus on Iran’s alleged violations.
The source of the IAEA investigation that led to this resolution was a 2018 Israeli intelligence report that its agents had identified three previously undisclosed sites in Iran where Iran had conducted uranium enrichment prior to 2003. In 2019, Grossi opened an investigation, and the IAEA eventually gained access to the sites and detected traces of enriched uranium.
Despite the fateful consequences of his actions, Grossi has never explained publicly how the IAEA can be sure that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency or its Iranian collaborators, such as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (or MEK), did not put the enriched uranium in those sites themselves, as Iranian officials have suggested.
While the IAEA resolution that triggered this war dealt only with Iran’s enrichment activities prior to 2003, U.S. and Israeli politicians quickly pivoted to unsubstantiated claims that Iran was on the verge of making a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies had previously reported that such a complex process would take up to three years, even before Israel and the United States began bombing and degrading Iran’s existing civilian nuclear facilities.
The IAEA’s previous investigations into unreported nuclear activities in Iran were officially completed in December 2015, when IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano published its “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program.”
The IAEA assessed that, while some of Iran’s past activities might have been relevant to nuclear weapons, they “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.” The IAEA “found no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material in connection with the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”
When Yukiya Amano died before the end of his term in 2019, Argentinian diplomat Rafael Grossi was appointed IAEA Director General. Grossi had served as Deputy Director General under Amano and, before that, as Chief of Staff under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.
The Israelis have a long record of fabricating false evidence about Iran’s nuclear activities, like the notorious “laptop documents” given to the CIA by the MEK in 2004 and believed to have been created by the Mossad. Douglas Frantz, who wrote a report on Iran’s nuclear program for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, revealed that the Mossad created a special unit in 2003 to provide secret briefings on Iran’s nuclear program, using “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere.”
And yet Grossi collaborated with Israel to pursue its latest allegations. After several years of meetings in Israel and negotiations and inspections in Iran, he wrote his report to the IAEA Board of Governors and scheduled a board meeting to coincide with the planned start date for Israel’s war.
Israel made its final war preparations in full view of the satellites and intelligence agencies of the western countries that drafted and voted for the resolution. It is no wonder that 13 countries abstained or did not vote, but it is tragic that more neutral countries could not find the wisdom and courage to vote against this insidious resolution.
The official purpose of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, is “to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies.” Since 1965, all of its 180 member countries have been subject to IAEA safeguards to ensure that their nuclear programs are “not used in such a way as to further any military purpose.”
The IAEA’s work is obviously compromised in dealing with countries that already have nuclear weapons. North Korea withdrew from the IAEA in 1994, and from all safeguards in 2009. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China have IAEA safeguard agreements that are based only on “voluntary offers” for “selected” non-military sites. India has a 2009 safeguard agreement that requires it to keep its military and civilian nuclear programs separate, and Pakistan has 10 separate safeguard agreements, but only for civilian nuclear projects, the latest being from 2017 to cover two Chinese-built power stations.
Israel, however, has only a limited 1975 safeguards agreement for a 1955 civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States. An addendum in 1977 extended the IAEA safeguards agreement indefinitely, even though the cooperation agreement with the U.S. that it covered expired four days later. So, by a parody of compliance that the United States and the IAEA have played along with for half a century, Israel has escaped the scrutiny of IAEA safeguards just as effectively as North Korea.
Israel began working on a nuclear weapon in the 1950s, with substantial help from Western countries, including France, Britain and Argentina, and made its first weapons in 1966 or 1967. By 2015, when Iran signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a leaked email that a nuclear weapon would be useless to Iran because “Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran.” Powell quoted former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asking, “What would we do with a nuclear weapon? Polish it?”
In 2003, while Powell tried but failed to make a case for war on Iraq to the UN Security Council, President Bush smeared Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” based on their alleged pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Egyptian IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei, repeatedly assured the Security Council that the IAEA could find no evidence that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon.
When the CIA produced a document that showed Iraq importing yellowcake uranium from Niger, just as Israel had secretly imported it from Argentina in the 1960s, the IAEA only took a few hours to recognize the document as a forgery, which ElBaradei immediately reported to the Security Council.
Bush kept repeating the lie about yellowcake from Niger, and other flagrant lies about Iraq, and the United States invaded and destroyed Iraq based on his lies, a war crime of historic proportions. Most of the world knew that ElBaradei and the IAEA were right all along, and, in 2005, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for exposing Bush’s lies, speaking truth to power and strengthening nuclear non-proliferation.
In 2007, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies agreed with the IAEA’s finding that Iran, like Iraq, had no nuclear weapons program. As Bush wrote in his memoirs, “…after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?” Even Bush couldn’t believe he would get away with recycling the same lies to destroy Iran as well as Iraq, and Trump is playing with fire by doing so now.
ElBaradei wrote in his own memoir, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, that if Iran did do some preliminary research on nuclear weapons, it probably began during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, after the US and its allies helped Iraq to manufacture chemical weapons that killed up to 100,000 Iranians.
The neocons who dominate U.S. post-Cold War foreign policy viewed the Nobel Prize winner ElBaradei as an obstacle to their regime change ambitions around the world, and conducted a covert campaign to find a more compliant new IAEA Director General when his term expired in 2009.
After Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano was appointed as the new Director General, U.S. diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks revealed details of his extensive vetting by U.S. diplomats, who reported back to Washington that Amano “was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
After becoming IAEA Director General in 2019, Rafael Grossi not only continued the IAEA’s subservience to U.S. and Western interests and its practice of turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons, but also ensured that the IAEA played a critical role in Israel’s march to war on Iran.
Even as he publicly acknowledged that Iran had no nuclear weapons program and that diplomacy was the only way to resolve the West’s concerns about Iran, Grossi helped Israel to set the stage for war by reopening the IAEA’s investigation into Iran’s past activities. Then, on the very day that Israeli warplanes were being loaded with weapons to bomb Iran, he made sure that the IAEA Board of Governors passed a resolution to give Israel and the U.S. the pretext for war that they wanted.
In his last year as IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei faced a similar dilemma to the one that Grossi has faced since 2019. In 2008, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies gave the IAEA copies of documents that appeared to show Iran conducting four distinct types of nuclear weapons research.
Whereas, in 2003, Bush’s yellowcake document from Niger was clearly a forgery, the IAEA could not establish whether the Israeli documents were authentic or not. So ElBaradei refused to act on them or to make them public, despite considerable political pressure, because, as he wrote in The Age of Deception, he knew the U.S. and Israel “wanted to create the impression that Iran presented an imminent threat, perhaps preparing the grounds for the use of force.” ElBaradei retired in 2009, and those allegations were among the “outstanding issues” that he left to be resolved by Yukiya Amano in 2015.
If Rafael Grossi had exercised the same caution, impartiality and wisdom as Mohamed ElBaradei did in 2009, it is very possible that the United States and Israel would not be at war with Iran today.
Mohamed ElBaradei wrote in a tweet on June 17th 2025, “To rely on force and not negotiations is a sure way to destroy the NPT and the nuclear non-proliferation regime (imperfect as it is), and sends a clear message to many countries “that their ‘ultimate security’ is to develop nuclear weapons!!!”
Despite Grossi’s role in U.S.-Israeli war plans as IAEA Director General, or maybe because of it, he has been touted as a Western-backed candidate to succeed Antonio Guterres as UN Secretary General in 2026. That would be a disaster for the world. Fortunately, there are many more qualified candidates to lead the world out of the crisis that Rafael Grossi has helped the U.S. and Israel to plunge it into.
Rafael Grossi should resign as IAEA Director before he further undermines nuclear non-proliferation and drags the world any closer to nuclear war. And he should also withdraw his name from consideration as a candidate for UN Secretary General.
EDF chief weighs asset sales as Paris pushes for new nuclear focus
a “complicated economic equation
… unless someone has found a magic wand”
Insiders say Fontana’s stance signals he is aligned with the French
government unlike his predecessor. EDF’s new boss is conducting a
portfolio review that could lead to the French energy group selling some
assets, as he seeks to meet government demands to focus on building new
nuclear reactors in France.
Bernard Fontana has told insiders that he
wanted to assess which assets were not profitable or did not fit with the
state-owned group’s strategic priorities, according to several people
with knowledge of the situation. Fontana, who took over as chief executive
of the state-owned group last month, told the people that sales could come
after the review, although he has not yet concluded which parts of the
business should be sold off.
The state “has said that we have to make the
new nuclear programme in France a success, and exploit the current nuclear
centres. For the rest, if there aren’t the means, we’ll have to
arbitrate”, said one of the people.
Its other assets and subsidiaries
include the construction engineering division Framatome — of which
Fontana was previously CEO
— renewable installations in France and across
the world, Italian utility business Edison and services company Dalkia.
Several people familiar with EDF said Dalkia and Edison are among the
business units that could be sold. Renewable assets, with the exception of
EDF’s hydraulic power projects, could also be under consideration, the
people said.
Still, the company’s aims could be complicated if it tries
to sell assets during a difficult economic environment, potentially forcing
it to offload some assets at deep discounts, especially in the US where it
has a number of offshore wind and solar projects.
Asset sales would also do
little to meet the enormous costs of delivering the new EPR2 programme,
people familiar with the business said. The government and EDF recently
agreed a funding mechanism for the project, but the total cost is yet to be
determined.
Building the EPR2s and meeting EDF’s other priorities such as
guaranteeing low energy prices to consumers and industrial groups, and
completing Hinkley Point make for a “complicated economic equation
… unless someone has found a magic wand”, said one of the people.
FT 25th June 2025
https://www.ft.com/content/e2c4ba72-b40a-4d7b-a820-70957b06958e
Israeli, US bombing of Iran a failure of epic proportions
25 June 2025 AIMN Editorial, By Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL https://theaimn.net/israeli-us-bombing-of-iran-a-failure-of-epic-proportions/
The illegal, criminal bombings on Iran which killed over 800 and wounded over 2,500 have failed spectacularly.
While still going on, there are indications from the Trump administration a ceasefire may soon be possible.
What has 11 days of bombings accomplished?
It has not destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities or its enriched uranium. It has not achieved regime change in Iran. It has not shattered Iran into failed state status. It has likely rallied Iran’s population to coalesce around besieged Iranian leadership.
It has brought retaliation bombings to Israel killing dozens and wounding hundreds, the largest such attacks in its 77 year existence.
It has likely motivated Iran to repair and rebuild its nuclear capabilities outside of oversight of nuclear inspectors. Iran may decide to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) designed to give signatories the inalienable right to civilian nuclear development. When they observe how Israel and the US cavalierly bomb non-nuclear weapons states, Iran may decide they have no choice but to join the nuclear club. Since Iran was not developing nuclear weapons, the Israeli, US misadventure may speed up the very thing they claimed urgency in preventing.
Possibly the worst bombing campaign failure was to obliterate US credibility as a responsible diplomatic partner. By using the duplicity of negotiating an end to the imagined nuclear crisis to enable Israel’ sneak attack, US now ranks dead last of all 194 other countries to negotiate anything of consequence. Check that, the US can still negotiate with Israel which has complete trust in US backing of their ongoing genocide in Gaza and lust to topple Iran as their only hegemonic rival in the Middle East.
The US has made of shambles of international law. It has substituted its Orwellian ‘Rules Based Order’ allowing it to wage regime change, including outright war, on any targeted state at the point of a smart bomb fired by dumb, international war criminals.
But no matter how badly deranged US policy turns out, the current CICW (Commander in Criminal War) will call it “a spectacular success.”
Radiation risks from US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites seen as minimal
Negar Mojtahedi, Iran International, Jun 23, 2025, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202506228904
S airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities are unlikely to cause serious radioactive fallout, nuclear experts told Iran International despite fears of a nuclear disaster.
Their assessments come as Iran threatens retaliation, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) holds an emergency meeting on Monday in response to the escalating crisis.
“For most facilities the impact of direct strikes will, to a large extent, most likely be very localized,” said Dr. Kathryn Higley, distinguished professor of nuclear science and engineering at Oregon State University and president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements told Iran International.
“While enriched uranium is radioactive, it is not terribly so. If the uranium is present and released as hexafluoride, that could also pose a serious but still localized hazard due to the fluorine in the compound being reactive,” she said.
Dr. David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, told Iran International that concerns over radiation from a strike on Fordow are overblown when compared with past incidents.
“One way to understand the low radiological risk of bombing Fordow is from a comparison to the underground Natanz enrichment site with over 15,000 centrifuges and many tons of uranium,” he said.
“It was attacked with earth penetrators and there is no off-site radiation risk. Fordow has about 2,700 centrifuges and much less uranium, and is more deeply buried underground. Hard to expect worse than Natanz.”
Albright emphasized that the design and location of Iran’s underground enrichment sites inherently limit the spread of radioactive.
Temporary contamination risks are primarily limited to areas near uranium conversion and enrichment plants, according to Andrea Stricker, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
“Response teams going near the destroyed facilities, for example, would need to wear protective gear temporarily due to risks of inhaling or ingesting aerially dispersed uranium chemical compounds,” said Stricker. “There is not concern for dispersal beyond the immediate plants.”
The US strike on the heavily fortified Fordow facility has likely trapped radioactive material underground, limiting any broader hazard, Stricker said.
Iran’s response: ‘no signs of contamination’
Their comments follow US President Donald Trump’s announcement on Sunday that American forces had struck Iran’s Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz nuclear sites, which he described as “completely and fully obliterated.”
While Iran confirmed the strikes, it insisted its nuclear program would continue undeterred.
Iran’s National Nuclear Safety System reported that radiation detectors at the affected facilities showed “no signs of contamination” and stated, “There is no danger to the residents living around the aforementioned sites,” according to Iran State media.
The IAEA said it had observed “no increase in off-site radiation levels” and would continue monitoring the situation.
Director General Rafael Grossi announced an emergency meeting of the agency’s 35-member board of governors. In response, Iran’s nuclear chief Mohammad Eslami called for an investigation and accused Grossi of “inaction and complicity.”
Isfahan and Natanz—both previously targeted by Israeli airstrikes—have not shown any evidence of radiation release, according to IAEA monitoring.
Experts say Bushehr not likely to be targeted
Bushehr, Iran’s only operational nuclear power reactor, is not expected to be targeted.
“Israel will not have the Bushehr nuclear power plant on its target list, as striking the reactor would cause a radiological disaster in the region,” Stricker said.
Bushehr is used for civilian energy production, not enrichment. The plutonium it generates is not suitable for nuclear weapons, and spent fuel is required to be returned to Russia.
Still, the plant contains significant quantities of nuclear material, and Grossi has warned that an attack on Bushehr could have the most serious radiological consequences of any site in Iran.
Tehran continues to maintain that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but Trump and Israeli officials argue Iran is moving dangerously close to weapons capability.
“There will either be peace,” Trump said during a national address following the strikes, “or there will be tragedy for Iran.”
Why BBC editors must one day stand trial for colluding in Israel’s genocide
20 June 2025, https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-06-20/bbc-editors-trial-israel-genocide/
In a confrontation with BBC news chief Richard Burgess, journalist Peter Oborne sets out six ways the state broadcaster has wilfully misled audiences on Israel’s destruction of Gaza
Veteran journalist Peter Oborne eviscerated the BBC this week over its shameful reporting of Gaza – and unusually, he managed to do so face-to-face with the BBC’s executive news editor, Richard Burgess, during a parliamentary meeting.
Oborne’s remarks relate to a new and damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. The report found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices.” These aren’t editorial slip-ups. They reveal a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour.
Oborne was one of several journalists to confront Burgess. His comments, filmed by someone at the meeting, can be watched below [on original]
Oborne makes a series of important points that illustrate why the BBC’s slanted, Israel-friendly news agenda amounts to genocide denial, and means executives like Burgess are directly complicit in Israeli war crimes:
1. The BBC has never mentioned the Hannibal directive, invoked by Israel on 7 October 2023, that green-lit the murder of Israeli soldiers and civilians, often by Apache helicopter fire, to prevent them being taken captive by Hamas. The Israeli media has extensively reported on the role of the Hannibal directive in the Israeli military’s response on 7 October, but that coverage has been completely ignored by the BBC and most UK media outlets.
Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive – essential context for understanding what happened on 7 October – explains much of the destruction that day in Israel usually attributed to Hamas “barbarism”, such as the graveyard of burnt-out, crumpled cars and the charred, crumbling remains of houses in communities near Gaza.
Hamas, with its light weapons, did not have the ability to inflict this kind of damage on Israel, and we know from Israeli witnesses, video footage and admissions from Israeli military officers that Israel was responsible for at least a share of the carnage that day. How much we will apparently never know because Israel is not willing to investigate itself, and media like the BBC are not doing any investigations themselves, or putting any pressure on Israel to do so.
2. The BBC has never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, the basis of its “mowing the lawn” approach to Gaza over the past two decades, in which the Israeli military has intermittently destroyed large swaths of the tiny enclave. The official aim has been to push the population, in the words of Israeli generals, back to the “Stone Age”. The assumption is that, forced into survival mode, Palestinians will not have the energy or will to resist their brutal and illegal subjugation by Israel and that it will be easier for Israel to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland.
Because Israel has been implementing this military doctrine – a form of collective punishment and therefore indisputably a war crime – for at least 20 years, it is critically important in any analysis of the events that led up to 7 October, or of the genocidal campaign of destruction Israel launched subsequently.
The BBC’s refusal even to acknowledge the doctrine’s existence leaves audiences gravely misinformed about Israel’s historical abuses of Gaza, and deprived of context to interpret the campaign of destruction by Israel over the past 20 months.
3. The BBC has utterly failed to report the many dozens of genocidal statements from Israeli officials since 7 October – again vital context for audiences to understand Israel’s goals in Gaza.
Perhaps most egregiously, the BBC has not reported Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblically-inspired comparison of the Palestinians to “Amalek” – a people the Jews were instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth. Netanyahu knew this clearly genocidal statement would have especial resonance with what now amounts to a majority of the combat soldiers in Gaza who belong to extreme religious communities that view the Bible as the literal truth.
The hardest thing to prove in genocide is intent. And yet the reason Israel’s violence in Gaza is so clearly genocidal is that every senior official from the prime minister down has repeatedly told us that genocide is their intent. The decision not to inform audiences of these public statements is not journalism. It is pro-Israel disinformation and genocide denial.
4. By contrast, as Oborne notes, on more than 100 occasions when guests have tried to refer to what is happening in Gaza as a genocide, BBC staff have immediately shut them down on air. As other investigations have shown, the BBC has strictly enforced a policy not only of banning the use of the term “genocide” by its own journalists in reference to Gaza but of depriving others – from Palestinians to western medical volunteers and international law experts – of the right to use the term as well. Again, this is pure genocide denial.
5. Oborne also points to the fact that the BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza. A greater number have been killed by Israel in its war on the tiny enclave than the total number of journalists killed in all other major conflicts of the past 160 years combined.
The BBC has reported just 6 per cent of the more than 225 journalists killed by Israel in Gaza, compared to 62 per cent of the far smaller number of journalists killed in Ukraine. This is once again vital context for understanding that Israel’s goals are genocidal. It hopes to exterminate the main witnesses to its crimes.
6. Oborne adds a point of his own. He notes that the distinguished Israeli historian Avi Shlaim lives in the UK and teaches at Oxford University. Unlike the Israeli spokespeople familiar to BBC audiences, who are paid to muddy the waters and deny Israel’s genocide, Shlaim is both knowledgeable about the history of Israeli colonisation of Palestine and truly independent. He is in a position to dispassionately provide the context BBC audiences need to make judgments about what is going on and who is responsible for it.
And yet extraordinarily, Shlaim has never been invited on by the BBC. He is only too ready to do interviews. He has done them for Al Jazeera, for example. But he isn’t invited on because, it seems, he is “the wrong sort of Jew”. His research has led him to a series of highly critical conclusions about Israel’s historical and current treatment of the Palestinians. He calls what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. He is one of the prominent Israelis we are never allowed to hear from, because they are likely to make more credible and mainstream a narrative the BBC wishes to present as fringe, loopy and antisemitic. Again, what the BBC is doing – paid for by British taxpayers – isn’t journalism. It is propaganda for a foreign state.
Watch the video above [on original] to see how Burgess responds. His answer is a long-winded shrugging of the shoulders, a BBC executive’s way of acting clueless – an equivalent of Manuel, the dim-witted Spanish waiter in the classic comedy show Fawlty Towers, saying: “I know nothing.”
Other lowlights from Burgess include his responding to a pointed question from Declassified journalist Hamza Yusuf on why the BBC has not given attention to British spy planes operating over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus. “I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel,” Burgess answers.
So the British state broadcaster has decided that its duty is not to investigate the nature of British state assistance to Israel in Gaza, even though most experts agree what Israel is doing there amounts to genocide. Burgess thinks scrutiny of British state complicity would be “overplaying” British collusion, even though the BBC has not actually investigated the extent or nature of that collusion to have reached a conclusion. This is the very antithesis of what journalism is there to do: monitor the centres of power, not exonerate such power-centres before they have even been scrutinised.
Labour MP Andy McDonald responded to Burgess: “To underplay the role of the UK is an error.”
It is more than that. It is journalistic complicity in British and Israeli state war crimes.
Here are a few key statistical findings from the Centre for Media Monitoring’s report on BBC coverage of Gaza over the year following 7 October 2023:
- The BBC ran more than 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians.
- The BBC interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians.
- The BBC asked 38 of its guests to condemn Hamas. It asked no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools.
- Only 0.5% of BBC articles mentioned Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.The BBC mentioned “occupation” – the essential context for understanding the relationship between Israel and Palestinians – only 14 times in news articles when providing context to the events of 7 October 2023. That amounted to 0.3% of articles. Additional context – decades of Israeli apartheid rule and Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza — were entirely missing from the coverage.
- The BBC described Israeli captives as “hostages”, while Palestinian detainees, including children held without charge, were called “prisoners”. During one major hostage exchange in which 90 Palestinians were swapped for three Israelis, 70% of BBC articles focused on those three Israelis.
- The BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza in the time period, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russia ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims than it was for Palestinian victims.
- In coverage, Palestinians were usually described as having “died” or been “killed” in air strikes, without mention of who launched those strikes. Israeli victims, on the other hand, were “massacred”, “slaughtered” and “butchered” – and the author of the violence was named, even though, as we have seen, the Hannibal directive clouded the picture in at least some of those cases.
As is only too evident watching Burgess respond, he is not there to learn from the state broadcaster’s glaring mistakes – because systematic BBC pro-Israel bias isn’t a mistake. It’s precisely what the BBC is there to do.
UK to purchase US jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons
Britain will join Nato’s airborne atomic mission in a significant overhaul of the
country’s defence strategy. The UK is to purchase 12 US-made F-35 stealth
fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons, in a sweeping overhaul of
the country’s defence strategy. Under the plans, Britain will join
Nato’s airborne nuclear mission, and the F-35A jets are expected to carry
American atomic bombs, as the military alliance contends with the growing
threat of Russia.
FT 24th June 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/1b779329-18c5-4984-a308-58a2afd12746
The Growing Nuclear Arsenals and Sharpened Rhetoric
By Alice Slater* https://indepthnews.net/the-growing-nuclear-arsenals-and-sharpened-rhetoric/
NEW YORK | 20 June 2025 (IDN) — The recent report from the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), despite its assertion that “understanding the conditions for peaceful solutions to international conflicts is a key part of their work”, has just issued alarming news that there is a “clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric and the abandonment of arms controls agreements!
The report then goes on to count the many ways that nuclear arsenals are expanding and new and more lethal technology is being developed in a growing number of nuclear weapons states and nuclear wannabe weapons states, bemoaning the “abandonment of arms control agreements”.
But it is precisely because these arms “controllers” never advocate for nuclear elimination, abolition, or disarmament and fail to promote the many missed opportunities to achieve an end to the bomb while repeatedly proposing step-by-step measures for an infinite number of various controls on arsenals, that we never get to see the end to nuclear weapons.
Indeed, scholars writing of the repeated proposals for insufficient steps have nowhere coined a term for these meaningless measures—antipreneurism—the action was taken for only illusory progress in finally banning the bomb.
Since SIPRI correctly notes that it is the US and Russia who have 90% of the total 2025 global inventory of some 12,241 warheads on the planet, it is really up to those countries to make the first move.
The US has rejected many opportunities over the years, starting from the very beginning of the nuclear age when Stalin proposed to Truman that the US put its new and terrifying nuclear weapons under the control of the newly formed United Nations, devoted to “ending the scourge of war” with its first resolution calling for nuclear disarmament. Truman refused, and Russia got the bomb!
The US walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, which it had negotiated with the USSR and put new missile bases in Romania and Poland.
Russia and China repeatedly urge the US to move forward on nuclear abolition; they need to preserve their “strategic security”, which would require the US to enter into treaties to ban weapons in space and cyber war. The US refuses to support those treaties and has vetoed negotiating proposals for draft treaties tabled by Russia and China in the consensus-bound UN Committee on Disarmament in Geneva.
When Gorbachev dissolved the Warsaw Pact and freed all of occupied Eastern Europe, he proposed to Reagan that the countries could eliminate their nuclear arsenals provided the US would end its Star Wars program to dominate and control the military use of space.
The US refused, and Gorbachev withdrew his offer. He was also very concerned that a united Germany would be a member of NATO since the USSR lost 27 million people to the Nazi onslaught.
The US assured Gorbachev and Yeltsin that we would not expand NATO one inch to the east. Still, Clinton began the expansion with the annexation of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; Albania, Croatia, Montenegro. and North Macedonia between 2009 and 2917, and most recently, Sweden and Finland during the Ukraine War.
The US keeps nuclear weapons in five NATO states: Turkey, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Belgium. Russia recently placed its nuclear weapons in Belarus during the Ukraine War. Indeed, some kind of deal should be urged to remove the US weapons in Europe in return for Russia taking its newly placed nuclear weapons out of Belarus.
Despite SIPRI’s assertion that its mission includes “understanding the conditions for peaceful solutions to international conflicts is a key part of their work”, history shows that there have been many possible solutions to genuine nuclear disarmament and abolition, repeatedly rejected by the US in the awful grip of what has now been described as the MICIMATT—the Military, Industrial, Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academic Think Tank complex!
Perhaps a more thorough and emphatic discussion and understanding of all the possible solutions over the years by SIPRI would enable more progress than the meaningless steps to “arms control” that are constantly being promoted and have brought us to this burgeoning new arms race today!
*Alice Slater serves on the Board of World BEYOND War and is a UN Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image: In this handout photo released by Roscosmos Space Agency Press Service on April 20, 2022, a Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is launched from Plesetsk in Russia’s northwest. (Roscosmos Space Agency Press Service via AP, File)
Did the US wipe out Iran’s nuclear programme? What researchers know
Nuclear-policy specialist David Albright told Nature how his organization is monitoring for damage to nuclear sites following US and Israeli strikes.
By , Davide Castelvecchi, Nature, 23 June 25
On 22 June, many people woke to the news that the United States had bombed nuclear sites in Iran, with the goal of destroying its ability to produce nuclear weapons. The raids targeted Iran’s uranium-enrichment facilities in Fordow and Natanz, and its nuclear research centre in Esfahan, using stealth bombers — which dropped massive ‘bunker-busters’ — and cruise missiles.
Although Iran says its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, experts have long assessed that Iran was close to having the capability of building nuclear weapons, if it chose to do so. The US attacks followed a bombing campaign by Israel, which has since carried out further attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. On 23 June, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that “very significant damage is expected to have occurred” at the underground Fordow site.
Researchers at academic institutions and think tanks are also assessing the potential impacts of the attacks on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Analysts have said that the attacks probably set the nuclear programme back substantially, but not permanently. In particular, Iran could have moved stockpiles of highly-enriched uranium, and perhaps some enrichment centrifuges, elsewhere. David Albright, a nuclear-policy specialist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington DC, spoke to Nature about what researchers know.
How do you assess the impact of the bombings on Iran’s nuclear capabilities?
There aren’t many researchers who are able to assess the impact of the bombings. We have decades of experience with the Iranian nuclear programme, so we know their facilities and activities very well. And we have great access to satellite imagery — which we have to buy. We try to buy some every day. And we utilize analysts who have decades of experience to analyze these images. We also have lots of contacts with governments, and we have colleagues who also have contacts with governments.
A lot of the damage is on the surface, so it’s a question of knowing what the building did [in terms of its role in the nuclear program]. We rely on our repository of information about the sites that are attacked. So it’s pretty straightforward.
Obviously, more problematic are the underground sites. When we initially assessed Israel’s bombing of Natanz, three days later I saw a very small crater above the underground hall. I could work out and link it to a type of Earth-penetrating weapon that Israel is known to have. It would leave a really small crater when it went in, and the damage would be underground. The United States bombed it with a much more powerful Earth penetrator, so the damage is probably more extensive.
How and when will the extent of the damage be known for sure?
As nuclear experts, we’d like to see this done with diplomatic agreements, where Iran would allow intrusive inspections into its programme. If that does not happen, then it’s the job of US and Israeli intelligence to assess the damage. They’re looking at communications intercepts, or trying to recruit people on the inside to reveal information.
Would radioactive material be detected outside Natanz, Esfahan and Fordow if the attacks were successful?
So far, the IAEA reports no such leaks. And it appears that Iran had moved the enriched uranium stockpiles in the days before the bombings. The United States has said that the target of its bombings was the facilities, so they understand they are not getting at the nuclear material………………………….… (Subscribers only)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01992-2
William Hague: Long term, this makes an Iran bomb likelier.
We do not know how much of the regime’s nuclear material and knowledge survives and how quickly it can be put to use. In the long term, the efforts to prevent Iran
possessing nuclear weapons are more likely to have been weakened than
strengthened.
This is the key judgment. It is why we did the deal with Iran
a decade ago and why it should have been renegotiated now. It is why Trump
was pursuing a diplomatic strategy until diverted from it. We do not know
what has happened to the 400kg of uranium that Iran has enriched. But we
should not be surprised if future Iranian leaders will have drawn the
lesson from recent events that the case for a nuclear bomb has now been
demonstrated beyond all doubt.
Times 23rd June 2025,
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/long-term-this-makes-an-iran-bomb-likelier-wrnvnx90w
War on Iran Is Fight for US Unipolar Control of World
The plan to use Netanyahu as America’s counterpart to Ukraine’s Zelensky, demanding U.S. intervention with his willingness to fight to the last Israeli, much as the U.S./NATO are fighting to the last Ukrainian, is a tactic that is quite obviously at the expense of strategy.
June 24, 2025 , By Michael Hudson / Geopolitical Economy Report, https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/06/22/michael-hudson-war-iran-us-unipolar-control/
Economist Michael Hudson explains how the war on Iran seeks to stop countries from breaking away from U.S. unipolar control and dollar hegemony, and to disrupt Eurasian integration with China and Russia.
Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that Iran does not pose any visible threat to the United States.
This appeal to reason misses the neoconservative logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea.
That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations, and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.
What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank, and other institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.
The 1970s saw much discussion about creating a New International Economic Order (NIEO). U.S. strategists saw this as a threat, and since my book Super Imperialism ironically was used as something like a textbook by the government, I was invited to comment on how I thought countries would break away from U.S. control.
I was working at the Hudson Institute with Herman Kahn, and in 1974 or 1975, he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks, and Turkic Azeris were others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.
Three decades later, in 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan, culminating in Iran.
The U.S. fight for unipolar control of the world
Most of today’s discussion of the geopolitical dynamics of how the international economy is changing is understandably (and rightly) focusing on the attempt by BRICS and other countries to escape from U.S. control by de-dollarizing their trade and investment.
But the most active dynamic presently reshaping the international economy has been the attempts of Donald Trump’s whirlwind presidency since January to lock other countries into a U.S.-centered economy, by agreeing not to focus their trade and investment on China and other states seeking autonomy from U.S. control. (Trade with Russia is already heavily sanctioned.)
As will be described below, the war in Iran likewise has as an aim blocking trade with China and Russia and countering moves away from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order.
Trump, hoping in his own self-defeating way to rebuild U.S. industry, expected that countries would respond to his threat to create tariff chaos by reaching an agreement with America not to trade with China, and indeed to accept U.S. trade and financial sanctions against it, Russia, Iran, and other countries deemed to be a threat to the unipolar U.S. global order.
Maintaining that order is the U.S. objective in its current fight with Iran, as well as its fights with Russia and China – and Cuba, Venezuela, and other countries seeking to restructure their economic policies to recover their independence.
From the view of U.S. strategists, the rise of China poses an existential danger to U.S. unipolar control, both as a result of China’s industrial and trade dominance outstripping the U.S. economy and threatening its markets and the dollarized global financial system, and by China’s industrial socialism providing a model that other countries might seek to emulate and/or join with to recover the national sovereignty that has been eroded in recent decades.
U.S. administrations and a host of U.S. cold warriors have framed the issue as being between “democracy” (defined as countries supporting U.S. policy as client regimes and oligarchies) and “autocracy” (countries seeking national self-reliance and protection from foreign trade and financial dependency).
This framing of the international economy views not only China but any other country seeking national autonomy as an existential threat to U.S. unipolar domination. That attitude explains the U.S./NATO attack on Russia that has resulted in the Ukraine war of attrition, and most recently the U.S./Israeli war against Iran that is threatening to engulf the whole world in U.S.-backed war.
The motivation for the attack on Iran has nothing to do with any attempt by Iran to protect its national sovereignty by developing an atom bomb. The basic problem is that the United States has taken the initiative in trying to preempt Iran and other countries from breaking away from dollar hegemony and U.S. unipolar control.
Here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government and bringing about a regime change – not necessarily a secular democratic regime change, but perhaps an extension of the ISIS/Al-Qaida Wahhabi terrorists who have taken over Syria.
With Iran broken up and its component parts turned into a set of client oligarchies, U.S. diplomacy can control all Middle Eastern oil. And control of oil has been a cornerstone of U.S. international economic power for a century, thanks to U.S. oil companies operating internationally (not only as domestic U.S. producers of oil and gas) and remitting economic rents extracted from overseas to make a major contribution to the U.S. balance of payments.
Control of Middle Eastern oil also enables the dollar diplomacy that has seen Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries invest their oil revenues into the U.S. economy by accumulating vast holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and private-sector investments.
The United States holds OPEC countries hostage through these investments in the U.S. economy (and in other Western economies), which can be expropriated much as the United States grabbed $300 billion of Russia’s monetary savings in the West in 2022. This largely explains why these countries are afraid to act in support of the Palestinians or Iranians in today’s conflict.
But Iran is not only the capstone to full control of the Near East and its oil and dollar holdings. Iran is a key link for China’s Belt and Road Initiative for a New Silk Road of railway transport to the West.
If the United States can overthrow the Iranian government, this interrupts the long transportation corridor that China already has constructed and hopes to extend further west.
Iran also is a key to blocking Russian trade and development via the Caspian Sea and access to the south, bypassing the Suez Canal. And under U.S. control, an Iranian client regime could threaten Russia from its southern flank.
To the neocons, all this makes Iran a central pivot on which the U.S. national interest is based – if you define that national interest as creating a coercive empire of client states observing dollar hegemony by adhering to the dollarized international financial system.
I think that Trump’s warning to Tehran’s citizens to evacuate their city is just an attempt to stir up domestic panic as a prelude to a U.S. attempt to mobilize ethnic opposition as a means to break up Iran into component parts. It is similar to the U.S. hopes to break up Russia and China into regional ethnicities.
That is the U.S. strategic hope for a new international order that remains under its command.
The irony, of course, is that U.S. attempts to hold onto its fading economic empire continue to be self-defeating.
The objective is to control other nations by threatening economic chaos. But it is this U.S. threat of chaos that is driving other nations to seek alternatives elsewhere. And an objective is not a strategy.
The plan to use Netanyahu as America’s counterpart to Ukraine’s Zelensky, demanding U.S. intervention with his willingness to fight to the last Israeli, much as the U.S./NATO are fighting to the last Ukrainian, is a tactic that is quite obviously at the expense of strategy.
It is a warning to the entire world to find an escape hatch.
Like the U.S. trade and financial sanctions intended to keep other countries dependent on U.S. markets and a dollarized international financial system, the attempt to impose a military empire from Central Europe to the Middle East is politically self-destructive.
It is making the split that already is occurring between the U.S.-centered neoliberal order and the Global Majority irreversible on moral grounds, as well as on the grounds of simple self-preservation and economic self-interest.
Trump’s Republican budget plan and its vast increase in military spending
The ease with which Iranian missiles have been able to penetrate Israel’s much-vaunted Iron Dome defense shows the folly of Trump’s pressure for an enormous trillion-dollar subsidy to the U.S. military-industrial complex for a similar Golden Dome boondoggle here in the United States.
So far, the Iranians have used only their oldest and least effective missiles. The aim is to deplete Israel’s anti-missile defenses so that in a few weeks it will be unable to block a serious Iranian attack.
Iran already demonstrated its ability to evade Israel’s air defenses a few months ago, just as during Trump’s previous presidency it showed how easily it could hit U.S. military bases.
The U.S. military budget actually is much larger than is reported in the proposed bill before Congress to approve Trump’s trillion-dollar subsidy.
Congress funds its military-industrial complex (MIC) in two ways: The obvious way is by arms purchases paid for by Congress directly. Less acknowledged is MIC spending routed via U.S. foreign military aid to its allies – Ukraine, Israel, Europe, South Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries – to buy U.S. arms.
This explains why the military burden is what normally accounts for the entire U.S. budget deficit and hence the rise in government debt (much of it self-financed via the Federal Reserve since 2008, to be sure).
The need for alternative international organizations
Unsurprisingly, the international community has been unable to prevent the U.S./Israeli war against Iran.
The United Nations Security Council is blocked by the United States’ veto, and that of Britain and France, from taking measures against acts of aggression by the United States and its allies.
The United Nations is now seen to have become toothless and irrelevant as a world organization able to enforce international law. (Its situation is much as Stalin remarked regarding Vatican opposition, “How many troops does the Pope have?”)
Just as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are instruments of U.S. foreign policy and control, so too are many other international organizations which are dominated by the United States and its allies, including (relevantly for today’s crisis in West Asia) the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that Iran has accused of having provided Israel targeting information for its attack on Iranian nuclear scientists and sites.
Breaking free of the U.S. unipolar order requires a full spectrum set of alternative international organizations independent of the United States, NATO, and other client allies.
Trump’s attack on Iran
The sound and fury of Trump’s missile attack on Iran’s most famous nuclear sites on June 21 turned out not to be the capstone of America’s conquest of the Middle East. But it did more than signify nothing.
Trump must have listened to the military’s warnings that all game plans for conflict with Iran at this time showed the United States losing badly.
His Trumpian solution was to brag on his social media account that he had won a great victory in stopping Iran’s march toward making an atom bomb.
Iran for its part evidently was glad to cooperate with the public relations charade. The U.S. missiles seem to have landed on mutually agreed-upon sites that Iran had vacated for just such a diplomatic stand-down.
Trump always announces any act as a great victory, and in a way it was, over the hopes and goading of his most ardent neoconservative advisors. The United States has deferred its hopes for conquest at this time.
The fight is now to be limited to Iran and Israel. And Israel already has offered to stop hostilities if Iran does. Iran gave hope for an armistice once it has exacted due retaliation for Israeli assassinations and terrorist acts against civilians.
Israel is the big loser, and its ability to serve as America’s proxy has been crippled. The devastation from Iranian rockets has left a reported one-third of Tel Aviv and much of Haifa in ruins.
Israel has lost not only its key military and national security structures, but will lose much of its skilled population as it emigrates, taking its industry with it.
By intervening on Israel’s side by supporting its genocide, the United States has turned most of the UN’s Global Majority against it.
Washignton’s ill-thought backing of the reckless Netanyahu has catalyzed the drive by other countries to speed their way out of the U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military orbit.
So America’s Oil War against Iran can now be added to the long list of wars that the United States has lost since the Korean and Vietnam wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of its adventures leading up to its imminent loss in Ukraine. Its victories have been against Grenada and German industry – its own imperial “backyard,” so to speak.
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