weapons and war « nuclear-news

President Trump Says He May Have ‘Forced Israel’s Hand’ Into Iran War

The narrative that Israel was ready to act alone has holes in it, considering Israel has relied on US air defenses to intercept Iranian missiles in previous conflicts, and POLITICO reported a few days before the war started that Trump officials thought it might be better for the “politics” if Israel attacked on its own at first, provoking Iranian attacks on US assets to justify US intervention.

The president made the comments in response to a question about Rubio saying the US launched the war because Israel planned to attack

by Dave DeCamp AntiWAr, March 3, 2026 0

Adding to the mixed messaging coming from the Trump administration regarding the war with Iran, President Trump suggested on Tuesday that he may have “forced Israel’s hand” when the conflict started.

The president was responding to a question about Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said on Monday that one reason why the US launched the war on Saturday was that Israel was planning to attack and that the US assessed Iran could respond with attacks. on US bases.

Senior Trump officials said the same thing during classified briefings with members of Congress on Monday, which was confirmed by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other lawmakers. “Because Israel was determined to act with or without the US, our commander in chief and the administration and the officials [in the Cabinet] had a very difficult decision to make. They had to evaluate the threats to the US, to our troops, to our installations, to our assets in the region in beyond,” Johnson said.

The narrative that Israel was ready to act alone has holes in it, considering Israel has relied on US air defenses to intercept Iranian missiles in previous conflicts, and POLITICO reported a few days before the war started that Trump officials thought it might be better for the “politics” if Israel attacked on its own at first, provoking Iranian attacks on US assets to justify US intervention…………………………………… https://news.antiwar.com/2026/03/03/president-trump-says-he-may-have-forced-israels-hand-into-iran-war/

March 7, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

France officially enters Nuclear Arms Race

4 March 2026

In what can only be called a worst case scenario, the burgeoning nuclear arms race has officially broken its bounds and will now include the world’s fourth largest nuclear superpower, France. (Counting only nuclear weapons actively deployed, France ranks third, behind the US and Russia, as less than 5% of China’s nuclear stockpile is actually deployed.)

Without offering precise numbers, French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday that France would increase its nuclear stockpile, currently estimated to include 290 nuclear warheads.

Macron also announced plans to build a second nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that would, like the currently deployed Charles de Gaulle, be capable of launching nuclear armed Rafale fighter jets.

In addition, Macron announced that some nuclear-capable Rafale jets might be temporarily deployed to allied European countries, naming Britain, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, and Denmark. This move expands France’s “nuclear umbrella” and places intermediate range missiles closer to Russia; it also positions France to replace US nuclear-armed aircraft currently deployed in three of those countries (Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands) in the case of US withdrawal from NATO.

France, like the US, Russia, China, and Great Britain, is a signatory to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. That Treaty requires nuclear-armed states to pursue “in good faith” a cessation of the arms race and complete nuclear disarmament “at an early date.” Since the signing of that Treaty more than fifty years ago, the US and Russia have intermittently engaged in negotiations leading to reductions in stockpile size, but both have also maintained nuclear arsenals with more than 3,500 warheads and show no signs of attempting a full disarmament campaign.

That reality, along with the consistent refusal of the nuclear powers to provide required reports to the United Nations about efforts to comply with NPT obligations, led non-nuclear nations to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017. The TPNW entered into force in January 2021 and now has the support of a majority of global states.

The United States government has been dismissive of the TPNW, denouncing it when it was being negotiated in 2017 and ignoring it since then. The government’s attempt to pretend the Treaty does not exist has been abetted by US mainstream media that resolutely refuses to mention the TPNW even in articles exploring the current status of the nuclear threat that include hand-wringing about the failure of arms control efforts.

That same mainstream media has, in recent months, begun to speak of the new global nuclear arms race—something OREPA has been warning about for more than a decade. Fifteen years ago, we pointed out that US investment in “modernization” of its nuclear capabilities, including building new bomb plants like the Uranium Processing Factility in Oak Ridge, was pushing the world toward a new nuclear arms race.

Unfortunately, our prescience has since been validated. Today, as mainstream media used words like “verge” and “brink” to talk about the nuclear arms race, some media with deeper knowledge describe the situation more accurately. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, for instance, has stated that we are in a full-blown global nuclear arms race.

Until Macron’s announcement, that global nuclear arms race was considered to be between the US, Russia, and China. But as the illusion of the old “rules-based” world order collapses, nuclear weapons are once again being deployed as viable threats and, potentially, the beginning of the end for planet Earth.

Macron’s Monday speech did follow one long-standing rule of the nuclear establishment—never mention the human cost of nuclear weapons. Any conversation that includes the damage done to human beings, men, women, children, families, by nuclear weapons production, testing, use, and threat of use; or that mentions the trillions of dollars being spend on these weapons of mass destruction while hundreds of millions of people go hungry and lack health care and shelter; or that accounts for massive environmental damage at mines, processing, production, and testing sites around the world; or that warns of the effects of nuclear winter in the event of a nuclear exchange—would undermine if not erase arguments that nuclear weapons have a role in providing security in any rational, human sense.

As victims of nuclear weapons, the hibakusha, survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, winners of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, courageously share their witness, telling the story of the worst day of their lives, the unimaginable horror of the devastation, death, and destruction wrought by bombs that, by today’s standards, are tiny. Their conclusion is the only one that makes sense—nuclear weapons must never be used again, and the only way to guarantee that is to abolish them altogether.

There exists today a path to nuclear disarmament, and it is not the path laid out by Emmanual Macron. It is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the only hope we have of avoiding a nuclear holocaust. As then-director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Beatrice Fihn, said in accepting the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize: “There are only two possible outcomes to the story of nuclear weapons. Either we do away with them, or they will do away with us.”

March 7, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | France, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Iran says Natanz nuclear site hit in US-Israeli strikes

Iran’s sprawling nuclear facility at Natanz was struck during U.S. and Israeli military operations against the Islamic Republic, Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

Again they attacked Iran’s peaceful, safeguarded nuclear facilities yesterday,” Reza Najafi told reporters at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation board of governors. Asked by Reuters which facilities were hit, he replied: “Natanz.”

Reuters 2nd March 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iran-says-natanz-nuclear-site-hit-us-israeli-strikes-2026-03-02/

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Beyond Nuclear condemns attack on Iran

February 28, 2026,
https://beyondnuclear.org/beyond-nuclear-condemns-attack-on-iran/

Beyond Nuclear strongly condemns the attacks against Iran by two nuclear-armed countries, the United States and Israel, when a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program was already within reach.

“These renewed attacks on Iran come at a time when negotiations were already underway to secure a new nuclear verification agreement with Iran,” said Linda Pentz Gunter, the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear. “This illegal attack by the US and Israel is dangerous and provocative and risks leading to a wider war, potentially involving the use of nuclear weapons. Such an outcome would be catastrophic not only for the region but for the world.”

Iran is a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that allows for the development of a civil but not military nuclear program and has consistently denied it has any plans to develop nuclear weapons.

Prior to the attacks by the US and Israel against Iran’s nuclear facilities last June (pictured), the International Atomic Energy had said there was no evidence to suggest Iran was making nuclear weapons.

The premise for the attacks appears to be President Trump’s personal dissatisfaction with current negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. But in 2018, President Trump destroyed a perfectly workable nuclear agreement with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that subjected Iran to verification and inspections to be sure it did not develop nuclear weapons.

Uranium enriched to 5% U-235 is considered for civil use. Above 90% is viewed as weapons grade. Currently, Iran is believed to be enriching uranium to 60% or possibly 80%, considered “weapons usable” but not suitable for the production of nuclear missiles.

“Instead of continuing with the diplomatic efforts already underway to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Iran, the Trump administration has chosen the reckless and unnecessary path of military aggression, a decision that will cost countless innocent lives and billions of US tax dollars,” Pentz Gunter said.

Although also a signatory to the NPT, the US has failed to abide by Article VI of the treaty, which calls for nuclear armed nations to reduce and eventually eliminate their arsenals. The US is instead “modernizing” its nuclear weapons — code for expansion and enhancement — at a cost of $946 billion over the next ten years.

Israel has refused to admit that it has nuclear weapons, but is estimated to possess at least 80 warheads and potentially as many as 200.

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

Macron plans to deploy nuclear weapons to Britain

French president announces dramatic increase in arsenal and says allies could host its aircraft.

Henry Samuel in Paris. James Crisp, 02 March 2026

French nuclear-armed jets could be stationed in Britain and other allied European countries after Emmanuel Macron unveiled a dramatic expansion of France’s deterrence doctrine…

The French president also used the symbolic
setting of Île Longue, the country’s Atlantic nuclear fortress in
Brittany, to announce the first increase in its nuclear warhead stockpile
since the 1990s.

Telegraph 2nd March 2026,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/02/macron-plan-nuclear-weapons-britain/

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | France, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

France to increase its number of nuclear warheads, Macron says – as it happened

French president says deterrent needs to be ‘strengthened’ in recognition of new challenges

Jakub Krupa, 3 Mar 26,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/02/eu-response-middle-east-conflict-evacuate-citizens-europe-live-latest-news

French president Emmanuel Macron has said France would increase the number of nuclear warheads and allow for temporary deployment of its nuclear-armed aircraft to allied countries for exercises as part of its new nuclear strategy seeking to “Europeanise” its deterrence programme (15:29, 15:50).
In a major speech at the nuclear submarines Navy base of Île Longue, Macron said Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom are expected to be involved in the programme, with London and Berlin playing particularly important roles (15:47, 16:00).
Several EU leaders confirmed their plans to engage with France on the details of the programme (16:44, 16:51, 17:04).
The president repeated his warnings that Europe needed to urgently step up its defence posture to respond to new, emerging threats and disintegration of rules on the use of nuclear weapons

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | France, weapons and war | Leave a comment

NewsReal: Historic Miscalculation? US & Israel ‘Decapitate Iranian Regime’, Yet Iran is Striking Back HARD

Sott.net. Mon, 02 Mar 2026 , https://www.sott.net/article/504928-NewsReal-Historic-Miscalculation-US-Israel-Decapitate-Iranian-Regime-Yet-Iran-is-Striking-Back-HARD

And so it begins. This time it isn’t ‘kayfabe’ and ‘negotiated strikes and counter-strikes’. The ‘peace president’, when announcing joint US-Israeli strikes against Iran on 28 February, said it would just take a few days, and gloated that he ‘took out the regime’ by targeting top Iranian leadership, including Ayatollah Khamenei. But Iran’s swift and massive response – bombing 11 countries housing US and Israeli military bases and installations, including a British base in Cyprus, EU territory – now has Trump saying the war will ‘last for weeks’…

What did they think was going to happen, that Iranians would ‘rise up and take power from their oppressors’? The Americans appear to have truly believed their own propaganda. In reality, Iranians are defiantly rallying in support of their country, and government, while Muslims across the region are preparing to potentially join the fray and do as Iran has always sought: remove all American military forces from the Persian Gulf, if not the Middle East as a whole.

It’s too early for predicting such an end-game, but in the meantime, it appears that, in the absence of Iranian popular support for US and Israeli ‘regime intervention’, the strategy could switch to attacking the people of Iran and the country’s infrastructure, ‘punishment’ for not ‘capitulating’.

March 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

This Illegal US-Israeli Attack on Iran Is Also an Assault on the United Nations

As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host US military bases and CIA operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.

The international order that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to build after the catastrophe of WWII was founded on a simple and profound idea – that law and respect, not force, should govern relations among states. That idea is now being destroyed by the very nation that did most to promote it in founding the UN. The irony is bitter beyond measure.

Jeffrey D. Sachs Sybil Fares, Mar 02, 2026, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/united-nations-israel-us-attack-iran

On February 16, 2026, one of us (Jeffrey Sachs) sent a lett er to the UN Security Council warning that the United States was on the verge of tearing up the United Nations Charter. That warning has now come to pass. The United States and Israel have launched an unprovoked war against Iran in flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, without authorization from the Security Council, and without any legitimate claim of self-defense under Article 51. They are trying to kill the UN Charter and the international rule of law, but they will fail.

At the Security Council on February 28, 2026, the US and its allies directed their condemnation not at the American and Israeli aggression, but at Iran. One US ally after the next condemned Iran for its retaliatory attacks yet absurdly failed to condemn the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran. This performance by these countries was disgraceful and turned reality completely upside down.

The truth is that the devastation of the war will not directly affect the so-called West: their children will not suffer traumas or death, and their countries will not be set ablaze. The victims of this attack are the people of the Middle East. They are the expendable ones who suffer from Western arrogance, abuse of power, and addiction to war.

We close with two observations. First, the United States will not achieve global hegemony or kill the UN. The world is too large, too diverse, and too determined to resist domination by any single power, much less one with 4 percent of the world’s population. The world outside of the US and the countries it occupies want the UN to live and thrive. The US attempt will surely fail, but it may cause immense suffering before it does.

Second, if Israel continues its addiction to war and occupation, it too will not survive. That addiction represents a mix of theocracy and post-traumatic stress. Part of Israel believes that it is the biblical kingdom of the 5th century BC. The other part lives in the traumatic memory of the Holocaust, and so is determined to kill any perceived adversary rather than learn to live together with it in peace. The Israeli Ambassador’s twisted defense of Israel’s brazen attack on Iran, as usual, cited the Bible and Auschwitz as the two justifications. These are Israel’s two perennial references, but not the real world of today.

The joint US-Israeli attacks were described by Trump as necessary because Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.” This is of course a flat lie. As the letter of February 16 recounted, Iran agreed a decade ago to a nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was adopted by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. It was Trump who ripped up the agreement in 2018. In June 2025, Israel bombed Iran in the midst of US-Iran negotiations. This time too, the Israel-US war plans were set weeks ago when Netanyahu met with Trump, and the negotiations underway between the US and Iran were a charade. This seems to be the new modus operandi of the US: start negotiations and then aim to murder the counterparts.

It is easy to understand why the US allies behave in the embarrassing and self-abasing way they did at the UN Security Council. In addition to the United States, eight of the other fourteen Council members host US military bases or grant the US military access to local bases: Bahrain, Colombia, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Panama, and the United Kingdom. These countries are not fully sovereign. They are partially governed by the US. The US military bases house CIA operations, and the host countries constantly look over their shoulder to try to avoid US subversion in their own countries.

As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host US military bases and CIA operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.

As an absurd but telling example, the Danish ambassador parroted every US talking point, pointing her finger at Iran for its aggression as if Iran had not been attacked by the US and Israel. She completely forgot that such humiliating vassalage to the US will not play well for Denmark if the US occupies Greenland.

The truthful voices at the Security Council came from the countries not occupied by the United States. Russia explained correctly that the so-called West (that is, the countries occupied by the US) is engaged in victim-blaming when it points its finger at Iran. China reminded the Council that the crisis began with the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, not with Iran’s retaliation. Somalia’s ambassador, speaking on behalf of several African member states, truthfully portrayed the source of this recent escalation. The UN Representative of the League of Arab States spoke brilliantly about the root cause of Israel’s mad aggression: the denial of rights to Palestinian people, and Israel’s use of mass murder and regional war to prevent the emergence of a State of Palestine.

When Iran retaliates against US military bases in the Gulf, it is exercising its inherent right of self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter. We must remember that the US and Israel are openly and repeatedly assassinating Iran’s leaders, with the aim of overthrowing its government. When states murder a foreign head of state and attempt to destroy the government, the target of those threats is entitled under international law to defend itself.

The US-Israeli bombing murdered not only Iran’s Supreme Leader and several top government officials, but also more than 140 young girls in their school in Minab. These young children are the victims of a horrific war crime. The countries today that gave a pass to the United States and Israel for these killings—notably Denmark, France, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and of course the US —are also complicit in this war crime.

This UN Security Council emergency meeting will likely be remembered as the day the United Nations ceased to function from its headquarters on American soil. An international organization dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes cannot credibly operate from a country that wages illegal wars, threatens member states with annihilation, and treats UN Security Council resolutions as disposable instruments of convenience. For the UN to survive, and we need it to survive, it will need several homes around the world—in Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and others—honoring the true multipolarity of our world.

Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN and the international rule of law—an attempt that will fail. Israel’s objective is to establish a Greater Israel, destroy the Palestinian people, and assert its hegemony over hundreds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East (from the Nile to the Euphrates, as US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently asserted).

The United States’ delusional efforts at global hegemony are proceeding region by region. The US has recently claimed, in a wholly twisted supposed revival of the Monroe Doctrine, that it controls the Western Hemisphere and can dictate how Latin American countries conduct their economic and political affairs. The US kidnapped the sitting Venezuelan president to prove the point, and it now threatens to overthrow the Cuban government as well.

Today’s war against Iran aims to prove that the US similarly owns the Middle East. The war is part of a 30-year campaign, initiated by the Clean Break doctrine, to overthrow all governments that oppose US and Israeli hegemony in the region. Those joint Israel-US wars have included the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the decades of wars and regime-change operations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

One part of the US global plan is to commandeer the world’s oil exports and to weaken China and Russia in the process. The US seizure of Venezuela was designed to ensure American control of that country’s oil exports, especially to control the flow of oil to China. US sanctions on Russia aim to prevent Russian oil from reaching India and China. Now the US aims to stop the flow of Iran’s oil to China. More broadly, the US aims to control the entire Gulf region plus Iran to maintain its imperial dominance.

A state that depends on permanent war, permanent occupation and slaughter of the Palestinians, and the indefinite subjugation of millions of people has no viable future, and the policies that the United States is now pursuing on Israel’s behalf will accelerate rather than prevent that outcome.

The two-state solution, which the Council has endorsed repeatedly, offers Israel a path to peace. Tragically Israel rejects that. The result, eventually, will be the end of Israel itself in its current form, especially as the US population is rapidly turning against Israel’s violent theocracy and towards the cause of Palestine. Perhaps there will be one democratic state for both Arabs and Jews living in peace, together, with an end of apartheid rule.

These are harsh truths, but emergencies demand honesty. The UN is being murdered by Israel and the United States. The Security Council must rouse itself from their military occupation by the US, and remember that they are the stewards of the UN Charter’s promise to maintain international peace and security.

March 5, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, Israel, politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US-Israeli War on Iran is NOT About Nuclear Weapons- It’s About Imperialism

March 1, 2026 By Ben Norton for Geopolitical Economy Report, https://scheerpost.com/2026/03/01/us-israeli-war-on-iran-is-not-about-nuclear-weapons-its-about-imperialism/

The United States and Israel are waging a war of aggression against Iran. This is not about nuclear weapons; it’s about imperialism.

Trump published a video on social media early on the morning of February 28, announcing, “The United States military began major combat operations in Iran”.

As the US and Israel brutally bombed Tehran, Donald Trump admitted that they want regime change.

Trump ordered members of Iran’s military to “lay down your weapons”, or “face certain death”.

The US president then called on Iranian opposition supporters to “take over your government”, claiming, “It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations”.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the war would overthrow the government in Tehran, to “cast off the yoke of tyranny and bring freedom and peace-loving values to Iran”. (Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces an ongoing arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, due to the genocidal crimes against humanity he committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza, with steadfast US support.)

Iran immediately retaliated, launching strikes in self-defense against multiple US military bases in Qatar, Bahran, Kuwait, and the UAE. The Pentagon’s largest base in the region, Al-Udeid in Qatar, was hit.

The absurd narrative that Washington and Tel Aviv are promoting is that they had to carry out “preemptive” attacks (which are illegal under international law), because Tehran supposedly seeks nuclear weapons.

This is nonsense. Iran signed the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in 2015, in which it agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons in return for the US and European countries lifting their illegal unilateral sanctions.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) admitted that Iran was abiding by the nuclear deal. Nevertheless, Trump unilaterally tore it up in 2018, during his first term as US president, in flagrant violation of international law (given that the JCPOA had been endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which even the US had voted for, under Obama).

Iran’s current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is ironically a reformist who sought to negotiate another deal with the same US aggressors who sabotaged the previous one just a few years before.

When Trump entered office for his second term, in 2025, he oversaw several rounds of bad-faith “negotiations” with Iran. Then, during those talks, the US and Israel suddenly bombed Iran in June 2025. The Wall Street Journal admitted: “In Twist, U.S. Diplomacy Served as Cover for Israeli Surprise Attack”.

The same thing happened in February 2026. The Trump administration participated in fake “negotiations” with Iran.

On February 27, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who moderated the talks, said they had made “substantial progress”, and a “peace deal is within our reach”.

Mere hours later, Trump and Netanyahu launched a massive bombing campaign in Iran.

The reality is that the US and Israel do not want peace.

The goal of this war of aggression is clear: Washington seeks to topple Iran’s independent government and finally overturn the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which removed one of the pillars of the US empire’s “twin pillars” strategy in West Asia.

The US empire, and more specifically the large US corporations that it represents, want to control the plentiful resources not only in Iran, but in the entire region, which is home to the world’s top producers of oil and natural gas, as well as critical minerals and other important commodities.

Washington also hopes to cut off China’s access to its top energy providers.

Wesley Clark, a former top US general and NATO commander, revealed more than two decades ago that, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, imperial strategists at the Pentagon made plans to overthrow the governments of seven countries in West Asia and North Africa.

On the US empire’s target list was Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

Washington succeeded in destabilizing governments in six of those seven. Iran is the last one standing.

With its war, the United States hopes to install in Tehran a puppet, like the son of the former shah, the murderous monarch who came to power following a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1953 against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.

A Fox News correspondent reported that the CIA-linked US state media outlet VOA Persian is broadcasting propaganda in Iran in support of the so-called “exiled crown prince”, Reza Pahlavi, who has spent much of his life living in the US, and whose dictatorial father terrorized Iran, with staunch US backing, until the 1979 revolution.

Top US officials have been secretly meeting with the so-called “exiled crown prince”, the former Israeli intelligence officer Barak Ravid reported in January. On Twitter, Reza Pahlavi heaped praise on Trump, claimed “the Islamic Republic is collapsing”, and called for the Iranian people to help put him in power.

US imperial strategists believe the Iranian government is weak at this moment, and they are going for the jugular.

In doing so, the billionaire supposed “populist” Trump is fulfilling the dreams of the most ardent neoconservative hawks — even as he calls himself a “peace president”.

March 5, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nuclear flashpoints to fallout

Devonport doesn’t just work on operational nuclear submarines, it is also a ‘graveyard’ for retired ones. Twelve out of the 16 decommissioned submarines at Devonport are still carrying their fuel – effectively a stockpile of nuclear waste.

New Internationalist 1st Jan 2026

Could the threat of nuclear war be closer than ever? Amy Hall explores how we got here and the pathways out of the crisis.

If you want to get a nuclear-powered submarine refitted, repaired or refuelled in Britain, there is only one place to go – Devonport dockyard in Plymouth, the biggest naval base in Western Europe.

Running across more than six kilometres of waterfront, the dockyard has been part of the landscape for generations. It dominates the western edge of the South West England city, encased by high fenced walls, security cameras and warning signs about police dogs and potential arrest for ‘unauthorized activity’.

The main refit and maintenance area is owned and operated by British defence company Babcock International, which in 2024 made $1,273 million in revenue from nuclear weapons work. In 2025, it celebrated a 51 per cent surge in profit.

But Plymouth itself has not seen the same boost. ‘Most of the money generated goes out of the city,’ says local campaigner Tony Staunton, who is also the vice chair of the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Authorities say that Devonport generates around 10 per cent of Plymouth’s income, but neighbourhoods next to the dockyard remain among the poorest five per cent in the country.

Over the last 30 years, at least 10 serious radioactive leaks have been documented at Devonport, and chemicals like plutonium, americium and tritium have been found on the Plymouth coastline, including at a wildlife reserve close to the dockyard. Staunton says he has met former dockworkers with cancer who are convinced that their illnesses date back to the time they worked at Devonport, but a ‘culture of secrecy’ about any negative impact of the docks pervades over this military city.

Local authorities have taken steps to prepare for a serious radiation leak at the dockyard, which is within a residential area. An investigation by Declassified UK found that in 2018 the Ministry of Defence distributed 60,900 iodine tablets to schools, emergency services and healthcare settings in local areas.

Nuclear-powered submarines are not only able to carry warheads; they are an essential part of the nuclear warfare infrastructure. And, as the British government jumps with both feet into the nuclear arms race, Devonport is key. The facility is set to receive £4.4 billion (just over $5 billion) in government investment over the next 10 years.

In 2024 the UK spent a larger percentage of its military budget (13 per cent) on nuclear weapons than any other country. The 2025 Strategic Defence Review described them as ‘the bedrock of the UK’s defence and the cornerstone of its commitment to NATO and global security’.

The race is on

As the world becomes more insecure, nuclear-armed states are reaffirming commitments to the most destructive weapons humans have developed. During the first six months of 2025, five nuclear-armed countries were engaged in military hostilities or outright war. And, after decades of decline, the trend of more retired nuclear warheads being dismantled than new ones being deployed looks set to be reversed.

Nearly all of the nine nuclear-armed states (US, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea) have been busy modernizing and growing their arsenal. Over the past five years global spending on nuclear weapons increased by just over 32 per cent, with the US and UK’s spending rising by 45 and 43 per cent respectively between 2019 and 2023. One year of global nuclear weapons spending could feed 45 million people in danger of famine for 13 years…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are considered ‘low-yield’ by modern standards. International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) estimates that casualties from a major nuclear war between the US and Russia would reach hundreds of millions. The use of less than one per cent of the world’s nuclear arsenal could disrupt the climate and threaten two billion people with starvation.

Escalations in global conflict continue despite the existence of nuclear weapons. ‘This concept of nuclear deterrence is really a faith belief system – that having nuclear weapons is necessary to make sure they’re not used,’ says Alicia Sanders-Zakre, policy and research coordinator at ICAN. ‘As long as this theory continues to hold value within the political establishment of nuclear armed states, it’s not possible to get rid of nuclear weapons.’……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Today, as the British government itself admits, ‘the future of strategic arms control … does not look promising’. But civil society has got behind the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which makes acquiring, proliferating, deploying, testing, transferring, using and threatening to use nukes illegal.

‘TPNW is really significant,’ explains Sanders-Zakre. A nuclear-armed state joining it must agree to a time-bound programme for eliminating its arsenal https://newint.org/arms/2026/nuclear-flashpoints-fallout

March 5, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Ghost in the Kill-Chain: The Invisible Cost of “Surgical” War

28 February 2026 David Tyler, https://theaimn.net/the-ghost-in-the-kill-chain-the-invisible-cost-of-surgical-war/

The Hidden Human Cost of Algorithmic Warfare

Fresh from their “snuff-movie” hit incinerating Venezuelan fishermen, Team Trump moves yet another carrier strike group into the Persian Gulf. Suddenly, our infotainment airwaves are full of experts spruiking “clean, surgical strikes,” while our media eagerly repeats the Pentagon’s propaganda. An old fat sea-cow, the USS Abraham Lincoln, and her tattooed bouncers are framed as instruments of precision and humane restraint, hovering just over the horizon of Iran’s ruggedly spectacular coast.

“Surgical strikes?” Pentagon experts now propose to kill and maim Iranians in an illegal blitzkrieg or perhaps three months of “boots on the ground” – the messages are as garbled as a Trump rally speech. But what is clearly being sold is the old lie that war is glorious, noble, and heroic. The US is supposedly ready to “send a message” without another Iraq-style quagmire because, this time, war will be data-driven, algorithmically optimised, and somehow morally minimised.

Modern warfare has never been more complex, nor more bloodthirsty. Today, to hold a principled anti-war stance is often derided as “un-Australian” or weaponised through accusations of anti-Semitism, all while a new cycle of state-sanctioned Islamophobia plays out under the guise of national security. We are witnessing the return of “One Nation” rhetoric: a toxic mix of division and rabid ignorance. From the White House, the lies arrive with such velocity that they overwhelm the public’s ability to process them. Above all, we are sold an antiseptic fantasy: that the next war will be a clean victory won by Artificial Intelligence, where autonomous drones and “algorithmic warfare” replace the messy reality of human slaughter.

We are rarely told who taught the machines to kill. And at what human cost.

The reality of 2026 is that the “intelligence” in AI remains deeply, painfully, and inexorably human. AI-enabled targeting, surveillance, and logistics systems require billions of data points to be labelled, sorted, and refined before a single model can be deployed. Every box drawn around a body in a blurry image, every classification of rubble, every tag of “weapon” versus “non-combatant” has been performed by a human being. Not by Silicon Valley engineers, but by a vast, hidden army of pieceworkers scattered across the Global South.

In refugee camps in East Africa, in cramped internet cafés in South Asia, and in crowded apartments in Latin America, workers are paid the equivalent of a few dollars an hour to sit at flickering screens and trace rectangles around human silhouettes. Behold the invisible pedagogues of the war machine, providing the labelled examples that allow military AI to distinguish “target” from “background,” “combatant” from “crowd.”

The irony is dark and palpable. Many of these workers live in regions already wrecked by Western interventions. Some fled earlier conflicts in Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan; others live under permanent austerity. Men and women now find themselves training systems that may one day patrol their own skies. It is a grim circularity: the global poor – the “wretched of the earth,” as Frantz Fanon termed them – are pressed into teaching the next generation of weapons how to see.

This is the new “Digital Taylorism.” Just as 20th-century manufacturers broke down manual labour into minute, repetitive tasks, 21st-century AI firms have fragmented intellectual labour into atomised micro-gestures. For those training military models, the work is often traumatic. Investigations into data-labelling hubs in Kenya, India, and Colombia document the harm: workers are forced to view thousands of hours of violent, graphic content—war footage, torture, and the aftermath of bombings—to “fine-tune” the algorithm’s recognition.

Unlike the soldiers who will eventually operate these systems, these digital labourers have no veteran status, no medals, and no guaranteed access to mental health care. When their performance drops due to the trauma, the solution is simple: deactivate their account and hire another worker from the endless queue.

Australia is not a bystander. Firms like Palantir and Anduril have successfully blurred the lines between civilian and military data. In February 2026, the Labor government quietly awarded Palantir a fresh $7.6 million contract for Defence’s Cyber Warfare Division. Meanwhile, Canberra has committed $1.7 billion to Anduril’s “Ghost Shark” program—autonomous undersea vehicles designed for strike operations.

When these systems are woven into civilian infrastructure, the war machine becomes an everyday reality. The same optimisation logic used to squeeze more deliveries out of a warehouse worker is repurposed to accelerate the “sensor-to-shooter” loop. In Australia, we saw a prototype of this in Robodebt: the weaponisation of data against the poorest, treating them as problems to be hunted by algorithms long before any human looks at the facts.

This is not a glitch. It is how capital has integrated AI into the security state. A data labeller in Nairobi might make less in a day than a single second of flight time for a carrier-based fighter jet. The system depends on the invisibility of the connection between the micro-task on a screen and the missile in the sky.

We must refuse the comforting illusion that the coming war will be “clean” because it is “smart.” If our automated future is built on a foundation of traumatised, underpaid labour, then it is not a technological triumph. It is a moral failure disguised as innovation. The cost of the next war will not only be counted in missiles fired and lives lost in Tehran or the Strait of Hormuz. It is already being paid, quietly, in the human dignity we have sacrificed to train the machines that will fight it.

Coda: The Sycophant’s Algorithm

And so, we find ourselves back in the familiar, fawning posture of the Australian security establishment – a collection of strategic wallflowers so desperate for an invitation to the dance that they have handed the keys to the kingdom to a band of Silicon Valley carpetbaggers. We are told that by tethering our national interest to the likes of Palantir and Anduril, we are buying “security.”

In reality, we are buying a front-row seat to our own irrelevance.

We have become the regional branch managers for a war machine we neither control nor understand. To watch a Labor government – the party that once spoke of “national sovereignty” – quietly outsource our military intelligence to foreign algorithms trained by the global dispossessed is more than a policy failure; it is a spiritual surrender. It is the triumph of the technocrat over the citizen, the dashboard over the diplomat. We are being marched into a conflict in the Middle East not by the force of reason, but by the relentless, unthinking click of a mouse in a Nairobi sweatshop. It is a spectacle of profound hollowness, orchestrated by people who wouldn’t know a national interest if it bit them on the leg in the middle of a Canberra cocktail party.

This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES

March 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Western Australia submarine’s base the only reason for AUKUS

Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines is not in fact the most important part of the AUKUS deal – they are a distraction … AUKUS’s main game is the base that Australia intends to give to the US at HMAS Stirling in Western Australia

Albert Palazzo , adjunct professor at UNSW Canberra., February 28, 2026, https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2026/02/28/wa-subs-base-the-only-reason-aukus?utm_campaign=SharedArticle&utm_source=share&utm_medium=link&utm_term=VFZ0rLaV&token=2PZRyQNr

It is tempting to label the AUKUS project an exercise in self-delusion and self-denial. The number of commentators who believe the project’s core promise will actually be honoured – the transfer of Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines from the United States to Australia – is astonishingly small and mainly limited to politicians and their hangers-on.

Even in the US, the likelihood of the transfer taking place is openly discounted, including by the chief of naval operations, Admiral Daryl Caudle. As if preparing for a let-down, a new report from the Congressional Research Service advances alternatives to the transfer of the promised submarines that will still allow the US to meet its strategic priorities.

In addition, it is hard to square the submarine promise with the reality that is Washington these days. US President Donald Trump’s willingness to pressure America’s allies and turn the US into a rogue superpower is well documented – just ask the Canadians and Danes. We have witnessed in real time his destruction of the global rules-based order as the US withdraws from dozens of international organisations and agreements.

That the US warship-building industry is in poor shape is also no secret. The odds of the nation being able to increase its submarine build rate to the required level for the transfer to go ahead without a loss of US operational capability is virtually nil, according to a December 2025 report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

One must accept that Australia’s politicians are reasonably intelligent, yet with the myriad well-known problems facing the nuclear-powered submarine transfer it is hard to understand how they can still insist that the project is “full steam ahead”. Nor is this insistence without cost to the taxpayer, as evidenced in the recent promise to spend $30 billion on South Australia’s Osborne shipyard to make it AUKUS ready. How can our politicians sustain their faith in AUKUS and not be rightly labelled as delusional?

The answer to this contradiction lies in recognising what AUKUS is really about – what the parties actually expect to gain from the agreement. Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines is not in fact the most important part of the AUKUS deal – they are a distraction. There are too many challenges to Australia’s acquisition, operation and maintenance of these boats for any rational person to believe they will arrive as promised. Hence AUKUS’s main game is the base that Australia intends to give to the US at HMAS Stirling in Western Australia.

This base may be on Australian soil but its primary beneficiary will be the US, just as it is the US that disproportionately gains from the seemingly “joint” military facilities at Pine Gap and North West Cape.

The forthcoming nuclear submarine base is part of a wider American preparation for a possible war between the US and China. From the base, American submarines will be able to operate against China’s southern flank and sever its lines of communication across the Indian Ocean. In addition, the base allows the US to complicate China’s security arrangements by allowing American forces to operate on multiple lines of attack – westwards across the Pacific Ocean and northwards from Australia.

For the US, the defence of Australia is a distant secondary goal for this base. Our politicians are not therefore being delusional; they are being actively deceptive to their voters, since they must know what it is that the US really wants.

Australia is making enormous improvements to Fleet Base West (Stirling). The base is being upgraded so it can sustain and maintain a fleet of foreign nuclear-powered submarines, principally the US Navy’s Virginia-class attack boats, Ohio-class nuclear-armed missile submarines and the occasional British submarine.

The Stirling upgrade is similar in intent to what is happening at RAAF Base Tindal in the Northern Territory, which is being improved to accept US heavy bombers, presumably including nuclear-armed ones.

As a second order effect, the US presence at Stirling will see a significant influx of American sailors, maintenance personnel and administrative staff to the area. So determined is our government to meet its AUKUS responsibilities and make the US submarine base a reality that it plans to build new homes for the 1200 mainly American military personnel and their families who will be calling Australia home.

In the midst of a national housing crisis, and in a region where home prices increased by 15 per cent in a single year, a similar urgent housing build for Australian citizens is apparently not on the cards.

If one examines AUKUS from the perspective of Australia’s longstanding security practice, what appears to be merely senseless starts to reveal a disturbing logic.

Since the end of World War II, Australian governments have gone to great lengths and expense to keep the US interested in our part of the world. Australia needs to get US attention because the south-west Pacific has never been – and still isn’t – an important part of the world in the eyes of our great power leader.

In order to keep our protector onside and interested in our fate, Australia has had to demonstrate repeated and enthusiastic support for American policy. The need to maintain relevance explains why Robert Menzies encouraged the US to fight in Vietnam, why Australia then invited itself to the war, and why this country went to such great lengths to be included in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as other military missions. Of course, getting into such conflicts was easy. Getting out again can be a lot harder. Any early withdrawal risks offending the US, so Australians have fought to the end.

Generating relevance also explains the readiness with which successive governments have accepted the establishment of US military bases on Australian soil. The most important of these are the spy and signals establishment at Pine Gap and the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt.

Just how vital these facilities are to America should not be minimised – they are critical for the conduct of US military and CIA operations, as well as the interception of communications by individuals ranging from actual terrorists to ordinary people, including Australians. The submarine base at Stirling will join Pine Gap and Naval Station Holt as a third facility of great operational importance.

AUKUS has a grim rationale when it is seen as the latest initiative in Australia’s longstanding tradition of seeking American attention. What is different in this case is that Australia’s leaders have increased the nation’s exposure to risk in any future war to a potentially existential level.

In the past, our participation in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan did not create any threat to Australia itself. Only those who served were placed in harm’s way. That is no longer the case.

China is a great power and, unlike Vietnam 60 years ago, has power projection capabilities that can hold Australian territory and population centres at real risk. The Australian government has placed a bullseye on Australia’s back and it isn’t clear if our leaders understand this.

Since the US bases are of great military importance, China would likely seek to destroy them in order to protect its own interests. Worse, China could safely employ nuclear weapons against Australia because the US would be unlikely to retaliate against such distant damage and risk the incineration of one of its own cities.

Without any commensurate benefit, the Australian government has embraced AUKUS and accepted the tremendous costs and risks it entails. It has done so with an appalling lack of honesty towards the Australian public, using the submarine promise like a set of shiny keys in front of a baby.

Our leaders must know that the US will not have submarines to spare when the time comes for the transfer. Instead, they employ deception to distract from the real game – a US submarine base and the unstated commitment of Australia to the American side in a war between great powers.

Of course, this need not be the outcome. Despite tradition and reluctance by our political leaders to embrace new ideas, policy can change. An independent defence policy that puts Australian sovereignty first is within reach, and the military technologies to enact it already exist.

The impediment is the Australian government’s inability to accept the reality of the present security situation. Instead, it opts for nostalgia. Australia needs a government that is willing to embrace the necessary changes in perspective and culture that will allow it to consider other security options.

Perhaps one day our politicians can rise to conceiving and implementing a different security policy, rather than falling back on the traditional default response of jumping up and down to get the attention of Washington. One can only hope.

March 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA, politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nuclear Weapons in Australia – Time to End the Secrecy

Australian missile defence system concept, 3D rendering

March 1, 2026, Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR) , https://warpowersreform.org.au/nuclear-weapons-in-australia-time-to-end-the-secrecy/

Under secretly-concluded arrangements with our allies, Australia is now on track to have US nuclear weapons on Australian soil for lengthy periods, starting very soon.

A new report released today details this dangerous development and exposes how the Australian community is being kept in the dark about it.

The report by civil society group Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR) examines efforts by the Albanese government to facilitate the increasing presence of nuclear weapons capable aircraft and submarines.

“Many Australians are completely unaware that under current agreements with the US Australian airfields and port facilities will be hosting US aircraft and subs that could be carrying nuclear weapons. And those visits will increase dramatically, possibly in breach of the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty,” said AWPR spokesperson Peter Murphy.

“A massive 1.6 billion dollars is currently being spent to upgrade the Tindal RAAF base in the Northern Territory and media reports describe six B-52, long-range, nuclear-capable bombers being “housed” there. But so far there’s been no proper public debate about Australia’s increasing involvement in the US nuclear weapons system.”

The Albanese government currently has a “we don’t ask” policy when it comes to whether US aircraft and ships are carrying nuclear weapons while in Australia. At the same time the US has a “neither confirm nor deny” policy on nuclear weapons. These policies are unwarranted and unacceptable.

“It’s time to end the secrecy on nuclear weapons and let the public have an informed debate. Do we really want these weapons of mass destruction in Australia? Shouldn’t the parliament discuss and vote on these matters?”

Australians have consistently rejected any role for nuclear weapons in our defence policies. A national poll last year revealed that two-thirds of Australians want the government to sign and ratify the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

“In this new report we are also urging the government to initiate a full independent inquiry into the AUKUS pact, as repeatedly called for by civil society and former prime ministers and foreign ministers. It should include a comprehensive review of Australia’s policies on nuclear weapons,” Peter Murphy said.

The full report “Australia and US Nuclear Weapons: Time to End the Secrecy” is available here

March 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)condemns strikes against Iran, calls for return to negotiations

IPPNW. 28 Feb 2026, https://peaceandhealthblog.com/2026/02/28/ippnw-condemns-strikes-against-iran-calls-for-return-to-negotiations/

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) unequivocally condemns the attack on Iran by the United States and Israel and calls on them to cease immediately all further use of force and to return to the negotiating table.

The unprovoked strikes, ostensibly to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, are incredibly dangerous and counterproductive. The conflict threatens the lives of large numbers of civilians in Iran and Israel. Attacking Iranian facilities could cause widespread devastation and significant releases of radioactivity. And the situation could escalate into a regional war and ultimately lead to the use of nuclear weapons — the very thing the world most needs to prevent.

For decades, the US and Israel have rejected multiple opportunities to seek a peaceful resolution to the legitimate concerns that Iran may be developing a nuclear weapons capability to counter Israel’s illegal clandestine possession of nuclear weapons. This has included refusal of multiple attempts by the United Nations and States Parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to negotiate a Middle East Nuclear Weapon Free Zone. During his first term, US President Trump summarily abandoned the Iran Nuclear Deal negotiated in 2015 that had successfully contained Iran’s nuclear program.

Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who had been mediating the current round of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran condemned the attacks saying, “Active and serious negotiations have, once again, been undermined. Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause or world peace are served.”

There is no military solution to the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation anywhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East. The need for regional and international efforts to negotiate a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East have never been more urgent. The only way to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons – and to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used again – is for all nations to join the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) that will eliminate all existing nuclear weapons and prevent all states from acquiring or reacquiring them in the future.

March 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Exiled Iranian Denounces War: ‘The People Will Suffer, Not Gain!’

by ScheerPost Staff, 28 Feb 26, https://scheerpost.com/2026/02/28/exiled-iranian-denounces-war-the-people-will-suffer-not-gain/

Behrouz Farahani, a political analyst and opponent of the Islamic Republic living in exile, condemned the US and Israeli military attack on Iran. Speaking to Middle East Eye about how Iranian opposition figures who also oppose the war are responding, he said:

“In this situation, we oppose both sides. This war is between an international imperialist power, the US, and its regional ally, Israel, on one side, and the reactionary regime of Iran on the other. We are against both sides and against this war.”

He added that opponents of the Islamic Republic who reject foreign intervention are mobilizing:

“We are calling for an immediate ceasefire and are organising anti‑war protests. This war will bring nothing but misery to the Iranian people. As we have seen before, its only result will be more pressure on ordinary people. This war will not help the Iranian people in their struggle against the Islamic Republic. Especially when one side is Israel and the other side is Trump.”

“When we have a president like Trump, who has openly said that his main concern is money, it is clear that this attack has nothing to do with improving life in Iran or helping its people,” Farahani said. “One of the main reasons for this war is that the Islamic Republic does not serve America’s economic interests in the region or globally.”

He stressed that this critique does not imply any support for Tehran:

“This does not mean that because the Islamic Republic is in conflict with American interests, it is a progressive or anti‑imperialist force. Not at all. Just as the Taliban in Afghanistan was a deeply reactionary force despite being in conflict with the United States, the Islamic Republic is also a reactionary force that has now been attacked by international imperialism and its regional ally.”

Farahani’s comments underscore what many critics argue is the real motive behind the escalation: a broad, opportunistic effort by the United States and Israel to secure regional dominance, energy access, and geopolitical leverage under the guise of confronting Iran.

March 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

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