President Donald Trump said that the “new” President of Iran had accepted a ceasefire with the US. Tehran quickly denied Trump’s statement.
“Iran’s New Regime President, much less Radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors, has just asked the United States of America for a CEASEFIRE!” the President posted on his Trump Social account on Wednesday. “We will consider when Hormuz Strait is open, free, and clear. Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!”
The post is confusing as Iran does not have a new president, and Tehran says there are no ongoing talks with the US. Masoud Pezeshkian has served as President of Iran since his election in 2024.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry said Trump’s claim that Tehran agreed to a ceasefire is false. Additionally, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a statement explaining that Iran would continue to use its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and was seeking new domains to expand the war.
Throughout the month-long conflict, Trump and other top US officials have repeatedly claimed that Tehran was attempting to broker an end to the conflict. Iranian officials have rebuked those statements and said that Tehran is uninterested in a truce or negotiations with Washington.
While the White House and Pentagon have told the American people that Iran’s military capabilities have been significantly degraded, Iranian forces continue to fire missiles and drones at US bases, Israel, and other US allies in the region.
According to data compiled by Anadolu, Iran has fired missiles and drones at a consistent rate since the war was started by a US and Israeli surprise attack on February 28. On Wednesday, Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst said that Tel Aviv was experiencing a constant bombardment from Iranian missiles.
The US is deploying a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East for operations against Iran, US officials told media outlets on Tuesday, a sign that the war will continue to escalate despite President Trump’s claims that he is looking to end the conflict.
The aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush and other warships that are part of its strike group departed Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia on Tuesday and are expected to arrive in the Middle East in a few weeks. The US Navy said the strike group’s departure is part of a regularly scheduled deployment.
USS George H.W. Bush departs Naval Station Norfolk on March 31, 2026 (US Navy photo)
According to The Wall Street Journal, once the Bush arrives in the region, the US could have three carriers deployed for the Iran war for the foreseeable future, though Al Arabiya reported that the warship could replace one of the two carriers that have been involved in the conflict: the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been operating in the Arabian Sea, or the USS Gerald Ford, which is currently in Croatia after being in Crete for reparis.
The Ford, which was operating in the Eastern Mediterranean near Israel, went to port after a major fire on the ship destroyed the beds of 100 crewmembers. The US military has insisted that the blaze was caused by a fire in the ship’s laundry room, though there are suspicions that an attack or sabotage was the real cause. The Ford has also been on an extended deployment and is set to break the record for the longest deployment since the Vietnam War.
In addition to sending a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East, the US has deployed thousands of Marines and US Army Airborne troops to the region as the Pentagon prepares for potential ground operations. Trump is insisting the war could be over in a few weeks, but escalating to a ground war would likely lead to a much longer conflict.
A former Palestine Action-linked prisoner has been arrested under the Terrorism Act by masked police in a dawn raid on her home, weeks after she was released on bail.
Footage circulated online appeared to show 21-year-old Qesser Zuhrah, who had recently been granted bail after spending 15 months on remand, being arrested at her home by police officers at around 6:30am on Monday morning.
In the footage, a masked officer informs her that she is being arrested under Section 44 of the Serious Crimes Act, the offence of encouraging others to commit crimes, and Section 1 of the Terrorism Act, encouraging others to commit an act of terrorism.
In the video footage, officers inform her that she is being taken to Hatfield police station.
Zuhrah can be heard asking why the police officers are masked.
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Counter Terrorism Policing told Middle East Eye: “Officers from Counter Terrorism Policing South East arrested a woman at her home address in Watford this morning.”
It said it was looking into why the arresting officers were wearing masks.
Zuhrah was already facing charges in connection with a raid on Israeli-owned arms factory in August 2024. She is part of a group of two dozen activists arrested over the incident known as the Filton 24.
Free the Filton 24, a campaign group supporting the defendants, reported that the arrest came after she allegedly posted an Instagram story calling for people to take “direct action”.
Met Police accused of reversing Palestine Action policy to fit previous arrests
Palestine Action, a direct-action group protesting against Israeli war crimes, was proscribed by the British government in July 2025, months after Zuhrah’s first arrest. The government is appealing a Hugh Court ruling that the ban was unlawful.
Zuhrah was one of eight Palestine Action-linked prisoners who launched a 73-day hunger strike over their detention conditions. Zuhrah went 46 days without food and was hospitalised multiple times.
Last week, she spoke at a news conference with three other hunger strikers, alleging mistreatment in prison.
Zuhrah, who was also held HMP Bronzefield, said she was left immobile on her cell floor for 22 hours with worsening chest pains, 40 days into her hunger strike.
She also reported that throughout her imprisonment, she was subjected to prolonged periods of solitary confinement and segregated from other prisoners.
Zuhrah was released in February along with 22 co-defendants after charges of aggravated burglary in connection with the break-in at the Elbit Systems plant were dropped
For decades, the United States moved from covert assassination plots to openly embracing assassination or “targeted killing” as policy. Now, in its war with Iran, that evolution is reaching its most dangerous phase.
On March 17th and 18th, the United States and Israel assassinated three senior Iranian government officials in targeted air strikes: Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council; Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Basij domestic security forces; and Esmaeil Khatib, Iran’s Intelligence Minister.
The missile that killed Ali Larijani also demolished an apartment building and killed more than a hundred people. Israeli defense minister Israel Katz announced that Israeli forces were now authorized to assassinate any senior Iranian official whenever they can, and they have continued to do so, bringing the number of Iranian officials assassinated in the past year to at least seventy.
The assassination of Ali Larijani is a blow to the already fraught chances for a negotiated peace between Iran and the United States and Israel. Ali Larijani was an experienced, pragmatic senior official who had played leading roles in negotiations with the US and other world powers since 2005.
Larijani had degrees in math and computer science, attended the revered seminary in Qom, and fought in the Iran-Iraq War, rising to the rank of brigadier-general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. After the war, he managed Iran’s state broadcasting service, earned a doctorate in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran, and wrote three books on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, before entering politics and government in 2005. In 2024, Larijani wrote a book on political philosophy, titled Reason and Tranquility in Governance.
If the U.S. hoped to make peace and restore relations with Iran, Ali Larijani would have been a potential negotiating partner. The decision to assassinate Larijani two weeks into this war suggests that US leaders had no interest in negotiations.
Another possibility is even more chilling. Israeli leaders may have viewed Larijani as a potential off-ramp and deliberately eliminated him to ensure the war continues.
That killing was followed by an unprecedented Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field – the largest in the world and a shared resource with Qatar. Iran retaliated with missile strikes on energy infrastructure across Israel and the Gulf. In Qatar, damage to the Ras Laffan LNG terminal – one of the world’s most critical gas hubs – could take years and billions of dollars to repair.
As global energy markets reeled, U.S. officials confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the South Pars attack had been coordinated with Washington, contradicting denials from President Trump.
The pattern is unmistakable. As one analyst put it, Israel appears to be escalating deliberately – eliminating moderates within Iran while striking critical infrastructure – to provoke a wider regional war that leaves no room for de-escalation.
Analysts debate how much Israel is driving this escalation and how much U.S. officials are fully aligned. But an imperial power cannot outsource responsibility. As Harry Truman’s famous desk sign declared: The buck stops here.
In its alliance with Israel, the United States has normalized the systematic assassination of foreign leaders – from Palestine, and Lebanon, to Syria, Yemen and now Iran. This is not new. In 2020, President Trump ordered the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that had joined with US forces to fight the Islamic State.
Yet assassination is explicitly prohibited under U.S. law. Executive Order 12333 states clearly: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
That prohibition emerged from the Church Committee’s investigation into U.S. assassination plots against Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and General René Schneider in Chile.
It also reflects long-standing international law, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions.
After 9/11, however, the United States systematically ignored or circumvented many of the constraints of U.S. and international law. As U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq led to widespread armed resistance, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began arguing for what he called “manhunts,” to deploy US special operations forces to hunt down suspected resistance leaders and kill them, as Israeli undercover units already did in occupied Palestine.
General Charles Holland, the head of US Special Operations Command, refused to authorize such operations, but his retirement in October 2003 allowed Rumsfeld to appoint more like-minded officials to senior positions and bring in the Israelis to train American death squads in Israel and North Carolina.
“Dead men tell no tales,” as the saying goes, and there has been almost no accountability for the resulting killings, which systematically killed thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two senior US commanders told the Washington Post that only about 50% of “kill or capture” raids by Joint Special Operations Command targeted the “right” or intended people or homes, while troops involved in these raids said that that assessment greatly overstated their rate of success.
Drone warfare accelerated the trend. Under President Obama, strikes expanded tenfold, turning targeted killing into a central pillar of U.S. policy. By 2011, night raids in Afghanistan numbered in the hundreds each month, alienating the Afghan people and ultimately ensuring the defeat of the US occupation and the return of the Taliban.
Now US and Israeli forces are using air and drone strikes to assassinate Iranian leaders and kill civilians in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. The language of restraint has disappeared, replaced by open celebration of “lethality” and threats of further war crimes.
What was once covert, controversial, and constrained is now overt, normalized, and defended.
The cumulative effect is stark: the United States has made assassination and extrajudicial killing routine instruments of policy, as it tramples the UN Charter, the Hague and Geneva Conventions and its own laws – undermining the very international legal order it claims to uphold.
Meanwhile, a multipolar world is emerging, driven largely by nations of the Global South. But the transition to a peaceful, sustainable world is far from certain. The greatest obstacle in its way is the continued reliance of the United States on the illegal threat and use of military force and economic coercion to try to maintain its own dominance.
Iran exercised restraint for decades in the face of false accusations regarding nuclear weapons, “maximum pressure” economic sanctions and escalating threats and attacks by the US and Israel. It quietly built up its defenses and military strategies for the day that it would need them, and that day has come.
The failure of the international community to stop successive U.S. wars of aggression poses an existential threat to the UN Charter and the post–World War II order. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned at the CELAC Summit on March 21: “The more serious humanity’s problems become, the fewer tools we have for collective action. And that path leads only to barbarism.”
The United States now faces a stark choice: to continue down this path of lawless violence, or to turn the page on our nation’s life of international crime and finally, genuinely embrace diplomacy and peaceful coexistence with our neighbors, as the UN Charter requires.
For Americans – and for the world – that choice is becoming a matter of survival.
The U.S. president said a military official told him it was “more fun” to kill rather than capture more than 100 Iranian sailors in the Indian Ocean who had just finished a training session. U.S. forces made no rescue effort.
U.S. Department of War photo of IRIS Dena being sunk by a torpedo in the Indian Ocean on March 4, 2026. (DoW/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
President Donald Trumpsaid the U.S. Navy chose to sink an Iranian frigate, killing more than 100 sailors last week, because it was “more fun” than capturing the vessel, even though the ship posed no threat.
Though death tolls vary, Iran’s state media organization, the Islamic Republic News Organization, reported on Sunday that 104 crew members were killed in the attack and that 32 others were injured when a U.S. submarine torpedoed the Iranian warship IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on March 4 as it departed from the Milan Peace 2026 naval drills hosted in India.
The Dena was more than 2,000 miles away from the Persian Gulf when it was attacked, far from the hostilities unleashed on Feb. 28 when the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran. Contradicting U.S. claims, Iranian and Indian officials have said it was not armed.
In what political commentator Adam Schwarz described as “the most blasé admission of a war crime by a U.S. president in history,” Trump on Monday casually recounted the U.S. Navy’s decision to attack the ship before a gathering of Republicans at a Congressional Institute event, a GOP-aligned nonprofit retreat organizer.
He suggested that the Navy blew the boat up not to neutralize a threat, but purely for its own sake.
After making the exaggerated boast that Iran’s navy is “gone” following aggressive U.S. bombing, Trump said at first he “got a little upset” with the military brass who ordered the sinking of the Dena, which he said they described as a “top-of-the-line” vessel.
Trump said he asked: “Why don’t we just capture the ship? We could have used it. Why did we sink them?”
He said that an unspecified official told him, “It’s more fun to sink them.”
As the crowd laughed, Trump went on, chuckling himself:
“They like sinking them better. They say it’s safer to sink them. I guess it’s probably true.”
Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Saeed Khatibzadeh, described the ship as operating in a purely “ceremonial” role and said it was “unloaded” and “unarmed” at the time of the attack last week.
Rahul Bedi, an independent defense analyst in India, told the Associated Press that while the ship may have used some limited non-offensive ammunition during naval exercises, drill protocol requires “the participating platforms to be unarmed.”
Dena during its commissioning in 2021. (MojNews /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has claimed the vessel was a “predator ship,” while the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has said claims that the ship was unarmed are “false.” However, it has provided no evidence that it posed a threat at the time of the attack.
The attack itself was likely legal under the rules of naval warfare, even if the ship was unarmed, though its ethical and tactical justification has been called into question.
“A military ship might be a lawful target,” Phyllis Bennis, the co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ New Internationalism Project told Common Dreams. “But firing on any ship — any people, anywhere — for ‘fun’ represents the kind of immoral depravity that this White House is infamous for.”
Bennis added that “failing to do everything possible to rescue those aboard is certainly a war crime,” as the Second Geneva Convention requires militaries to take all possible measures to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded, and sick.
The Dena’s 32 survivors, as well as dozens of dead bodies, had to be pulled from the water by a Sri Lankan joint rescue operation following a distress call. The survivors were quickly rushed to a local hospital in Galle City.
Hegseth has previously come under fire for reportedly ordering a second strike on shipwrecked sailors who survived the bombing of an alleged drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean.
Many have described that attack on Sept. 2 as an exceptionally blatant war crime in a broadly illegal campaign that has extrajudicially killed at least 156 people.
In carrying out its war against Iran, Hegseth has emphasized that the U.S. would not abide by what he called “stupid rules of engagement.”
Thousands of civilian targets, including schools, hospitals, and residential areas, have reportedly been attacked by U.S. and Israeli strikes, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.
As of Monday, Iranian Deputy Health Minister Ali Jafarian said at least 1,255 people have been killed, including 200 children and 11 healthcare workers.
Bennis said that even if attacking the ship itself was lawful in a vacuum, it took place before a backdrop of brazen “illegality.”
“This entire shocking episode represents a clear U.S. violation of what the Nuremberg trials identified as the ‘supreme international crime’: the crime of aggression,” she said. “The U.S. had no legal right to go to war against Iran. The [United Nations] Security Council had not authorized the use of force, and there was no ‘armed attack’ from Iran against the US that required immediate self-defense.
“Without either of those, the U.N. Charter is very clear that no country may attack another country,” she continued. “To do so, as the Nuremberg judges found, constitutes the crime of aggression — the ultimate crime.”
Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
Iran told Saudi Arabia it was not responsible for a drone attack on an Aramco facility, calling it ‘an Israeli effort to sabotage regional peace’
News Desk. The Cradle, MAR 5, 2026
In an interview broadcast on Asharq News on 3 March, Adhwan al-Ahmari, the editor-in-chief of Independent Arabia and the president of the Saudi Journalists Association, said that “not all attacks” targeting Persian Gulf nations come from Iran, and stressed fears that the US–Israeli alliance wants to “trap” Gulf nations into joining the war. “Some believe this war is an American-Israeli trap to implicate the Gulf countries and draw them into a confrontation with Iran,” Ahmari said. “This hypothesis, I think, increases every day.” “What if the US announces after a week, 10 days, or two weeks that it has achieved all its goals in this war and that the war is over and then leaves the Gulf states in an open confrontation?” he asked. In parallel, Middle East Eye (MEE) reported in an exclusive article that Iranian officials said Israel carried out several drone strikes on energy infrastructure in the Gulf. The official reportedly declined to specify which incidents were attributed to Israel, but said at least some of the drone strikes on Gulf infrastructure were not carried out by Iran. “I can categorically say that some of the attacks were not carried out by us [Iran],” the anonymous officials told MEE. Saudi Arabia has faced several drone and missile attacks in recent days, including strikes targeting Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura oil refinery, and the US Embassy in Riyadh. Two additional Iranian sources told MEE that Israel’s Mossad intelligence service may have launched some operations from within Iran, claiming authorities were searching for drone storage facilities allegedly used in the attacks. Iranian officials also said Tehran had informed Saudi Arabia it was not responsible for the strike on the Ras Tanura facility, describing the incident as “an Israeli effort to sabotage regional peace and alliances between neighbours.” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, meanwhile, told Gulf leaders that Tehran’s military actions were aimed at defending itself after US-Israeli attacks. “We respect your sovereignty,” he said, adding that regional security “must be achieved through the collective efforts of its states.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday said that the US launched a war against Iran because Israel was planning to attack, an admission that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu steered the US into the conflict.
“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States, Israel, or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States,” Rubio told reporters.
“If we stood and waited for that attack to come first, before we hit them, we would have suffered much higher casualties. And so the president made the very wise decision — we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces,” he said.
Secretary Marco Rubio visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem, September 14, 2025. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett)
Rubio’s comments align with reporting from The New York Times that said when Tucker Carlson recently met with President Trump and tried to convince him not to launch a war with Iran, the president said he had no choice but to join a strike that Israel would launch.
The Times report said that Netanyahu was determined to ensure that the negotiations between the US and Iran wouldn’t get in the way of planning for a joint US-Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic.
But Trump and his top officials tried to sell the war as being related to Iran’s nuclear program despite insisting that it was “obliterated” by the June 2025 US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Vice President JD Vance even claimed that there was evidence Iran may be trying to build a nuclear weapon.
Now that the war has started, the Trump administration is sending mixed messages about the goal. President Trump suggested in his first statement that he is pursuing regime change, and the initial round of US-Israeli attacks killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but Rubio said on Monday that the goal was aimed at eliminating the “threat” posed by Iran’s missiles.
“The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short-range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by their navy, particularly to naval assets. That is what it is focused on doing right now, and it’s doing quite successfully,” he said.
When asked for a timeline, Rubio said the war will last “as long as it takes” for the US to achieve its objectives.
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations (UN), Amir Saeid Iravani, speaks during an emergency Security Council meeting on the situation in Iran at the UN on February 28, 2026 in New York City. U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States and Israel had launched an attack on Iran Saturday morning.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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.
On February 16, 2026, one of us (Jeffrey Sachs) sent a letter 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The U.S. is on a fast track to authoritarianism like nothing I’ve ever seen. Meanwhile, corporate news outlets are utterly capitulating to Trump, twisting their coverage to avoid drawing his ire while lining up to stuff cash in his pockets.
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Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
A planning document from 2009 suggested the US or Israel launch a regime change war Iran while using the pretext of negotiations to deflect blame on to Tehran
The unprovoked US-Israeli war against Iran launched on 28 February had “been planned for months, and the launch date decided weeks ago,” even as the US and Iran carried out indirect nuclear negotiations, an Israeli defense official told Reuters.
Washington and Tel Aviv renewed negotiations in February over Iran’s nuclear program. President Trump was under pressure from Israel force Iran to give up uranium enrichment, as well as its ballistic missile program and support for regional resistance forces.
Amid the negotiations, Trump sent an “armada” of US naval ships and warplanes to the region, threatening to launch an attack if officials in Tehran refused to make a deal.
After the latest round of talks on Thursday, a senior US official toldAxios the talks were “positive.”
Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who mediated the talks, said the talks had shown “significant progress.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also expressed optimism, saying both sides had shown a “clear seriousness” about getting a deal.
However, the US and Israel launched large-scale attacks against Iranian targets early Saturday, suggesting the negotiations had never been serious.
In the wake of the attacks, Omani Foreign Minister Albusaidi said that the negotiations he mediated had been “deliberately undermined.”
Mehran Kamrava, director of the Iranian studies unit at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, stated that Israel “appears to have launched an attack designed to derail the negotiations.”
A planning document prepared years ago by the US think tank Brookings Institution provided a blueprint for regime change in Iran that outlined such a strategy.
“Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran,” written by analysts at the Brookings Institution in 2009, recommended that the US carry out negotiations ahead of a planned attack to give the false impression that the US had done everything possible to avoid war.
Iran could then be blamed for rejecting a “good deal,” thereby shifting blame onto the Islamic Republic for what would be an unpopular war both among the US public and internationally.
“The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down,” the document stated.
“Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians’ brought it on themselves’ by refusing a very good deal,” the document added.
After the start of the US and Israeli strikes, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) launched barrages of ballistic missiles and drones at targets in Israel and US bases in the region.
Damage to targets within Israel is difficult to assess due to media censorship imposed by the Israeli military.
However, sirens were heard across Israel as the military issued a “proactive alert to prepare the public for the possibility of missiles being launched toward the state of Israel.”
The military announced the closure of schools and workplaces, with exceptions for essential sectors.
The Israel Airports Authority announced its airspace had been closed to all civilian flights.
Amid the Iranian attacks, Israel’s energy sector shifted into emergency mode.
Israel’s energy ministry instructed Greek firm Energean to temporarily suspend production at its offshore Karish gas field.
The ministry also ordered the closure of the country’s largest gas field, Leviathan, as a precautionary measure.
Some units of the Haifa oil refinery were also shuttered.
A demonstrator holds a ‘Stop Trump’s Wars’ placard during a protest against the war with Iran in Parliament Square, as USA and Israel launch attacks on Iran.
(Photo by Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional war on Iran is not only a moral and humanitarian disaster, but also a profound constitutional crisis.
Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) condemns Donald Trump and the Trump Administration, as well as their enablers in Congress, the media, and elsewhere for launching and supporting a reckless, illegal, unprovoked, and unconstitutional war on Iran over the past 24 hours.
Last June, we issued a statement denouncing Trump’s bombing of Iran because it posed risks of “spiraling into a regional or even global conflict that could shatter fragile economies and displace millions.” Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran is now confirming our worst fears.
This war is already inflicting significant humanitarian suffering, causing chaotic economic disruption, and risking grave damage to the international order.
The War on Iran has also precipitated a constitutional crisis, attacking the foundational principles of our democratic republic by blatantly violating the separation of powers. It also violates the War Powers Resolution of 1973.
We the People must not fail to meet this crisis. This latest precedent of unchecked abuse of power imperils our democracy, potentially fatally.
The US Constitution vests in Congress the sole authority to declare war (Article I, Section 8). Members of both parties have already acknowledged that Trump’s war against Iran without prior authorization from Congress is unconstitutional.
Senator Jeff Merkley, (D-Oregon), a veteran member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations said this war “shreds our Constitution, which assigns decisions of war to Congress.”
Member of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) called the war “blatantly unconstitutional.” Rep. Khanna co‑authored a bipartisan War Powers Resolution that would restrain Trump from launching such illegal, immoral, and reckless military operations.
Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) described Trump’s attacks as “acts of war unauthorized by Congress.” He is also leading the effort for the War Powers Resolution.
Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sponsored a similar Resolution. Sadly, Republican congressional leaders continue to block Rep. Khanna’s and his colleagues’ efforts to enact a War Powers Resolution in the House.
This unconstitutional, illegal war continues an alarming pattern of the Trump regime’s contempt for the Constitution, Congress, U.S. law, and international norms, as well as basic ethics and morality. Trump has previously ordered illegal attacks against Iran and Venezuela without lawful authorization.
The Trump administration has routinely trampled basic human and civil rights through violent, even deadly operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeting US citizens and lawful residents. We cannot tolerate fascistic policies including fatal shootings, abusive raids, indefinite detentions, and family separations.
Trump, his Department of Justice, and other appointees have escalated their contempt for Congress and the constitutional separation of powers by publicly attacking members of Congress during hearings, by stonewalling and ignoring subpoenas, and by defying oversight powers, and by implementing illegal orders and lawless policies.
Trump’s illegal war on Iran and the rule of law establish an intolerable pattern of egregious abuses of power, directly threatening our constitutional order, our safety, and our way of life. These intertwined crises cry out for an immediate, decisive response by the Congress and the US public.
Therefore, PDA demands that all members of Congress, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, uphold their oath of office to defend our constitutional republic. The Constitution offers one and only one remedy when President a repeatedly breaks the law and arrogantly refuses to abide by the limits on the power clearly laid out in the Constitution. That remedy is impeachment, followed by removal from office.
To effectuate that, PDA calls upon its hundred of thousands of supporters across the country—as well as every American who wants to preserve our constitutional democratic republic—to contact their Senators and Representatives by phone, email, social media, and in‑person visits to demand two things: 1. An immediate end to the War on Iran, and 2. The initiation of impeachment proceedings against Trump and all complicit Trump Administration officials.
Furthermore, we urge organizations and individuals across the country to launch protests and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience to demand an end to the war. These could include boycotts, or a refusal to purchase any non‑essential goods and services, or some form of intentional non-participation, or any other lawful means until all US military operations against Iran cease and Congress initiates efforts to remove all lawless Trump officials from power.
Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional war on Iran is not only a moral and humanitarian disaster, but also a profound constitutional crisis. The Congress and the American people must oppose, rebuke, and punish Trump and all those complicit in the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on our liberty, our Constitution, and the rule of law. We the People must not fail to meet this crisis. This latest precedent of unchecked abuse of power imperils our democracy, potentially fatally. We can and must overcome these clear and present threats to our lives, liberty, and way of life.
(Photo credit: Carlos Barria – Pool/Getty Images)
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