The current war against Iran by the United States and Israel has been a huge disaster for the people of Iran as well as throughout the region. Thousands of people in Iran and the Gulf States have been killed. Donald Trump has declared he is not interested in making any deal with Iran and that the war will only end with the “unconditional surrender” of Iran.
What are the reasons being sold to people in the U.S. for why we should line up in support of this attack that flirts with the possibility of world war?
The first claim made by officials like Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is that Iran somehow posed an “imminent threat.” The Trump administration has not even bothered to provide any evidence at all. In fact, two anonymous officials within the Trump administration have disclosed that there was no intelligence evidence that even suggested a credible threat of attack from Iran. In addition, on March 3rd, Marco Rubio also stated that, “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” In other words, he acknowledges that Israel was an imminent threat to Iran.
Linked to the claim that Iran posed a threat is another that Iran is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. But Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said in March of last year that there was no evidence that Iran had or was producing nuclear weapons. Then, following the so-called “Twelve Day War” in June of 2025, Donald Trump bragged that Israel and the U.S. had “obliterated” Iran’s capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Trump even repeated this claim in his State of the Union address last month, literally four days before launching the attack on Iran.
Trump has also spoken of so-called “regime change” in Iran. A regime change war in Iran is impossible without significant escalation. Coming out of the recent memories of the absolute catastrophes of “regime change” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there isn’t much enthusiasm among the U.S. public. A full-scale war with Iran will become more and more unpopular, especially as gas prices continue to skyrocket and the Trump administration starts to entertain the idea of bringing back a military draft. So, the Trump administration has had to walk back some of its initial talk about “regime change” and has since rebranded it “regime modification.”
The most disgusting claim that the Trump administration makes is that they are somehow interested in liberating the people of Iran from the regime of the Islamic Republic. Are we supposed to believe that the United States and Israel, two states clearly guilty of genocide against the people of Gaza, can be genuine defenders of human rights? At least one of the targets already struck by a U.S. attack was a desalinization plant which will mean cutting off clean water to Iranians. Is this what liberation looks like?
There are also equally repulsive claims about wanting to stand up for women in Iran. The U.S. government, which has recently been exposed as protecting rich and powerful sexual predators, is somehow a champion for women’s rights? As is well-known, one of the first attacks on Iran this time was a U.S. bombing of an all-girls school.
The women of Iran have a courageous history of struggle for their own emancipation, most recently risking their lives and taking the lead in the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in 2022, following the murder of Mahsa Amini by the religious morality police for the crime of not wearing a hijab in public.
The people of Iran deserve our solidarity in their struggles. Imperialism will never bring liberation.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a barbaric regime. But the right to determine the future of Iran belongs to the Iranian people and the Iranian people alone.
The real truth is that this aggression on the people of Iran by the United States and Israel is all about maintaining and expanding empire and nothing to do with the wellbeing of the Iranian people.
