Donald Trump and his national security team in the Situation Room of the White House. Photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr.

A few days into the US-Israeli attack on Iran, when US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said American jets were “bringing death and destruction from the sky, all day long,” it was hard to fathom who he hoped to influence or impress. Did he expect the proud yet wounded people of Iran to suddenly capitulate under the weight of US-Israeli bombs? Unlikely. Did he hope that Americans, nearly a majority of whom oppose air strikes on Tehran, would be persuaded by his rhetoric? Hardly. Did Hegseth think that his European and Canadian allies would applaud an illegal war? Doubtful. Iran had not attacked the United States or Israel at the time of the air strikes, and even the most craven politicians in the West cringed at Hegseth’s indecorous glee.

“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight,” he went on to say. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

Hegseth’s address came on the heels of one of the single worst war crimes committed by the US military since the Vietnam War. On the first day of Operation Epic Fury, the US military bombed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. The precision-guided missiles, which were reportedly targeted at a nearby military base, slaughtered 175 people, mostly children between the ages of seven and 12. The girls were shredded, their blood was strewn on books and desks, and classrooms collapsed into dust.

Witnesses say the school was subjected to what’s called a “double tap” strike, which is the ruthless practice of following a bombardment with a second strike only a few minutes later, typically in an attempt to maximize casualties. In this case, the second missile killed sheltering survivors, first responders, and a parent of a slain child, according to a Red Crescent medic who spoke to the news site Middle East Eye.

By day seven of the military campaign, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani, said the attacks had killed at least 1,332 Iranians and injured thousands more. Witnesses have described apocalyptic scenes in Tehran, after bombs struck hospitals, schools and residential buildings, with children buried beneath the rubble.

By day nine, Israel had bombed Iran’s oil refineries, fuel depots and water desalination facilities, causing major fires and heavy, black smoke over the capital. The Iranian Red Crescent Society reported that significant quantities of toxic hydrocarbons, sulfur, and nitrogen oxides have been released into the air.

Hegseth was most giddy about how easy it was for Tel Aviv and Washington to wage decapitation warfare against Iran, using advanced ballistic weapons to assassinate the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with several senior Iranian officials, among them top defence chiefs.

But there was a more sinister reason for Hegseth’s enthusiatic endorsement of violence in the manner of the Prince of Antioch, one of the most reckless rulers during the First Crusade. The secretary of war has a history of poitical extremism and open Islamophobia. Hegseth has a fascination with “Crusader aesthetics.” He sports a tattoo on his right biceps that reads “Deus Vult”—God Wills It—which is understood to be a Crusader battle cry. He appears to have another tattoo that reads “kafir”—or Infidel—which has been weaponized by far-right Islamophobes to villify Muslims. The Pentagon chief is also the author of a book entitled American Crusade which views Muslim-Christian relations through the prism of the medieval Crusades and depicts Islam as an enemy of the West.

Hegseth’s values, coupled with fears that ruling elites in the US have been co-opted by Israeli intelligence because of their ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein, pose a dangerous risk to global stability. But more fundamentally, they exemplify the serious existential crisis at the heart of Western leadership.

Pete Hegseth speaking with attendees at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida. A tattoo reading “Deus Vult”—God Wills It—is visible on his right bicep. Photo by Gage Skidmode/Wikimedia Commons.

Here in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s response to the war on Iran was shocking and utterly incoherent. Amid the carnage being unleashed on Iranian civilians, Carney said that Canada supported US efforts against Iran on the grounds that Tehran should not be able to develop a nuclear weapon (even though the UN’s nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi insisted that inspectors had not found evidence of a coordinated Iranian program to build nuclear weapons). After being roundly condemned for supporting an illegal war, Carney revised his rhetoric, expressed his regret and admitted that the US and Israel had likely violated international law. When pressed to clarify Canada’s future position, the prime minister said he could not rule out a possible role for Canadian forces in a widening conflict in the Middle East if NATO and other allies came calling. These actions reflect a leader willing to override international law forbidding the use of armed force against a sovereign nation if certain political conditions are met.

Britain, France, and numerous European Union member states issued scripted responses that were equally ambiguous and devoid of moral leadership.

Western leaders have acquiesced to a brazen gangster imperialism that has shattered the crumbling edifice of international insititutions and global governance. But there is no way that the radical leaders of the US or Israel would be able to proceed today if international law were actually binding and legitimate, if states were obliged to respect and enforce a system of rules created to maintain order and protect human rights. There is a reason that Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and their senior officials play war as a video game, treating lives as expendable and death as entertaining. They can. Their predecessors committed similar crimes of aggression, using covert methods or diplomatic cover, that were just as bloody and illegal. And they got away with it.

Israel would not be attacking Iran today if its leaders had been prosecuted for the mass killings, forced displacement, and deliberate starvation of the Palestinian people. Not only has Israel enjoyed immunity from prosecution for the genocide in Gaza, but it has continued to receive weapons and political support from its principal sponsor, the US—both under Trump and Joe Biden—and from Canada and the European Union. These are the same allies that refuse to sanction Israel for its bombing campaigns against Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and the West Bank (Lebanon’s health ministry said on March 8 that 394 civilians, including 83 children, had been killed in a week-long series of Israeli attacks).

Trump’s actions on the world stage historically dovetail with countless other US military interventions, from Haiti and Chile—to name merely a few—to the African nations of Ghana and Congo in the 1960s, and then in Congo again in the 1990s.

Nearly a million people, almost half of them civilians, were killed in US-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Nearly four million others in those zones have died from war-related causes such as poverty, malnutrition, disease, and loss of basic health care.

Similarly, NATO’s US-led destruction of Libya—involving France, Italy, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, and Norway—went on to ignite battles across the Sahel.

Wherever US imperialism has gone, death, state collapse and chaos have followed. The people of Iran know full well that the US and its allies are not interested in bringing freedom and prosperity to their country. The West and Israel—the tip of the spear—want unhindered access to commodities and trading routes so that they can transfer that wealth to their economies.

Iranians are not interested in this zero-sum game, or in embracing Western values in a unipolar world. The West has no business imposing its political or economic systems on other countries. For starters, it must carry out its own deep democratic reforms, and it must elect leaders with integrity who are held accountable to national and international law. In the meantime, progressives can amplify the voices of Iranians who seek freedom by organizing, striking, teaching, writing, and resisting.

Judi Rever is a journalist from Montréal and is the author of In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

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