CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Preliminary Notes on a Planned Decapitation

Photo the bombed elementary school in Minab, Iran, posted to X by Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi.

Trump has done the world a service. He has abandoned pretense and clarified the true nature of American power. There is no longer any need to manufacture a case for war, to make an attack seem conform to international law and treaties or to demonstrate its righteousness by acting as part of an international coalition. Now America can do what it wants to whomever it wants solely because the people who run its government want to. This has, of course, almost always been the case behind the curtain of diplomatic niceties. But Trump has ripped those curtains down and now the world is seeing American power in the raw: brazen, arrogant and mindless of the consequences, which will be borne by others and if they complain, they might be whacked, too.

The joint Israeli/US strike on Iran wasn’t a surprise attack. (Though Wall Street was certainly surprised.) It could hardly be so with two aircraft carrier fleets aiming their massive arsenal at Iran. However, the US and Israel did use diplomacy as a cover. No one announced the talks had failed. Indeed, it’s been reported that Iran’s leadership was discussing a plan to end its enriched uranium program when the attack was launched. How do we know the US had no intention of accepting a deal? Because the attack was a joint venture with Israel, which has never wanted negotiations with Iran, only an end to the regime. The strike that killed Khamanei is a crime, whatever you think of the Ayatollah. And it should be a warning to any nation that you can’t trust the diplomatic envoys and entreaties of the US; they are the ultimate Trojan Horse.

Axios reported that the US/Israel agreed on the date of the attack a week earlier, meaning that the past week of diplomacy was indeed a ruse to lower Iranian defenses.

The “decapitation strike” did not cause the regime to collapse. Indeed, Iran’s response has been more robust than it was last summer. By Sunday, Israel was already running low on interceptor missiles and Trump, who had no plan other than launching a bunch of missiles, was calling for a ceasefire after his bombing-as-spectacle weekend.

Exulting grotesquely over killing an infirm 86-year-old leader of one of the world’s largest religions (200 million Shia) probably isn’t the wisest precedent to set…

Trump and Netanyahu killed a religious leader who was aged, ill and near death. They made a martyr out of Khamenei when he likely would have died of natural causes within the next year. As former PM, Naftali Bennett admitted, “[Iran] built a very elaborate secession plan precisely for this event of mass decapitation that Israel has done.” 

Netanyahu: “Israel now has the assistance of the United States, my friend, US President Donald Trump, and the US military. This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” Netanyahu’s “dreams” of a Greater Israel are a nightmare for the rest of the Middle East and the US, in the long run, which might not prove all that long…

Israeli officials say that after Iran (assuming there is an “after Iran,” which doesn’t appear likely), Turkey is now seen as the next major threat to their existence. One of those officials is former PM Naftali Bennett, who said last week: ‘Turkey is the new Iran.”

Will Trump join Israel in an attack on a NATO country?

Sometimes, the dynamics driving 75 years of history become clear in a single instant: The US just launched an illegal war alongside a man who was indicted for the worst possible war crimes.

The day after US/Israeli airstrikes hit a girls’ elementary school, killing more than 150 people, they bombed a sports hall, where witnesses described a scene of horror and chaos with “continuous screaming.” This is the kind of attack that will unite a deeply divided population against the bombers for decades.

Robert Pape writing in Vox: “Air power can kill leaders.  It cannot engineer political collapse. From Chechnya to Kosovo to Libya, decapitation rarely delivers regime change — and often accelerates escalation.”

The CIA predicted that a decapitiation strike wouldn’t topple the IRI, but most likely led to an even more reactionary leadership. Looks like they were right for once.

Trita Parsi on why the Iranian leadership (still intact) rejected Trump’s offer of a ceasefire: “Tehran is not looking for a ceasefire and has rejected outreach from Trump. The reason is that they believe they committed a mistake by agreeing to the ceasefire in June – it only enabled the US and Israel to restock and remobilize to launch war again. If they agree to a ceasefire now, they will only be attacked again in a few months. For a ceasefire to be acceptable, it appears difficult for Tehran to agree to it until the cost to the US has become much higher than it currently is. Otherwise, the US will restart the war at a later point, the calculation reads.”

From a Washington Post report claiming that a push from the Saudis was decisive in convincing Trump to approve the attack on Iran: “The attack came despite U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran’s forces were unlikely to pose an immediate threat to the U.S. mainland within........

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