CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Operation Imperial Fury

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Is it Donald Trump who’s afraid of peace or is it the political establishment of Washington DC that’s afraid of peace?  Recent negotiations between Washington and Teheran seemed to be making some progress towards a situation in Iran that did not involve death and destruction.  While a treaty between the two nations was not just over the horizon, the potential that a framework that genuinely discussed an equitable way for both countries to avoid war seemed possible.  The attack by Israeli and US forces and Iran’s ensuing counterattacks of February 28,2025 rendered that possibility moot.

Israel claims the existence of the current government in Iran is an existential threat to its existence.  If one looks at the situation from a perspective not tainted by Israeli and US imperial designs, and from one that includes a history of the region that extends into a past well before the creation of the western colony called Israel, a more honest appraisal would claim that the existence of Israel is an existential threat to the people who live in what is often called the Mideast.  Indeed, if the current conflict follows certain trajectories, it could be an existential threat to the entire world.

In recent months, as the Trump regime has kidnapped heads of state, blockaded nations, murdered dozens on the high seas and established a domestic secret police regime in the US, one can’t help but make comparisons to similar endeavors in the past.  One potential comparison the current regime in Washington invites is to one of history’s most hated governments –the Nazis under the reign of Adolf Hitler.  As the Nazis consolidated their internal security in the months after Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship of Germany, its military and diplomatic forces annexed Austria and then invaded Poland in the years 1938-1939. With the expansion of the numbers and roles of Homeland Security agents like those in Minneapolis, the kidnapping of its leaders and government by threat in Venezuela and now the attack on, murder of its rulers and a potential invasion of Iran, the general scenario is closer than comfort allows.

In 1968, the Americal division of the US army slaughtered over five hundred civilians in MyLai, Vietnam.  On February 13, 1991, the US Air Force (USAF) bombed a civilian air defense shelter, killing 408 Iraqis.  In April 1999, the USAF bombed a civilian train in the former Yugoslavia, killing over sixty civilians and in October 2015, the USAF bombed a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing more than forty patients and staff.  As I am writing, this the numbers of school children killed after US forces bombed an elementary school in the opening hours of the attack on Iran being discussed here, with the toll already over one hundred. More bodies continue to be discovered in the rubble. One fears that this is just the beginning of what will become a long list of atrocities committed by US forces beyond the atrocity of the military conflict itself.

Speaking of further atrocities, the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei along with his daughter, grandchild and son-in-law certainly qualifies, albeit in a different way than the massacre of the schoolchildren. No matter what one thinks of Khamanei and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran—and there is certainly plenty to be take issue with in terms of human rights abuses—for the head of the government Martin........

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