The real agenda behind the bombing of Iran

We can only hope that Iran will be different to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but history, sadly, is not on the side of peace.

The world moved closer to complete catastrophe in Middle East this week, when Israel launched a series of unprovoked attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and missile sites, resulting in the deaths of 224 people – most of them civilians. Iran then responded with missile strikes of its own, leaving 24 Israelis dead and, to round off the week, the United States bombed three nuclear sites within Iran under Operation Midnight Hammer, at the behest of and with the full co-operation of Israel.

The official rationale for Israel’s assault and the follow-up US bombing was the now-familiar claim: Iran is “weeks away” from developing a nuclear bomb, a false claim repeated by Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – without any evidence – for well over 20 years. But this justification seems to be a repeat of the infamous lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – a convenient fiction that hides far more cynical motivations, just as it did back in 2003.

Behind the air raids and retaliatory fire lies a large dose of political desperation. Both Israel and the United States are struggling with internal political crises – in Israel, Netanyahu is besieged by ongoing legal battles, mass protests, and a collapsing far-right coalition. In the United States, the political system is paralysed by dysfunction and ineptitude, as a result of a second Trump presidency and a deeply polarised nation. A foreign crisis – especially one framed as a supposedly righteous pre-emptive strike – offers both governments a perfect distraction and a chance to change their respective political narratives. But the stakes are also dangerously high, and this reckless brinkmanship could ignite a regional war with no winners, and only leaving behind a trail of destruction.

As always, there’s an obvious level of hypocrisy and duplicity at play here. Israel does not allow visits from the International Atomic Energy Agency and has not signed the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty. In contrast, Iran has signed up to the Treaty, allows inspections into its nuclear program, and was holding negotiations with the United States, just as Israel was firing rockets at Tehran, and decided that it was best to kill Ali Shamkhani, Iran’s chief negotiator in these talks. Just who exactly are the real terrorists here?

Yet the Western narrative insists that it’s Iran poses the nuclear threat. For over two decades, Israel has claimed that Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons – an imminent danger that never materialises, and is always used to justify the next act of aggression. Iran’s uranium program remains well below the 90 per cent enrichment threshold that’s needed to develop a nuclear weapon – even the US’s own intelligence agencies have confirmed this – and yet it’s Iran that’s portrayed as the villain in this geopolitical game, not Israel.

While there is still some way to go on this conflict, the United States and Israel will be in for a rude shock if they think they will emerge from this war victorious and unscathed. Iran is not Libya. Nor is it like Iraq, Gaza or Syria. It’s a nation of 94 million people, with a larger and formidable geography that makes conventional invasion a logistical nightmare. The Iranian plateau, like the highlands of Afghanistan or the beaches of Gallipoli, is difficult terrain for military warfare. And no nation has ever been conquered by air strikes alone, a fact that any student of military history would understand. The United States learned this lesson the hard way in Vietnam, and then again in Afghanistan. A motivated population defending its homeland cannot be broken by bombs. Pentagon analysts would also understand this, and they have reportedly warned against any such incursion, recognising that the cost in lives, equipment, and the damage to the credibility of the United States would be immense and futile.

What we’re witnessing, in all likelihood, is a game of distraction, for ulterior motives, and none of them are good. For Netanyahu, war is political capital – the ‘forever wars’ are a means of survival for his leadership, a diversion from courts and corruption trials. For Washington, it’s a convenient distraction from its economic woes, the debacle of the Trump’s tariffs war, electoral disarray, and policy paralysis. But the collateral damage isn’t just Iranian or Israeli lives – the entire region is precariously balance on the edge of chaos.

The only hope – if that’s what we can call it – is that this latest escalation is not much more than a cynical ploy by two failing governments and two inept leaders to manufacture relevance, or at least provide a short-term distraction. But if they really do believe they can impose regime change in Iran through force and, as Trump suggested, “make Iran great again”, they are deluding themselves. Most leaders in the West would realise this, and it’s about time they started saying the quiet bit out loud, before it’s too late.

The right to defend: Who has it, and which rules can they use?

War should never be the first response in any circumstance – it must remain the last line of defence. If peace is the product of hard work, wise and capable leadership, and war is the easy and final refuge of scoundrels and a game played by leaders of low intellect, then Trump and Netanyahu are obvious candidates to lead this feckless march toward destruction.

Wars should be avoided at all costs, yet here we are again, as if the lessons of Iraq, Libya, and Syria have been erased by collected amnesia and a lobotomised Western community, with leaders choosing escalation over diplomacy and provocation over diligence.

Senator Penny Wong – surely up there as one of Australia’s most unprincipled Foreign Ministers – condemned Iran’s missile strikes on Israel as a “dangerous escalation,” while reiterating Australia’s commitment to international law and the supposed right of Israel to defend itself. And yet, in these carefully worded statements lies the big omission: if Israel has a right to defend itself – surely a standard part of statehood, irrespective of how that statehood was achieved – then why is there no equal recognition of Iran’s right to respond to what was, quite clearly, an unprovoked assault by Israel? If international law is so important for Israel, why was it not important when Israel was attacking Iran? Or for the eighteen months Israel has been perpetrating a genocide on the peoples of Palestine? Where is the application of international law in those cases?

This selective framing has become so predictable and disgustingly outrageous and disingenuous. It would be more intellectually honest, although politically inconvenient, for Wong to acknowledge that Iran’s strikes were retaliation for an initial Israeli attack, itself part of a broader campaign sanctioned and materially supported by the United States. But to say that plainly would involve uncomfortable diplomatic contortions, and so Wong’s narrative remains obtuse and untrue – Israel defends; Iran provokes. Iran is a regime, after all, so of course, for Wong and her Western friends, it’s always going to the one that provokes, even when it doesn’t.

Geopolitically, it’s not helpful to claim who fired the first shot – like the shot fired by Gavrilo Princip at Archduke Franz Ferdinand that led to war in 1914 – because these are deeply complex tensions rooted in decades of covert operations, sanctions, proxy wars, and ideological antagonism. But moral clarity could be found in calling out what is obviously being ignored: no one in Canberra or Washington is speaking about Iran’s right to self-defence. Nor Lebanon’s. Nor Palestine’s.

For all the talk about adhering to international law, the law seems to be selectively applied in only the one direction: Israel. And, who knows, if international norms had been consistently applied over the past eighteen months – and if Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, incursions into Lebanon, and now direct strikes on Iran had been called out with even a fraction of the outrage reserved for their retaliation – we might not have reached this point.

International law, like diplomacy, is imperfect. It hasn’t prevented wars in the past, but when applied, it has delayed them, restrained them, and sometimes even stopped them. The erosion of these protocols happens not through a single violation, but through the steady silence that follows every breach. And when silence follows one side’s actions – Israel’s – and the other side takes all the blows without sanction, it’s obvious that retaliation will become the only remaining language of power.

False words as a weapon of war

This conflict hasn’t been fought just through missiles and drone attacks – it’s also been waged with words and rhetoric – and the language used in Western media, as well as by its political leaders, has become a weapon in its own right. The pattern is the usual one, and uses a clear formula: Israel has a government, Iran has a regime. The United States has allies, Syria and Lebanon have proxies. Britain and Australia support democracies; Russia and China prop up despots. It’s the old Cold War rhetoric of moral superiority, where “regimes” is the code-word for any nation not aligned with Western interests and any country that we don’t like: Iran, Cuba, China, North Korea, Venezuela – if they won’t bend to the American-led order and go on to resist in any way, they are labelled regimes. And regimes in the eyes of the United States, of course, are there to be toppled, not to be reasoned with.

This weaponisation of language doesn’t only shape perceptions, but also directs policy. It dehumanises the enemy and simplifies the conflict to fit an easily digestible narrative. Saddam Hussein, once a key United States ally during Iraq’s war with Iran between 1980–88, was referred to as a leader then. But when he outlived his usefulness, he became a dictator heading a brutal regime. It was the same man, and the same country. But, a different spin was applied. And that spin paved the way for one of the most catastrophic foreign policy failures of the modern era – the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Over 200,000 civilians died. The country was destroyed. And the justification, parroted by George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and our own John Howard, was a complete fiction: the weapons of mass destruction didn’t actually exist, it was a falsehood to justify an invasion of a sovereign country.

Photo credit: AP Photo.

Today, the same narrative is coming back to life. Iran is once again being framed as a rogue power on the verge of nuclear capability, while the lies of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” has faded into the background for those who conveniently benefit from public amnesia. But the objective remains the same: dominance over the Middle East. It’s not about nuclear weapons, it never has been. It’s about punishing Iran for rejecting American control in 1979; it’s a payback for the hostage crisis between 1979–81; for the removing the United States-installed puppet ruler, the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – and for nearly half a century of Iran refusing to play by the rules of Washington. What we are seeing here is the long tail of imperial resentment by the United States, just like a spoilt child, in the same way it punished Cuba and Vietnam for decades after humiliating and well-deserved defeats.

While many still accept the political framing – Iran is a regime and must be stopped – more and more people are beginning to question this ridiculous script. What does “regime” even mean? Is it really any different from right-wing strongman war mongers like Trump or Netanyahu, whose own governments have embraced authoritarism while still cloaking themselves in the language of democracy?

People have become more cynical, and more literate in the output of propaganda pushed forward by the state. They’ve seen how words have been twisted to justify Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan – and now Iran – and they’re less likely to accept it this time around.

War as a lifeline for leaders in trouble

The recent escalations in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and now Iran appear less like strategic military operations and more like calculated political theatre, just like we saw in the movie Wag The Dog. A common thread in all of this is Netanyahu, a leader clinging to power by any means necessary, including manufacturing wars to keep a hold of power. With an Israeli election looming in October 2026 and a right-wing coalition as fragmented as ever, Netanyahu’s survival strategy seems to rest on keeping the country in a state of permanent war, just like Orwell’s 1984 concept of the “forever war”.

But that election is still over a year away: can Netanyahu really keep up this charade for another 15 months without plunging the region into deeper chaos? Can the world afford to pander to a leader such as Netanyahu when global peace is at stake? Across the Atlantic, Trump is reading from the same script – using inflammatory threats and foreign policy bluster to distract from his own mountain of legal troubles and authoritarian fantasies, and “peace through strength”. It’s not a ridiculous as “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” that the US applied in the Battle of Ben Tre in Vietnam, but it’s getting there.

Just this week, Trump publicly threatened to assassinate Iran’s leadership, and fresh from bombing three nuclear sites in Iran – against international law – is now openly calling for “regime change”. This isn’t strategy: it’s just tough-guy recklessness dressed up as resolve, like a bumbling G.I. Joe character with orange hair. And it highlights a frightening reality: two of the world’s most powerful and nuclear-armed states are being steered by two foolish old men who are using war as a tool of self-preservation.

For sure, Iran has its problems, but it’s not an isolated rogue state, like North Korea. It is a major power in the Middle East with long term alliances and strategic importance. India has a strong diplomatic relationship with Iran, and Russia views Iran as a partner in its anti-Western bloc. China has long courted Iran for economic cooperation. This isn’t Libya or Afghanistan. An attack on Iran risks detonating a regional war, if not a global crisis.

This use of “regime change” rhetoric from Washington and Tel Aviv is, clearly, far removed from any strategic logic. The Iranian state is entrenched, not just militarily but socially. The leadership might not be universally popular, but as history has shown – most recently in Iraq – foreign intervention has the uncanny ability to unite even a fractured population against a common external enemy. To remove Iran’s government by force would require a ground invasion of a mountainous nation with 94 million people. Even the United States – the world’s largest military power – knows this is not viable, yet, just as Colin Powell did over Iraq in 2003, its military leaders are playing along with this charade, despite the madness of their commander-in-chief. And yet, leaders like Trump and Netanyahu float these ideas like they’re part of a cheap political campaign, not a dangerous geopolitical gamble where many people will die.

It all circles back to a poignant irony: the men maniacally shouting out about threats to global peace – Trump and Netanyahu – are, in fact, the ones threatening it most. The self-proclaimed “stable genius” of Trump is now openly baiting nuclear powers and destabilising entire regions, and the Israeli Prime Minister is turning war into a form of personal immunity. If this isn’t madness, what is? Why can’t world leaders see what is plainly evident to everyone else? Why are so many naked emperors wearing the invisible cloaks and nobody dares to call them out?

This is where international diplomacy should step in – otherwise, what’s the point of it – but will it? Perhaps there more sane and measured voices from France, Germany, Britain, or even South America and Africa might still intervene against the Idiot King and talk this down. This might be a naïve hope because, so far, the loudest voices have been the ones pushing us toward the brink.

Australia, too, must reckon with its role in this. Our history with Middle Eastern conflict is long, bloody, but poorly remembered. We’ve followed allies into the region before, from Gallipoli in 1915 to Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s. And each time, we have emerged with little more than body bags, broken veterans, and a vague sense that we were helping to uphold Western ideals – ideals that looked like imperial delusions then, and will continue to do so now.

The Middle East region now stands on an extremely precarious edge. Trump’s Operation Midnight Hammer marks a bold departure from previous United States policy: direct strikes on Iranian nuclear sites which breach international law, coordinated with Israel, and grounded in a doctrine of pre‑emptive national defence. This is an international disaster. Whether this reckless ruse brings Iran back to the negotiation table – and why would they – or ignites a broader conflict involving proxy forces and allied nations, is a difficult question to answer at this stage. We can only hope this time is different but history, sadly, is not on the side of peace.