Why Iran? Why Now?

Iran is the Latest Target in an Orchestrated Plan for Global Dominance

First, let us be clear what the war on Iran is not about.

The Islamic Republic has committed many human rights abuses over the more than four decades of its existence, especially against women—though Western media consistently presents the worst side of things and it is often difficult to parse rumor from reality.

Yet, it must be stated plainly that, contrary to official claims, U.S./Israeli operations that began bombing the country on February 28 are not aimed at alleviating abuses or addressing the grievances of the people.

Minah Primary Girls School Bombing

On February 28 the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, a girls’ school in southern Iran was hit by a guided missile, killing 170 people, mostly girls between the ages of 7 and 12. The school was adjacent to a strategic military complex in Minab which overlooks the Strait of Hormuz. But according to an Al Jazeera investigation the buildings, formerly part of the military complex itself, had been separated from the complex for a decade, and the brightly painted primary school served not only children of military personnel but also the civilian community. Immediately after the bombing, which occurred as part a series of strikes on the military compound, X accounts linked to Israelis or sympathetic to Israel posted claims that the school was struck by a misfired Iranian interceptor. Those posts went viral, but have been debunked as the photo they included showed an identifiable location nearly 1000 miles north of Minab.

The Minab school incident is not an exception in the record of civilian facilities being targeted by the US and Israeli militaries; rather, it falls within a documented pattern stretching across decades of military operations and attacks, in which the same scene recurs: Strikes hit schools, hospitals, and civilian shelters, followed by immediate denial or shifting of blame to the other side, before independent investigations later reveal the falsity of official claims.

Evidence cited by The Guardian indicates Tomahawk missiles were used in the attack as part of a flurry of bombardment of the southern coast, and that the U.S. was responsible.

Many Civilian Targets

That was just the beginning. According to a UN press release dated March 19:

US and Israeli strikes have claimed the lives of people across Iran. Housing complexes, medical facilities, schools, shops, courthouses, UNESCO World Heritage sites and energy installations have been impacted by strikes. According to the Iranian Red Crescent, 67,414 civilian sites have been struck, of which 498 are schools and 236 health facilities.

Universities, academics, scientists and diplomats have also been targeted in a clear strategy to undermine the country’s intellectual community.

A threat to regional security?

If concern for Iranian citizens is not the motive for the war, then what about the claim that the Iran is a menace to peace in the region and a threat to world security?

Isn’t such a claim simply more U.S.-Israeli hasbara? After all, who was it, if not the Allied powers that destabilized the region at the end of WWI by dividing it up into states with imaginary lines not corresponding to natural ethnic boundaries and by installing arbitrarily leaders of their own choosing? Who was it if not the British empire that helped establish a European Jewish colony in the Levant with the direct intention of destabilizing the region for its own geopolitical interests?

The Rise of Zionism and the Creation of the State of Israel

Who was it if not the U.S. empire via the CIA and Israel that has trained and armed militant, extremist groups throughout the Middle East that it later designates as terrorist groups and uses as an excuse for military intervention? In fact, if it were not for such constant mischief on the part of Western powers and the illegitimate State of Israel—a state founded on bloodshed, ethnic cleansing, racial and religious hubris, and divisiveness—there would be an opening for diplomatic dialogue, fairness, peace and understanding. And if it were not for the Gaza genocide and Israel’s disruptions in Syria and Lebanon, even at this late stage dialogue and peace might have been possible.

Nuclear threat?

Pay no heed to the noisy claims about Iran being on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon: the same trope has been spouted by Netanyahu for decades, despite the Islamic Republic’s recently assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s public statements over two decades that nuclear weapons are “contradictory to our religion. We are against either nuclear or chemical weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction.”

In 2003, Khamenei issued an oral fatwa declaring nuclear weapons as haram, forbidden, by Islam.

According to an opinion article in the Middle East Monitor:

The Islamic conception of war begins from a premise different from the caricatures often projected on to it. Classical Islamic thought does not treat war as an unbounded field of religious violence. Rather, it regulates warfare through a moral-legal framework derived from the Qur'an, the practice of the Prophet, and the juristic traditions that developed in subsequent centuries.

[…] A weapon whose essence is mass, uncontrolled devastation, sits uneasily with any tradition that treats non-combatant immunity as morally central.

It remains to be seen whether Khamenei’s admirable restraint in this matter, dismissed by the West, will be eroded with his death. Certainly the new leadership will be less amenable to peaceful solutions after the treachery it has experienced with his assassination—neither the first nor the last assassination of an Iranian leader by zealous “patriots” of America and Israel intent on ensuring they have no one to negotiate peace with.

Terrorism by proxy?

The White House claim that Iran is “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism” is equally disingenuous. The CIA has sponsored terrorist groups around the world in arena after arena, whenever it suits it’s fancy. So has Israel. Moreover, groups Iran has supported—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen—while known to engage in acts of terror, emerged as resistance groups to ongoing state terror and oppression—notably, in the first two cases, at the brunt of Israeli aggression, as brought out in a recent Chris Hedges interview with former CIA analyst and counterterrorism operations officer John Kiriakou, a whistleblower who was imprisoned for 2 years under the Obama administration for revealing that within the CIA torture is a matter of policy.

The Real Motives

Having dispensed of the empty, hypocritical excuses proffered by the talking heads of Washington and Israel for initiating yet another illegal, all-out war of naked aggression, let us consider the real motivation that can be discerned from decades-long maneuvers within the U.S. capitol and its actions abroad.

The real reasons for the U.S.-Israeli bombing spree on Iran is double:

1. Powerful financial incentives for the war apparatus to be kicked into action once again; and

2. Radical religious ideologies, both Jewish and Christian, especially Zionism.

The second motive appears to be subservient to the first in a perverse leveraging of religious belief and conservative values for filthy lucre and political dominance and expansionism.

This is brought out in detail in a 3-part essay series by The Democracy Defender exposing the connections in all their sordid detail.

In this war, every cabinet member has a financial stake. Every bomb dropped is a live-fire sales demo. Every barrel of Iranian crude pulled off the global market is a windfall for a politically connected fracking company in Texas. And when the rubble settles, the people carving up the reconstruction aren’t diplomats — they’re real estate billionaires pitching luxury hotels and artificial islands to sovereign wealth funds in Riyadh.

This isn’t a byproduct of the conflict. It is the conflict.

Now to be honest, I must say that despite what appears to be good, verifiable information on this subject, The Democracy Defender Substack is to me somewhat suspicious on two accounts.

First, it looks like something produced by AI.

Second, it targets “right wing conservatives” using many of the talking points of the Democratic Party. This is suspicious as corrupt politicians do not belong merely to one party or the other; they are not merely MAGA conservatives.

While Republican “representatives” are the most supportive of the U.S. corporation’s military objectives, Democrats stand back and clamour for war from the sidelines. It’s the Uniparty with red and blue hats doing the bidding of the white-hat philanthropaths who control the franchise. In fact, there is no “democracy” to defend. What we have is a perennial extortion racket that switches subordinate managers every so many years while the oligarchs pulling the strings never change.

Notwithstanding all the above, I think the series is worth reading in full for what it tells, keeping in mind what it omits. In fact, I keep going back to review the details.

Iran War: We Follow The Money (To Mar-A-Lago)

Iran War: The Dark Money, Dark Politics, and Project 2025

Iran War Part 3: The REAL Reason Behind The War

Trump Isn’t Acting Alone

Trump didn’t just pull his cabinet members out of a black hat. They were previously vetted and groomed by powerful conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that have been guiding Republican policy for decades.

Approximately 70% of Trump’s cabinet and more than 50 government officials have direct prior roles with the Heritage Foundation or its Project 2025 partner groups.

The 50 year old Heritage Foundation seeks out and trains future conservative leaders, providing what The Democracy Defender dubs a personnel pipeline to Washington. The leaders it chooses and molds uphold a specific set of principles, at the top of which are national supremacy, “defense” industry spending, and brazen war-positive policy in the Middle East and around the world. All of this translates into obscene profits for those who are making the very policies that guide the country toward war.

Take just one example:

Heritage Foundation backed Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is the founder and former CEO of Liberty Energy, a fracking services company. His financial disclosures ran to over 1,800 pages. They revealed energy-related stock holdings in the “tens of millions of dollars,” including nearly 3 million shares of Liberty Energy held by Wright and his spouse. He agreed to reduce his holdings. The regulatory environment he personally oversees determines what those remaining holdings are worth.

The Iran war is the best thing that could have happened to domestic oil and gas producers, and Wright knows it. The administration’s “maximum economic pressure” campaign against Iran — sanctioning over 30 entities, targeting the Iranian “shadow fleet” — has pulled millions of barrels of crude off the global market. When you combine that artificial supply constraint with the ever-present threat of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz (now closed, and through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil passes), the result is predictable: energy prices go up. American shale producers — the very industry Wright built his career in — rush to fill the gap.

This is Wright’s stated vision made manifest. He has publicly argued that hydrocarbons “still fuel roughly 85% of global energy supply” and has worked to dismantle climate-related reporting requirements. The war provides the geopolitical cover to accelerate that agenda: more drilling, more fracking, more production — all framed as “energy dominance” and “national security.”

Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry donated $25.8 million to Trump campaign groups in 2024 alone. The policy returns on that investment are now arriving in the form of executive orders that favor production, the dismantling of environmental regulations, and a Middle Eastern conflict that has driven up the price of the very commodity they sell.

This picture is further elucidated by the geopolitical analysis of British-Syrian journalist and Youtuber Richard Medhurst. In fact, apart from The Democracy Defender, Medhurst is the only one I have found bringing attention to how the Iran war and other maneuvers by the Trump administration including the war in Ukraine are pushing energy clients toward the U.S., especially for LNG, and consolidating U.S. control of oil and LNG in the Western hemisphere at the same time.

Medhurst’s analysis of U.S. world energy monopoly can be found beginning at 38 min in the video below.

(Beginning at 1:27:00 he discusses his elaborate mapping of target’s destroyed in Israel and elsewhere by Hezbollah and Iran.)

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