It's Trump’s War Crime and Trump’s War on Iran
And perhaps another endless war?
Paris—Like millions of other,Americans, I woke up yesterday morning to the news that my country was at war with Iran.
I haven’t felt this angry and bummed-out about my country’s brutish, criminal bloody-mindedness since late 1972 when another criminal psychopath president, Richard Nixon, ordered half the nation’s B-52 strategic nuclear bomber fleet to begin a two-week round-the-clock carpet bombing of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam over the Christmas ‘holiday.’ At least 1624 civilians died in that largest bombing campaign since WWII as 20,000 tons of bombs were dropped on hospitals, schools, the national music conservatory, flood control dams and levies and urban areas. And that criminal act was a failure: 16 months later, the victorious forces of the Viet Cong and the People’s Army of Vietnam rolled into Saigon, forcing an embarrassing helicopter evacuation from the embassy roof, and ended the puppet state of South Vietnam, unifying the country of Vietnam.
After warning the Iranian government last Friday that he was giving them two weeks — until Friday the 27th, SD to a deal to cease efforts to refine Uranium 235, the isotope needed to produce a uranium fission bomb, Trump, the spoilt-brat draft-dodger spawn of a German immigrant, and a narcissist who has a history of dreaming up strategies in the middle of the night and then ordering their implementation — usually unconstitutionally—had decided not to wait, but to just send in several B-2 stealth bombers and hit Iran’s nuclear fuel processing plants with 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordinance Penetrator bombs on two Iranian nuclear sites, Natanz and Fordo. Each GBU-57 bomb is a bunker-buster weapon designed to bore deep into rock or concrete before detonating its 15-ton explosive. (An alternative plot line is being put out by the White House claiming Trump’s two-week deadline offer to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to reach a peace agreement with Israel was actually an elaborate feint to leave Iranian forces unprepared for a mass night-attack.)
While nobody knows at this point (including Trump and his Pentagon experts), how much damage the attack on the three main uranium processing sites, as well as a second salvo of 24 tomahawk missiles that hit less well hardened Iranian nuclear sites like Isfahan and ancillary nuclear research centers, Trump wasted no time before making a national broadcast to the nation, declaring that that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “completely obliterated.”
In fact, it was starting to look like Trump’s initial approach—warning Iran of an all-out attack if I\it didn’t agree to halt their uranium enrichment program, was going to work. Many Iranians are fed up with all the strict religious rules, the hijab requirement on pain of beating or jail, brutal responses to protests etc. Even many of those who support the theocracy have grown tired of years of economic hardship caused by the strict international sanctions imposed by the US and much of rest of her world. After Israel’s week-long bombing campaign had destroyed much of the Tehran government’s multi-billion-dollar nuclear fuel refining obsession and showed that Iran’s defenses were not up to the challenge of Israel’s air force, and that the sanctions they had endured had been for nought, Trump’s offer of an end to the sanctions in return for deal on ending Iran’s uranium enrichment program was understandably looking tempting.
But Trump’s surprise “stable genius” brainstorm of throwing the US “all in” with Netanyahu’s regime-change approach to Iran has blown up even that perhaps remote possibility.
Meanwhile, according to an article in Bloomberg news, The US attack, along with the Israel’s earlier one may well have made it impossible to go back to\ monitoring of Iran’s uranium reactor fuel — even if Iran’s government woule allow this.. As authors Jonathan Tirone and Rachel Lavin explain, the enormous MOP blasts that hit the two deeply buried centrifuge arrays at Natanz and Formo, as well as the Tomahawk strikes on Isfahan, have made it extremely difficult if not impossible to readily determine whether or to what extent the centrifuge refining operations have been destroyed.
The article also notes that with all the rubble at the entrances to the deeply buried sites, and the likely hazardous condition of the caverns where the centrifuges and refined uranium 235 product might be stored, would make it impossible for inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to check to see the condition of the operations, or what have happened to any already highly refined U-235. In fact the destruction, by releasing much uranium from its containment will make it impossible for the IAEA to use the mathematical m method agency inspectors had developed to track all uranium being used and produced to determine whether Iran was spiriting away bomb- grade U-235 or not.
As things stand both US and Israeli attacks on Iran are war crimes of the first order, as there is no credible evidence that Iran was working on developing a nuclear bomb. In fact, the last word on the matter before the US attack came last Wednesday, June 11 from Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard,’ who said publicly that US intelligence services were saying Iran was not working on making an atomic bomb.
One thing ia for certain: Donald Trump will go down in history with a long line of presidential war criminals. He also now “owns” the Iran War, just as Joe Biden owns Israel’s Gaza genocide, Obama owns the criminal Invasion and destruction of Libya, George Bush and Dick Cheney, along with Jimmy Carter, own the Afghan War, Bill Clinton owns the civil wars in Kosovo, Bosnia and Serbia, George H. W. Bush owns the Gulf War. Reagan owns the US war on Nicaragua. Nixon owns the Vietnam War along with Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy and Truman owns the Korean War and a well as the criminal nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A note about this article’a dateline: I began writing this piece yesterday as we were flying from London to Paris for a stay of a few days with our granddaughter. I noticed signs of increased police presence at the Luton Airport in Britain, which makes sense, given Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s equivocating stance in trying to placate Trump while maintaining the UK’s “special relationship” of subservience towards the US. Britain hasn’’t offered to join the war against Iran, but has not openly criticized the US action.
At the De Gaulle International Airport, where we landed yesterday, and at the airport train station on the rail line to Paris, however, in a city that has a large Muslim and Arab population, and has experienced its share of violent anti-Western terrorism attacks including some in support of Ira, there was no police or military presence. France and its capital city don’t shrink from displays of militarized police power, but so far I’ve seen no signs so far of increased police presence in Paris. This may be because President Macron has been calling for a cease =fire in Iran and criticizing talk about a goal of “regime change.”