Oxford (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – After thirty years of agitation, incitement, lies and provocation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has finally succeeded in getting the United States involved in a war against Iran.
It should be stated unequivocally that Netanyahu’s attacks on Iran in the middle of negotiations, and President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attacks on Iranian homeland in support of Netanyahu’s aggressive policies were not only violations of international law but also an act of aggression which, according to the Nuremberg tribunal, is the “supreme international crime”. Despite the restraint shown in the Iranian response and the abrupt announcement on social media by Trump of a ceasefire agreement, enormous work lies ahead in bringing the region away from the brink of full-on conflagration.
Former Director General of the Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, warned that the use of force against Iranian nuclear installations and demanding that it stop its peaceful nuclear enrichment, which is its right under the NPT, is not only illegal but will also destroy the NPT. In a post on X, he wrote:
“For #Israel to attack #Iran including its nuclear facilities (prohibited by international law) and for #Trump to ask Iran for “total surrender” and forgo a treaty right (uranium enrichment) in a clear act of national humiliation, on suspicion that it is developing nuclear weapons (possessed by both #Israel and #US), suspicion that does not constitute an “imminent threat” as confirmed by all western intelligence agencies and was dealt with through negotiations in #JCPOA agreement of 2015 which the US withdrew from in 2018. To rely on force and not negotiations is a sure way to destroy the #NPT and the nuclear non-proliferation regime (imperfect as it is) and sends a clear message to many countries that their “ultimate security” is to develop nuclear weapons !!!”
Furthermore, they may have opened Pandora’s Box in the Middle East. Even if they don’t set the region on fire, they have severely compromised the US’s position in the world as a reliable power on the side of peace and the rule of law, and have severely undermined the liberal international order based on the values of the UN Charter universally agreed to after the carnage and devastation of two world wars.
There are many contradictory assessments about whether President Trump wanted to attack Iran and gave a green light to Netanyahu to launch his illegal attack, or whether he was manipulated by Netanyahu against his election promises that he wanted to stop and even prevent wars from happening. He campaigned on the slogan of being a peace president. After the election, he tasked his foreign policy guru, Steve Witcoff, to start talks with Iran on its nuclear policy. However, Witcoff has had a poor record of success in any of the tasks he has been given by Trump.
Just before Trump’s inauguration, Witcoff seems to have been successful in persuading Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire with the Palestinians, providing the hope that the ceasefire would lead to a lasting agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. However, shortly after the inauguration, the Israelis clearly violated the terms of the ceasefire and resumed their savage attacks on Gaza.
Trump boasted that the war between Russia and Ukraine would not have started under him and that it would end even before he assumed office. He again appointed Witkoff as his envoy to mediate a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Witcoff had a series of talks with President Vladimir Putin, and despite initial optimism, the talks fizzled out without any tangible results, and the war in Ukraine intensified.
The same has been true about his talks on the Iranian nuclear programme. Witcoff held five rounds of talks with Iranian negotiators, and they seemed to be making real progress. Initially, Trump and Witcoff stated that Iran should not have any nuclear weapons, something that Iran has always denied pursuing. The two sides were discussing the level of enrichment that Iran would be allowed to have. Both sides expressed optimism about the progress of the talks. However, in the later stages of the talks, Witcoff suddenly changed his tune and said Iran should not have any nuclear processing on its soil, despite Iran’s clear right as a member of the NPT. I wonder if Netanyahu had been whispering in his ear.
Only a day before the Israeli “preemptive” attack on Iranian nuclear sites, Trump said that he had told Netanyahu not to attack Iran while the talks were continuing. On several occasions, he expressed optimism about the progress of the talks. Iranian and American negotiators were scheduled to meet in Oman on Sunday, 22nd June, for the sixth round of talks, but only two days earlier, the talks were abruptly shattered as a result of Israeli attacks.
Netanyahu’s propaganda about the Iranian nuclear programme has proved false time and time again. Ever since the early 1990s, he claimed that Iran was only weeks or months away from acquiring nuclear weapons. Just as the Iran Nuclear Deal (known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) was being prepared and later signed between Iran and the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany, and was ratified by a UN Security Council resolution, as well as by the EU, Netanyahu was invited by the AIPAC-dominated Congress to speak at a joint session of Congress against the policies of a sitting president and practically the entire international community.
Under the JCPOA, Iran reduced its enriched uranium stockpile by 98 per cent and restricted the level of enrichment to 3.67 per cent, which is far below the number that would be needed to achieve anything close to the 90 per cent level required for a nuclear weapon. Additionally, the agreement prevented Iran from commissioning its Arak Reactor, which is capable of producing plutonium, and restricted research and development activities in other nuclear facilities. It also cut off all of Iran’s other potential pathways to obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Iran was put under the strictest IAEA inspections. It is believed that IAEA inspections of Iranian sites constituted more than 50 per cent of its global inspections. Iran strictly followed all the provisions of the agreement, although even under Obama, the sanctions that had been imposed on Iran were not completely lifted, contrary to the terms of the agreement. Iran opened its markets to the West, and it was hoped that Iran’s massive market of over 90 million people with some of the biggest oil, gas and rare earth deposits would provide a boost to Western economies.
However, in 2018, under pressure from Netanyahu, Trump withdrew from the deal and imposed maximum pressure on Iran. Other European signatories to the deal promised to go ahead with their commitments. Iran continued to abide by the terms of the deal for nearly two years after US withdrawal and the violation of Western commitments, but when President Biden who had promised to return to the deal refused to do so, again under pressure from Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby, Iran decided to increase the level of enrichment as a bargaining chip.
However, in numerous reports, the IAEA confirmed that there had been no violation of the safeguards. Even as late as March 2025, Trump’s national security director, Tulsi Gabbard, stated that there were no signs that Iran was aiming at getting nuclear weapons. Allegations that Iran was building a nuclear weapon, which were constantly raised by Netanyahu, have been fully investigated by the IAEA and found to be unfounded.
Iran did exceed the limits imposed upon it by the JCPOA, long after Trump withdrew from the deal, but it did not move towards weaponisation. Netanyahu claimed that “Iran has produced enough highly enriched uranium for nine atom bombs.” This is an outright falsehood. The most recent IAEA report confirmed that Iran had not enriched uranium above 60 per cent U-235 and there had been no indication of weaponisation.
All this is important to bear in mind to see how Netanyahu goaded the United States to get involved in another potentially disastrous war based on manifest lies. Even if some people who do not follow the news carefully can be fooled by Netanyahu’s lies, all the experts have rejected Netanyahu’s allegations. On Friday, June 20, 2025, just hours before President Trump ordered American attacks on Iran, over 1,000 leading international scholars issued a statement calling for an immediate stop to Israel’s war on Iran and a warning against the US joining this disastrous and illegal war.
The other lie by neocons is that Iran was not negotiating in good faith. Only a day before he was assassinated by the first wave of Israeli attacks on residential areas in Tehran, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and former head of Iranian National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, sat for an interview with NBC News to communicate Iran’s readiness to sign a nuclear deal with President Trump in exchange for lifting economic sanctions. He emphasized in the interview that “Iran would commit to never making nuclear weapons, getting rid of its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium which can be weaponized, agree to enrich uranium only to the lower levels needed for civilian use, and allow international inspectors to supervise the process, in exchange for the immediate lifting of all economic sanctions on Iran.” Shamkhani further stated that “It’s still possible. If the Americans act as they say, for sure we can have better relations…it can lead to a better situation in the near future.”
In fact, it might have been the likelihood of an agreement between Iran and the Trump administration that persuaded Netanyahu to launch his so-called pre-emptive attack to disrupt the process of talks. He fears nothing more than a rapprochement between Iran and the United States.
A day after the Israeli attack, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a statement saying that Israel had carried out a unilateral action and the United States had not been involved in it. However, having seen that Netanyahu had already launched the attacks, which seemed to have been successful, Trump did not want to be left out and decided to own the attacks. He openly contradicted his secretary of state and described the attacks as “excellent”, claiming that he had known about them all along. He repeated Netanyahu’s statement by saying, “We have full control of Iranian skies.”
I don’t know what is worse of these two options. The first option is that Trump was not involved in Israel’s aggressive attacks on Iranian nuclear installations, as his own statements only a day before the attacks indicated, and he was manipulated to take part in the attacks, against his will. The other option is that he was involved right from the start and pretended otherwise in order to deceive the Iranians. Either of those options is damning and portray him as a weak man. He was either pushed by Netanyahu to start a war, which he had always said he was against, or he deliberately lied. Neither of these is worthy of a US president.
There was another embarrassing case of deception. He gave Iran another two weeks to return to negotiations after the Israeli attacks, but two days after announcing it, he attacked Iran. I wonder how anyone can trust or respect the words of the US president, who is so unreliable.
What most people seem to have ignored is that Israel, which advocates bombing any country which might develop even a civilian nuclear programme, possesses an arsenal of nuclear weapons amassed through deception, even against its chief benefactor, the United States. The conventional estimate is that Israel’s nuclear stockpile comprises between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads, which makes the tiny country the world’s 9th or 4th largest nuclear power, right after Russia, the U.S., and China.
Only two days after the US attack, events are taking a turn for the worse. There have already been Iranian attacks on US bases in Qatar. International flights have been cancelled in all the Persian Gulf states, which have some of the busiest airports in the world. The attacks that have been carried out so far have been limited, and the countries involved have been warned in advance, which indicates that Iran does not want to escalate the conflict. The Iranian Parliament has voted to instruct the government to close the Strait of Hormuz. If the bill is approved by the Iranian Security Council and carried out, it could push oil prices beyond $100 a barrel.
There have also been some more ominous reports indicating that the crisis can get much worse. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, said on Sunday that some countries are “ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”
“Deescalation,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2025
Before things get out of hand and turn into a global conflagration, cooler heads need to prevail and try to calm the situation down. The main responsibility lies with Iranian politicians not to allow their emotions to cloud their better judgment. Iran can certainly deliver some blows to its opponents, but they are no match for the United States and the Western world. They should not allow themselves to be manipulated into a major war, which benefits the ambitions of some countries that might want to use them in a proxy war against their opponents. They must return to the negotiating table and show that they are not trying to obtain nuclear weapons as they have always professed.
However, in order to achieve a peaceful solution, it is incumbent upon the West to restrain Netanyahu, who seems to be out of control and who is prepared to do anything and sacrifice its allies in order to remain in power. He should be told in the strongest terms to stop his illegal attacks against Iran, and also to withdraw his forces from Gaza in return for the freeing of all hostages, and accept a two-state solution. Despite all the countries that he blames for Israel’s problems, the fact remains that the Palestinian issue is at the heart of the problems in the Middle East.
The ghastly genocide in Gaza has turned not only Arabs and Muslims against Israel’s policies, but practically the entire Global South and even many of Israel’s allies see Israel as a pariah state. In this day and age, the continuation of a terrorist apartheid state, engaged in the worst genocide since the Second World War, is untenable and must stop. The West should not trample upon its cherished values, crush the global economy and drag the world to a catastrophic war for the sake of a maniacal, genocidal regime.
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