'The Iran War: Don't Blame Israel, Blame the Empire and Its Demagogue'
"Israel has been a junior partner of the US empire’s Middle East policy since its military success in the 1967 Six Day War. While there are instances of Israel pushing the US into conflict, most directly in the US-Israel war against Iran in June 2025, the current war in Iran was driven by the US empire’s perceived interests plus the Trump factor."
"Israel has long been pressuring the US to fight Iran, but the empire did not find it worthwhile to initiate a full-scale war against the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress during the Obama era warned of an impending Iranian nuclear weapon. But, instead, President Barack Obama continued the diplomatic route through establishing the Iran Deal, ensuring Iran would not develop nuclear arms. Long before that, neocons dreamed about attacking Iran, from John Bolton’s pressuring the Bush administration to attack the Persian nation to John McCain’s 2007 bomb Iran song."
"In addition to the neocons, several other segments of the population have long been eager for an Iran war: Christian evangelicals, Christian Zionists, Jewish Zionists, and pro-Israeli American lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Also, the pro-military US public, while not supportive of this war, seems to have an inadequate sense of war’s gravity based on their overwhelming majority support for most American wars since WWII. Then, of course, there is the American military-industrial complex, which is seeing high demand for armaments and missile technology as the US spends at least $1 billion a day on the Iran War. With oil at over $100 a barrel, the other main corporate beneficiary to the war is the petroleum industry."
"These are all very active and influential internal American elements that have existed for quite some time. With a demagogue in the White House seeking to turn the US into a dictatorship, war has proven to be the answer, whether with Venezuela, threatening a takeover of Greenland, and now Iran. An important factor in pushing President Donald Trump are the Epstein files: war is not only good for accumulating power domestically but a convenient distraction from scandal."
Continued at link:
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-and-trump-own-iran-war