After weeks of threats, over the weekend, on 28 February 2028 Donald Trump, who declares himself to be the Chair of a “Board of Peace”, joined with his friend Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel who is accused of committing genocide in Gaza, to begin an unprovoked and illegal war against Iran while diplomatic efforts were still in progress aimed at preventing such a war. killing Iran's supreme leader and top military leaders, prompting authorities to retaliate with strikes on Israel and US bases across the Gulf.
It is perhaps not surprising. Trump has recently sent a large military force to the Middle East so one might have suspect he had been planning to attack the country all that time.It remains to be seen whether these strikes will be fairly limited, or are the opening of an extended conflict. Whatever happens, though, one thing is clear – that this use of force by the US and Israel is manifestly illegal. It is as plain a violation of the prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter as one could possibly have.
Donald Trump did NOT seek Congressional approval for this operation, and completely bypassed congress to launch these attacks. The attacks are also manifestly illegal under international law. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
There was no imminent threat to justify starting a war with Iran. Instead, Donald Trump chose the path of aggression and more chaos. Attacking a country during active negotiations is a violation of the principle of "good faith" under Article 2(2) of the UN Charter.
Donald Trump said the attacks were intended to end Iran's nuclear weapons programme and bring about regime change and urged Iranians to "take over your government", while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the goal was to "remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran". Forcible regime change violates the foundational principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention under the UN Charter.
It shouldn’t matter what your opinion is on the Iranian government, Trump and Netanyahu’s attack on Iran is an illegal act of aggression .Their actions are no different from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo
Many people have opined that Donald Trump’s main motivation for attacking Iran is to distract attention away from the Epstein files, and the fact he’s mentioned tens of thousands of times in the documents that have been released so far.
The joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran represent a further erosion of the international legal order. Israel and the United States launched Operation Shield of Judah and Operation Epic Fury while diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Tehran were actively underway on Iran's nuclear programme. Just two days earlier, the most intense round of US-Iran talks concluded in Geneva, with both sides agreeing to continue. Trump indicated he would give negotiators more time. Then came the bombs. Israel said the strikes were "preventive", meaning they were to prevent Iran from developing a capacity to be a threat. But preventive war has no legal basis under international law.
The UN Security Council did not authorise any military action, meaning the sole lawful pathway for the use of force for self-defence was never pursued. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
Central to the current crisis is that it was Trump who ended the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, which had regional support for controlling Iran's nuclear program. The US director of national intelligence testified in March 2025 that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons, which the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency affirmed.
US intelligence also reportedly indicated it would take three years for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. Moreover, US and Israeli strikes on Iran last year had put the programme back by months.Trump claimed Iran's nuclear programme had been obliterated.
Regime change by force is unlawful Trump said the attacks were intended to end Iran's nuclear weapons programme and bring about regime change. Trump urged Iranians to "take over your government", while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the goal was to "remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran". Forcible regime change violates the foundational principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention under the UN Charter.
The strikes targeted Iran's supreme leader, president, and military chief of staff, as well as military infrastructure. Deliberately targeting heads of state also crosses a threshold that distinguishes military operations from acts of aggression. Attacking heads of state is illegal under New York Convention, for obvious reasons of stability.
With the death of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the power vacuum will only increase the hardship on the ground for Iranians. In addition, promises to return the shah - Iran's previous monarch - have not considered the authoritarian implications of such rule.
One of the most absurd things about these attacks is the way the US and their vassal states are attempting to reverse-reality by casting Iran as the aggressor. Mike Waltz even attempted to lecture the United Nations about Iran’s "unprovoked and indiscriminate" response to the US-Israeli assault on their country!
As Caitlin Johnson said: Only the United States could bomb a country, kill its leader, massacre its children, declare the intention to destroy its military and topple its government, and then call that country's retaliation against US military bases "unprovoked".
It’s outlandish that they seem to imagine people are dumb enough to accept their utterly backwards version of events. After years of promising he would not conduct military operations aimed at regime change, Donald Trump has launched the second regime-change operation in two months. His reckless actions prove that his administration cannot be trusted.
Attacking a country during ongoing negotiations is a low blow, even for the United States, and it’s certain to further undermine the US’s international reputation.
Donald Trump has already proven the US’s unreliability by imposing tariffs on trade partners despite assurances that he wouldn’t, and now he’s demonstrated that negotiation with the US is essentially pointless, because they’ll just pretend to be negotiating in good faith, then do whatever they want. Netanyahu has spent three decades attempting to goad US Presidents into attacking Iran with lurid claims about their nuclear programme (Israel is the only country in the middle east to actually have nuclear weapons). It turns out that Donald Trump was the only one stupid enough to actually do it.
Keir Starmer’s response to the situation has been absolutely lamentable. The man is supposed to be a human rights lawyer, but not only does he refuse to call out the illegality of the US/Israeli attacks, he’s actually seeking to draw the UK into the conflict by giving Trump permission to use British RAF bases to launch their attacks!
Allowing British bases to be used in an illegal war of aggression is a catastrophic and historic mistake. Britain has been dragged into another war because our Prime Minister would rather appease Donald Trump than stand up for international law.Yet again, proof that Starmer has zero integrity! He knows he is joining an illegal war of aggression, the blood of any British service personnel killed and anyone they murder will be on his hands!
Starmer has put British lives at risk in order to participate in Trump's illegal attack on Iran. No debate. No vote in parliament .When he stood for leader, he denounced "unquestionably blindly following the Americans". He said he'd legislate so the Commons voted on military action. The biggest conman in UK political history.
Britain joining the illegal war on Iran will not benefit a single bus driver, a single teacher, a single nurse, a single care worker, a single business owner, a single farmer in Britain . It will only benefit billionaires around the world. Iran is NOT Britain's war.
These attacks are yet another demonstration that the so-called rules-based international order is over. Israel can carry out a live streamed genocide in front of the entire world for two years, and countries like the US and UK don’t just refuse to stop it, they actively support it.
Donald Trump openly fantasises about annexing Canada and Greenland. And the US kidnaps Venezuela’s leader and assassinates Iran’s, in complete violation of international law. It’s not just that the US and Israel seem to think they can do whatever they want by force now, it’s the fact that it renders all the western leaders’ criticisms of Putin and Russia over the Ukraine war utterly hypocritical.
If cowardly western leaders like Starmer, Merz, and Macron are willing to turn a blind eye to lawlessness; genocide; war-crimes; military expansionism; kidnap; and extrajudicial assassinations, why should anyone take any of their criticism of Russia’s behaviour seriously?
Over 150 people were killed in a US attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, most of them little girls between the ages of seven and twelve. It's an indisputable war crime that has been largely ignored or sanitized by the genocidal western media and its typical racism and dehumanization towards people of color, exposes the real objectives of this aggression by two rogue nuclear powers.
This atrocity is proof that the whole story about attacking Iran to liberate the Iranian people from their oppressive leaders is absolute nonsense. If anything, massacrering a load of children in their school alongside their teachers is likely to harden the resolve of Iranians to stand up to violent US imperialism.
Just imagine if it had been the other way around and a hostile state had attacked a school in the United States or Israel. There would be wall-to-wall outrage, but because the victims are little Muslim girls, most of the depraved western media class are studiously looking in the other direction.
The first wave of strikes ended up killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but that’s not the victory it might sound like. Khamenei was an 86 year old man, and his reputation is now cemented as a martyr.
Iran has multiple lines of succession, and the idea that taking out the old man at the top would topple the regime is extremely fanciful.
Bombings and assassinations may well destabilize an unpopular and weakened regime. But it is highly unlikely that Washington can then fly in Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, to establish a new monarchy. In a political vacuum, power goes to those with the guns. You don't liberate people by carpet bombing them.
The Revolutionary Guards, with 200,000 members and an estimated one million in associated militias, are most likely to seize control now that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is reportedly dead. They could be even worse for Iranians than the clerical regime.
The most baffling thing about Europe’s support for regime change in Iran is that it contradicts its own interests. One of the biggest impacts this needless and unlawful war is likely to deliver is an intensification of the "cost of living crisis"
The price of crude oil has already surged after Iran’s announcement of their closure of the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, which carries about one fifth of the world’s oil supply.
Higher oil prices mean higher energy prices; higher petrol and diesel prices; and higher transportation costs. All of which amounts to increased inflation.
Oil isn’t the only commodity to pass through the Strait of Hormuz either, with one third of the world’s fertilizer supply passing through the narrow 3km wide tanker shipping lane.
If inflation does begin to erode people’s spending power again, the blame lies squarely with Donald Trump, Israel, and the United States’ pathetic vassal states like the UK.
If Trump and the Israelis succeed in collapsing the Iranian government and provoking civil war in Iran, there will be millions of refugees. Iran already accounts for a significant proportion of refugees coming to Europe, and deliberate destabilisation there is likely to increase the flow many times over.
This makes Nigel Farage’s giddy support for the US/Israeli attacks particularly incoherent. If he’s so against middle eastern refugees coming to Europe, why is he so keen on the destabilisation of Iran, and the inevitable consequence of even more Muslim refugees?
Refugees from Iran aren’t the only ones to consider though. Tens of thousands of tax-dodgers in places like Qatar and the UAE are expecting the UK government to pick up the bill for rescuing them from the conflict zone. They fled to their dodgy middle east tax havens because they didn’t want to pay tax in the UK, and now they expect the UK government to pay the cost of their repatriation. The entitlement is absolutely staggering.
We’ve seen the diabolical consequences of "regime change" play out time and again in the middle east. The illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 killed hundreds of thousands, created millions of refugees, and turned the country into the world’s largest terrorism breeding ground.
Regime change in Libya turned the country to chaos and delivered deadly blowback to the UK when a Libyan-trained Islamist fanatic carried out the Manchester Arena atrocity in 2017.
Regime change in Syria has handed the country over to ISIS. The Islamist fanatics who were Western-funded allies in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation; enemies when they bombed the World Trade Centre in 1993; allies again when they were fighting against Serbia in the late 90s; enemies again when they carried out the September 11th attacks; and now allies again now that the US helped them take over Damascus!
Doing the same thing over and again is the definition of insanity, so anyone supporting this deliberate destabilisation strategy must be either insane, or actually enthusiastic about all the death; instability; refugees; economic chaos; Islamist extremism; and blowback.
Netanyahu just said in a new video that he has been “yearning” for war with Iran for 40 years… and with his friend Donald Trump, he finally has it. This also explains his “days away from nuclear weapons” rhetoric for 40 years. Netanyahu very clearly controls Trump.
Israel wanted war with Iran, now Israeli’s are calling on the UN to stop Iran retaliating Zionists got exactly what they wanted, and no amount of tears by Israeli politicians live on TV will change the world’s view on Israel.
There's zero chance that Iran will surrender to the USA In the same that many Americans are brainwashed and will support their tyrannical Government no matter what because 'America is the best country on Earth' Iranians will resist it because they know it is one of the worst. Iran has the right to defend itself.
There are many other possible broader consequences, including sustained missile and drone strikes on Israel and US Arab allies, terror attacks on US interests around the world, possible cyber attacks, and even Iran racing to process its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium into a workable nuclear device. Trump’s declared aim of regime change makes this an existential war for Iran’s leaders. Nothing is off the table. The war is unpredictable, and death and destruction are coming without any serious deliberations in Congress or consultation with allies. It is the impulsive decision of one deranged man.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the heads of UN agencies have condemned Saturday’s joint Israeli and US attacks on Iran and the Iranian retaliatory strikes on Israel and the Gulf Regions. Mr. Guterres declared that the military escalation in the region undermines international peace and security, and recalled that all Member States must “respect their obligations under international law, including the Charter of the United Nations,” which prohibits “the threat of the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” He called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and de-escalation and warned that a failure to do so risks a wider regional conflict with grave consequences for civilians and regional stability.
There has been no harsher critic to U.S. military action in Iran than Pope Leo XIV: “War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. “Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.” “Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. “This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.”
Russia and China have also criticised the US-Israeli actions and urged an immediate end to military operations and a return to diplomatic negotiations. The international legal order is now in free-fall. When powerful states conduct illegal wars under the guise of prevention, weaponise diplomacy as cover, and openly pursue regime change, the "rules-based order" is literally dead.
Trump did not go through months of arguments and manipulation of intelligence to convince Americans to go to war. He didn’t even pretend to mobilize democratic support. Instead, Trump went to war on a whim, solely on his order, alone and imperial. This is not how democracies go to war. It is how dictatorships do. And we know it cannot end well.
Trump and his aides have in recent days and hours claimed, without credible evidence, that Iran had restarted its nuclear program, had enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days and was developing long-range missiles that could "soon" be capable of hitting the United States. All three of these claims are false.
This is the second time in less than a year that the United States and Israel, both nuclear-armed states, have launched attacks on Iran in the midst of ongoing U.S.-Iranian negotiations regarding Tehran's nuclear program.
As the Omani Foreign Minister and mediator of the talks reported just hours before Trump's attacks on Feb. 28, the U.S.-Iranian negotiations were very serious and making significant progress toward an effective, verifiable, lasting deal that could have blocked Iran's capabilities to build nuclear weapons. The United States could have and should have negotiated in good faith with Iran to arrive at effective solutions that address concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and stockpiles of enriched uranium, including by securing the return of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors who were ejected from Iran following the June 2025 U.S.-Israeli attacks.
The return of the inspectors will be further delayed in the midst of a potentially drawn-out conflict. Without effective monitoring, the whereabouts and security of Iran's nuclear material will now become even more uncertain.
Although Iran's current leadership is repressive and the Iranian people deserve to choose their own government, war is not the answer. There is no lawful justification for it. Diplomacy was possible. Peace was possible. Instead, Israel and the United States chose war. It’s not a pre-emptive strike.This is the behaviour of rogue states.
You literally will find it hard to find a mainstream news website in the west that will headline this US-Israeli attack on Iran as an illegal war of aggression under international law. I know we shouldn't expect anything else but the propaganda is still kind of unbelievable
The U.S. Congress and responsible states around the world have a solemn moral and legal duty to oppose this rogue aggression, beginning with emergency legislation and international mediation to stop further hostilities by all sides.
If Congress fails to act, the message to the president will be clear: He is empowered to use the military whenever he would like, however he would like, regardless of the Constitution’s demands. There is no telling where such unbridled power will lead in the hands of a president who has openly contemplated military action against multiple countries.
Operation Epic Fury is what Trump and his band of terrorists are calling the attack on Iran. We will witness an Epic Shit Show where more people including children will certainly die at the hands of the US and Israel.
Let me be clear this is a crime by both terrorist states. The United States is not the victim, Israel is not the victim. They are the perpetrators, they started an illegal war of aggression against Iran under false pretences. A reminder that Donald Trump is a convicted felon, while Benjamin Netanyahu is being sought by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes. Both are proven and habitual liars.
The world must unite to hold the Israeli and US perpetrators accountable for these war crimes. Otherwise we are all complicit in the destruction of international law.
Trump is NOT "defending American people" by striking Iran. Trump is putting the American people at a much higher risk of terrorism and placing the world on the brink of World War III.
Make no mistake. The US/Israel war against Iran is a colonial war. Like the genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Iraq and Libya, the incineration of Vietnam and Laos, it is war to subjugate the people of the global South and annihilate their resistance. Colonialism has no place in humanity and it must be defeated.
Meanwhile Israel has closed off Gaza entirely, using its own attacks on Iran as an excuse to seal off an entire population from receiving food and medical aid. Genocide in Gaza continues because the international community allows Israel to maintain an illegal blockade and siege on Gaza.
US and Israeli illegal strikes on Iran have nothing to do with nuclear threats and everything to do with regime change. With grave risks of a devastating war across the Middle East, join this critical protest!
And please sign the following petition to stop using UK military bases for strikes on Iran?
No comments:
Post a Comment