Nadene Goldfoot
Yesterday at around 5am my time, Israel attacked Iran. Following were the American planes. This is war. One guess is that it will last about 6 days. What a miraculous feat! Every bit of it is spectacular, the secretiveness they kept, getting there and fueling, hitting exact places and people like the Ayatollah who is now dead, and with two countries, Israel and USA, not bumping into each other in the sky.
The question comes up of WHAT NOW? Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi (born 1960) is the exiled Crown Prince of Iran, serving as a prominent opposition figure against the Islamic Republic and advocating for a secular democracy. As the eldest son of the last Shah, he has lived in the U.S. since 1978 and is currently based in the Washington, D.C. area. He's been guiding the Revolution youth from the USA, and said he would join them when he could get there, I presume, safely.
I'm waiting for the main newscasters to say something about this as they all, including Trump and Netanyahu, seem to know nothing about it. I can't imagine the Crown Prince not telling them of his plans.
I'm reading this, and I have to ask: how does one describe the "spectacular" bombing of a girls' school that killed 118 children in Minab? Does Trump consider that a military target? Over 200 Iranians are dead, more than 700 maimed and wounded, and 3 American soldiers killed.
ReplyDeleteThat was only day one.
I want to walk through how we arrived here, because the narrative your post constructs omits everything that actually matters:
We had a deal. Trump killed it.
In 2015, Iran signed the JCPOA. Iran was in full compliance. The IAEA confirmed it. Iran had ceased enriching uranium beyond civilian levels and granted inspectors full access. In 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew, reimposed crushing sanctions, and severed the European trade that was Iran's incentive to comply. After we broke the deal, Iran resumed enrichment. We manufactured the very crisis we are now bombing them over.
Trump told us he already solved this.
In June 2025, the US bombed Iran's nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Trump declared them "completely and totally obliterated." The White House published a page titled "Iran's Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated, and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News." Yet US intelligence found the strikes only set Iran back one to two years. So either Trump was lying then, or he is lying now about why we need to bomb them again. Both cannot be true simultaneously.
We were in active peace negotiations when we attacked.
The Omani foreign minister, who mediated three rounds of talks, said one day before the bombs fell that "substantial progress" had been made and a "peace deal is within our reach." Iran had expressed willingness to surrender its enriched uranium and accept comprehensive inspections. Technical talks were scheduled for the following week in Vienna. We bombed them instead. This is the behavior of a nation that needed negotiations to fail and, when they didn't fail fast enough, simply bypassed them.
This is illegal under both US and international law.
Trump launched this without congressional authorization. The Constitution is unambiguous: only Congress can declare war. Members of both parties, including Representative Warren Davidson, an Army Ranger, and Senator Rand Paul, have called this unconstitutional. The White House has not presented a legal justification to the public or to Congress. This is a pattern: Venezuela two months ago, now Iran.
On the fantasy of "regime change."
You mention Crown Prince Pahlavi as though this is a hopeful prospect. Ask Iraq how Western-imposed regime change worked. Ask Libya. Ask Afghanistan. Representative Seth Moulton, a Marine who served in Iraq, said it directly: "The two basic problems with Bush's War in Iraq were that it was based on a lie and there was no plan for what comes next." We are watching the identical playbook.
There is nothing miraculous about killing children, assassinating a head of state while peace talks are underway, or initiating an illegal war premised on justifications that contradict what the White House told us last year. What your post celebrates as spectacle, the rest of the world recognizes as catastrophe: the slaughter of children, the sabotage of active diplomacy, and the familiar machinery of American imperialism grinding toward its next forever war.
We should know better by now.