America has no plan. Donald Trump has admitted that the people Washington had in mind to run Iran are now dead – and other candidates may soon die. So it may appear that the US-Israeli war machine will achieve no victory because there is no definition of what that may look like.
But it is, to quote Senator Elizabeth Warren, who spoke after an in-depth White House briefing on the war, “much worse than that”.
We have been here before – and learnt very few lessons.
The lies told before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the incompetence that followed, had, at least in part, their roots in the same soil.
The view, among hard-right Israelis and their Christian evangelical supporters, is that Saddam Hussein in Iraq and now the theocracy in Iran needed to be toppled to preserve the long-term security of the Jewish state.
This was spelt out in a 1996 document entitled A Clean Break – A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, which was prepared for Benjamin Netanyahu by men who went on to become powerful figures in the Bush administration – notably neoconservatives Douglas Feith and David Wurmser.
They worked hard with, and in, a secretive Pentagon intelligence cell called The Office of Special Plans to come up with the lies that al-Qaeda was supported by Saddam, and that he was close to building a nuclear weapon, which were used on both sides of the Atlantic to justify the catastrophic Iraq war.
These were lies. Just as it is untrue that Iran was close to completing a nuclear weapon, and posed an imminent threat to the US (or its allies), or that the US cared a single jot for the vast numbers of Iranians desperate for emancipation from the violent oppression of Iran’s ayatollahs.
The toppling of Saddam might have suited Israel back in 2003. And Netanyahu may be a devotee of Vladimir Putin’s military chief, Valery Garazimov, in believing that chaos in the ranks of the enemy is victory.
So Israel’s agenda in Iran is clear. Smash the place up and let someone else sort it out. If Iran, like Iraq, collapses into civil war – so be it. Tehran won’t have any nukes, it won’t be able to sponsor groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, or the Houthis in Yemen, and thousands of years of Persian culture can go down the plughole of chaos and anarchy.
In 2003 and now in 2026, toppling Middle Eastern regimes suits Netanyahu and his far-right ultra-nationalists.
Smashing the way to peace in the region is a gamble that Israel has been happy to make, while simultaneously grabbing territory on the West Bank and now in Gaza.
The gamble may not pay off, but there is a real-world case to be made for such ruthless bloodletting.
For the US and its allies, if they’re sucked further into the Iranian quagmire, it’s “much worse than that”.
Sure, the oil majors may fantasise about getting their hands on the fossil fuels in Iran. Decent folks around the world will be delighted – even though it’s all illegal under US and international law – that the regime in Tehran has been decapitated and that the fabric of oppression across Iran is being smashed by Israeli and American bombs.
But there is a madness at the heart of the Trump administration. A religious fanaticism that has its equal only among… the ayatollahs.
In 2018, Pete Hegseth, then a Fox News commentator, gave a speech at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which he said that Israel’s foundation in 1948 had been “a miracle”, as had the 1967 six-day war victory – and the 2017 decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.
He also said he foresaw another miracle – the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple on the site of what is now the Haram al Sharif in Jerusalem – a sacred site in Islam.
This, in the tradition of Christian end-times belief, is an essential part of the return of Christ.
In Judaism, it is part of the preconditions required for the first coming of “the messiah”, and both are to be underpinned by the in-gathering of all Jews to modern-day Israel ahead of “the rapture”, when the righteous can ascend into heaven.
Hegseth has a Jerusalem Cross, a Crusader symbol that has been adopted by the far-right Christian national movement, tattooed on his chest.
He clearly believes in what he says when he relishes what the US-Israeli campaign is doing in Iran and “punching down” on the Iranian regime.
There is sound politics behind pushing the end times philosophy in America. Some 39 per cent of Americans, and 47 per cent of evangelical protestants, believe that we are living through “the end of times”, according to a 2022 survey by the Pew Institute.
Two-thirds of evangelicals believe that Trump’s election was part of a divine plan. Last year, YouGov found that 43 per cent of Americans believe demons exist.
Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Jerusalem who is an evangelical Christian, believes God gave Jews the “deeds” to Israel, and when asked if Netanyahu should extend Israel’s borders to the Euphrates, said: “If they decided to take it all, it would be fine with me.”
This makes little sense to most Europeans, who enjoy Hollywood’s vampires and demons on TV but know that they’re myths – not reality.
And among Iran’s regime leaders, a belief that the country has been creating the necessary preconditions for the revelation of the hidden Mahdi (messiah) is central to their temporal claims to power and part of the Iranian constitution.
The role of the supreme leader in Iran is to prepare for the emergence of the Mahdi.
Preconditions for this will be the sinking of an army being led against the just – which may explain why Tehran has ruled out ceasefire talks.
It may sound mad – but this is reality in the corridors of power in Washington and in the bunkers where the ayatollahs hide today.
Source: independent.co.uk