Iconos

Iconos
Volcán Popocatépetl

jueves, 30 de abril de 2026

Israel’s New World Order: Nothing but the Threat of Endless Death

by Andy Worthington | Apr 30, 2026 

https://original.antiwar.com/worthington/2026/04/29/israels-new-world-order-nothing-but-the-threat-of-endless-death/

For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel has unilaterally — and with jaw-dropping illegality — reimagined warfare as a religiously-mandated existential struggle against alleged “forces of darkness” in which there are no rules, and no sense of proportionality or restraint.

Everyone in the Gaza Strip — 2.3 million people at the start of this “conflict” — has been regarded as, in one way or another, “associated” with Hamas, the administrative government of Gaza whose military wing, along with other armed factions, broke out of the “open-air prison” of Gaza on October 7, 2023, killing hundreds of Israeli security personnel, and hundreds of civilians.

Completely supported by almost all the nations of the west, who approved the shamefully ill-defined notion that Israel had “the right to defend itself”, Israel has reinterpreted “self-defense” to mean genocide, inflicting such disproportionate destruction on Gaza that almost its entire built environment has been destroyed, and over ten percent of its population — a quarter of a million people — have been killed or wounded.

As of today, the official death toll, as assessed by Gaza’s shattered health ministry, is 72,594, with 172,404 people injured, and with, of course, many of those injured suffering life-changing and in many cases life-threatening injuries.

Even since a ceasefire was declared six months ago, Israel has continued to directly kill and wound Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, breaking the ceasefire on thousands of occasions, leading to another 818 deaths, and 2,301 injuries.

On April 20, UN Women published an article, “Who are the women and girls behind Gaza war’s horrific casualty toll?”, pointing out that over half of those killed were women and girls — at least 22,000 women and 16,000 girls, proportions much higher than in previous conflicts in Gaza.

As the article also explained, “Nearly 11,000 women and girls in Gaza have sustained injuries so severe they now face lifelong disabilities.” In addition, “Nearly one million women and girls have been displaced in Gaza, with many being forced into displacement an average of four times. Access to water and food has been severely limited, with nearly 790,000 women and girls experiencing crisis-level or catastrophic levels of food insecurity.”

Nor must we forget the men and boys who make up the other 34,000 victims of Israel’s genocide, of whom at least 10,000 were children, while the majority of the men were also civilians.

Israel itself admitted, in documents released last year, and subsequently analyzed by Israel’s +972 Magazine and the Guardian, and which I wrote about here, that, by its own assessment, 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians, having only been able to verify that 7,330 individuals had been combatants.

Moreover, numerous responsible analysts have also undertaken detailed research establishing that the true death toll is many times higher than the figure compiled by Gaza’s health ministry — perhaps, as I have discussed at various times over the last two years, anywhere between 150,000 and several hundred thousand.

These much higher figures rely, primarily, on assessments of the number of secondary deaths in addition to those resulting from direct military attacks — caused by the collapse of healthcare services, shortage of food and clean water, and the spread of diseases.

Israel’s ongoing efforts to increase the death toll in Gaza, despite a ceasefire

On every front, Israel has, over the last 30 months, maximised its efforts to create as many secondary deaths as possible, through prolonged sieges on all supplies of food, water, fuel and medical supplies, through the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and its entire healthcare sector, through the destruction of Gaza’s sewage systems, and, most recently, through a refusal to allow in any kind of machinery for clearance and reconstruction, most urgently needed for the mountains of garbage that have built up and that have become a significant health hazard.

As the poet and writer Omar Hamad reported on X just yesterday, “Gaza is witnessing over 17,000 cases of rodent-related and parasitic infections among its displaced population. This is the reality left behind by the genocide, an environment forced upon Gaza by Israel’s destruction and its total ban on the entry of insecticides and life-saving medicines.”

As the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported just last week, there is “a proliferation of rodents, cockroaches, flies, and other pests, contributing to disease transmission, with a high prevalence of scabies, lice, and skin infections. The scale and persistence of such public health risks are linked to overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, and limited access to hygiene services.”

Investigations of the various displacement sites in which the majority of the population are living “indicated that rodents or pests were frequently visible in 1,326 of the 1,644 assessed sites (81 per cent), affecting about 1.45 million people. Additional alerts highlighted persistent sanitation‑related risks, including sewage in surrounding streets (61 per cent of sites), accumulated solid waste (56 per cent), and flooding or stagnant water (24 per cent). Traces of open defecation and dead animals were also reported. Only 3 per cent of sites indicated no visible environmental health hazards within or around the site perimeter.”

As the report added, “These environmental conditions are closely mirrored in reported household‑level health concerns. A total of 1,322 sites (81 per cent) reported the presence of skin infections or rashes, including scabies, lice, bedbugs, or other ectoparasitic infestations. Skin infections or rashes were reported in nearly two‑thirds of sites, lice in over 65 per cent, and bedbugs in more than half. Other ectoparasitic infestations were identified in over one‑quarter of sites. According to health partners, more than 70,000 cases of rodent and ectoparasitic infestations have been reported so far in 2026.”

Aid agencies are doing what they can, but are restrained by deliberate Israeli obstruction, either because they “rely on items that are largely unavailable in Gaza”, or because they are “often difficult to take in”, because “implementation requires lengthy processes including procurement, approvals, shipment, deployment and safe application.”

The genocide, in other words, still grinds on, deliberately maintained by Israel, which is clearly still trying to kill as many Palestinians as possible.

Israel still wants everyone in Gaza to die

When pushed, Israeli officials still talk about their hopes for the “voluntary migration” of the population, as though it is some kind of humanitarian option, but it has always been a mirage, because no country will take in significant numbers of the Palestinians, either because of increasing anti-immigrant sentiment, or because it would so clearly involve the crimes of ethnic cleansing or forced displacement on a significant scale.

When Israel reluctantly re-opened the Rafah Crossing with Egypt in February, it was an opportunity for senior Israeli officials to demonstrate their commitment to their claim of wanting to encourage people to leave, but, instead, they have persistently restricted the numbers of those allowed out, which, yesterday, prompted the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom to ask, “Why is Israel preventing Gazans from leaving?”

Polling conducted last year, by what Reuters called “a think tank based in Ramallah and funded by Western donors”, which may not have been reliable, apparently found “that 49% of those surveyed declared that they would be willing to apply to Israel to help them emigrate via Israeli ports and airports, against 50% who said they would not be willing to do so.”

The reason Israel doesn’t want to make even the most cursory efforts to encourage Palestinians to leave Gaza, is, as senior officials, pundits and far too many Israeli citizens have made all too clear, with relentless barbarism, since October 7, is because they want everyone in Gaza to die, as I first pointed out nearly a year ago, when Israel stepped up its relentless extermination in Gaza, after deliberately breaking a six-week ceasefire in January and February, in an article entitled, Israel Wants to Kill Everyone in Gaza.

Not only did the Israelis admit it themselves, but numerous international organizations and genocide experts have, since January 2024, when the International Court of Justice warned of a “plausible” genocide being undertaken in Gaza, concluded, with increasing certainty, that the cumulative effect of all Israel’s actions since October 2023 has been undoubtedly and deliberately genocidal in intent, fulfilling four of the five indicators of genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention; namely, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, by “killing members of the group”, by “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, by “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, and by “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

To cite just a handful of examples, Amnesty International concluded that Israel’s actions constituted a genocide in December 2024, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel reached the same conclusion in September 2025, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, has published a series of reports (“Genocide as colonial erasure”, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide”, “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” and “Torture and genocide”), defining the contours of Israel’s genocide, and its support through governments in the west and businesses worldwide, and in July 2025 the prominent US-Israeli genocide scholar Omer Bartov wrote, in “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”, an article for the New York Times, “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”

In November 2024, Israel was finally hit with a legal blow that it couldn’t simply shrug off, when the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Although devious efforts were subsequently made to topple the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, in a manufactured sexual harassment scandal, and although the US has obligingly waged warfare on the court through the imposition of sweeping sanctions on its judges, the arrest warrants still stand, and both Netanyahu and Gallant are, as a result, unable to visit the 125 countries who are signatories to the Rome Statute that initiated the ICC in 1998.

From demands for silent compliance to AI-facilitated mass slaughter

The most grotesque innovation of the last 30 months has involved the use of AI (artificial intelligence) in military targeting.

For most of the 16 years before October 7, 2023, Israel sought to control the trapped population of Gaza through an insistence on silent compliance. Despite its total control of the border, not only preventing the entry and exit of the population, but also restricting the supplies that were allowed in, the Palestinians were meant to endure these persistent and deliberate deprivations in total silence.

When they did respond — primarily through militants firing missiles at Israel — the response was brutal, via intensive bombing campaigns that were sickeningly described by Israeli officials as a regular process of “mowing the lawn.” Every few years, these “wars” took place — Operation Summer Rains, a four-month offensive in 2006, Operation Cast Lead, a brutal three-week assault in 2009, the week-long Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, the 50 harrowing days of Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and the three-day Operation Black Belt in 2019.

Some of these attacks involved specific targeting, because Israel has controlled the Palestinian population registry for Gaza and the West Bank since its illegal occupation began in 1967, with any changes — including the registration of births, marriages, divorces, deaths or changes of address — requiring its approval.

With this vast database at its disposal, the opportunities for mass surveillance offered by smartphone technology, and the dawning capabilities of AI programs to process information more rapidly than human analysts, meant that, by 2021, when Israel launched Operation Guardian of the Walls, which lasted for eleven days, it was triumphantly described as “the world’s first AI war”, with the Jerusalem Post enthusiastically explaining how, “in the years prior to the fighting, the IDF established an advanced AI technological platform that centralized all data on terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip onto one system that enabled the analysis and extraction of the intelligence.”

As the article proceeded to explain, “Soldiers in Unit 8200, an Intelligence Corps elite unit, pioneered algorithms and code that led to several new programs called ‘Alchemist’, ‘Gospel’ and ‘Depth of Wisdom’, which were developed and used during the fighting”, with data collected through “signal intelligence (SIGINT), visual intelligence (VISINT), human intelligence (HUMINT), [and] geographical intelligence (GEOINT)”, including information collated “in real time.” The article enthused about how the IDF stated its belief that “using AI helped shorten the length of the fighting, having been effective and quick in gathering targets using super-cognition.”

Aviv Kochavi, then the head of the IDF, captured most compellingly how the new technology was transforming Israel’s concept of warfare. “in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets in a single day”, he said in admiration.

By October 2023, Israel had had another two and a half years to expand its AI-driven military targeting, and the result was devastation on an unprecedented scale, as apartment block after apartment block was levelled, and entire neighbourhoods were destroyed. The attacks looked remarkably like arbitrary carpet-bombing, but when some of those involved in the AI-driven military targeting programs publicly expressed their misgivings in revelatory investigations published in November 2023 and April 2024 (which I wrote about here and here), they revealed that what looked like random carpet-bombing was actually the result of a giddy enthusiasm amongst military commanders for the alleged accuracy of these apparently miraculous technological developments that allowed them to target and kill at a rate that was previously inconceivable.

While the commanders viewed the programs as a miracle, however, those who were perturbed behind the scenes recognized fundamental problems that were irreconcilable with notions of proportionality and accuracy that ought to underpin any military operations.

These whistleblowers identified a 10% error rate, which is shockingly high, but, more fundamentally, they were alarmed by the parameters set by those who were establishing the targeting programs, primarily because they included “low-level” targets, who may have been nothing more than employees of Hamas’ civilian administrative government, who were not legitimate targets, but also because “a system of mass surveillance”  had been established which assessed and ranked the likelihood of activity in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad), assigning “almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.”

As I explained in an article last month, The Horrors of AI-Driven Military Targeting, From Gaza to Iran:

Having learned “to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data”, the program then located similar “features” amongst the general population. Those with “several different incriminating features” would “reach a high rating”, and would automatically become “a potential target for assassination.”

Alarmingly, however, “These ‘features’ might include ‘being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently’ — even though the former is no guarantee of militancy, and the latter two might well involve no militancy whatsoever. As the sources explained, the AI program ‘sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once [unknowingly] belonged to a Hamas operative.’”

As a result, in the early weeks of the genocide, the AI program “clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants”, identifying them, and their homes, as “targets for possible air strikes”, even though that figure was more than the entirety of Hamas’s military membership, according to official Israeli statements.

Another key aspect of the programming was the tolerance of mass civilian casualties when pursuing “high-value” targets, via unheard-of rates of “collateral damage.” One, early on, involved “the killing of approximately 300 civilians” in an attack aimed at one individual, a figure that appalled an international law expert at the US State Department, who told the Guardian that they had “never remotely heard” of even “a one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable.”

In addition, another program, the sickeningly-named “Where’s Daddy?”, deliberately targeted individuals “while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity”, because, “from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses.”

As one of the sources explained, “In practice, the principle of proportionality did not exist.”

Nor too did any meaningful human oversight. One source, as I described it, “stated that human personnel often served only as a ‘rubber stamp’ for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about ’20 seconds’ to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.”

That 20-second review was therefore, the only measure of human oversight that prevented what was, in essence, a policy that I have described as “automated genocide.”

Legally, of course, this is a nightmare, as those involving in assessing the legality of war are increasingly recognizing. An article for the Georgetown Security Studies Review, for example, stated that, “By relying on AI, in some cases almost granting it executive authority, Israel is undermining principles of proportionality, distinction, and precaution”, as identified in a UN report in June 2024, which assessed attacks on civilian infrastructure in the first three months of Israel’s genocidal assault, before the central involvement of AI-driven military targeting had even been established.

As the Georgetown article noted, huge questions need to be asked about the conduct of war in the AI era when “the fate of thousands of lives [is] at the discretion of an automated system”, and when the removal of “even the slightest shred of humanity from it leaves us all as potential targets.”

Israel expands its depravity from Gaza to Lebanon and Iran

What we still don’t know, as Israel has eviscerated all sense of proportionality in its attacks on civilians, and has deliberately erased distinctions between militants and administrative workers in Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, is how much its other deadly targeting of key protected individuals — medical personnel and journalists — has involved AI-driven “terrorism” assessments, or whether these have been cynically grafted on after they were identified and killed.

What is clear, however, is that there has never been a conflict in which so many medical personnel and journalists have been killed, with so much deliberate misinformation invented afterwards in a sickening effort to justify their slaughter. Over 270 Palestinian journalists have been targeted and murdered in Gaza, and in September 2025 the health ministry reported that 1,722 health workers have been killed, with this figure including some of the 562 aid workers who have also been killed.

What we also know is that Israel has expanded the depraved, disproportionate model it established in Gaza to Lebanon, which has been suffering from Israeli depredations throughout the long blood-soaked decades of Israel’s existence.

In September 2024, stepping up its attacks on Hezbollah, which has long supported the Palestinians and has repeatedly engaged in attacks on Israel, a truly depraved mass attack, involving booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, was initiated, with the support of the US tech firm Palantir, which was reportedly aimed at Hezbollah militants, but which, in reality, killed, maimed and mutilated numerous civilians. UN experts, who condemned the attacks as “terrifying” violations of international law, noted that the attacks “ killed at least 32 people and maimed or injured 3,250, including 200 critically. Among the dead [were] a boy and a girl, as well as medical personnel. Around 500 people suffered severe eye injuries, including a diplomat. Others suffered grave injuries to their faces, hands and bodies.”

Israel followed up by assassinating Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, in an attack in Beirut, during a sustained period of savage attacks on Lebanon that resembled the destruction rained down incessantly on Gaza. On the deadliest day, September 23, 558 people were killed, including 50 children and 94 women, and 14 ambulances and fire engines were also targeted and attacked, and on October 1 Israeli troops invaded Lebanon for the sixth time since 1978.

Although a ceasefire was declared in November, Israel treated it with the same scorn it has applied to ceasefires in Gaza, and on March 2, two days after Israel persuaded the US to foolishly initiate a war on Iran, it resumed full-scale attacks, also, as in Gaza, imperiously ordering the mass evacuation of Lebanese civilians, creating over a million internal refugees.

On March 16, Israel followed up by invading southern Lebanon, aiming to occupy the whole of the land up to the Litani River, and, as was explained in the Guardian by Mohamad Bazzi, the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University, “pledging to clear frontline villages of their inhabitants and establish a new ‘security zone’ that would be devoid of people and occupied by Israeli troops.”

Israel’s fanatical defense minister, Israel Katz, explicitly promised another Gaza, stating that his forces would destroy “all houses” in Lebanese border villages “in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun”, towns in Gaza whose existence has been completely erased.

The perilous refusal of Israel to submit to any kind of restraint, and why it must be stopped

Israel’s behavior over the last six weeks has, above all, demonstrated its extraordinary arrogance. Having seduced Trump into attacking Iran based on promises that another assassination — of Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khameini — would sow discord and lead to regime change, the US soon discovered, to its dismay, that Iran was a formidable adversary, and had been preparing, since unprovoked attacks last year, for retaliation. After successfully targeting US bases throughout the Middle East, Iran proceeded to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global energy crisis whose magnitude is being deliberately hidden by politicians and the media throughout the west, but which was significant enough for Trump to recognize the need for a ceasefire.

For Iran, any ceasefire deal also had to include Lebanon, but Israel refuses to be constrained by anyone, including the US or Iran, because it simply doesn’t care about anyone or anything other than itself.

This was made clear when, last September, as Gaza ceasefire negotiations were taking place, Israel brazenly targeted Hamas officials who were meeting in Doha, in Qatar, violating the powerful Gulf state’s sovereignty, and requiring frantic diplomatic efforts by the US to limit the attack’s political damage.

It has also been made clear in the responses, within the US, to the deadly attack on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, in Iran, on the very first day of the “war”, when, it seems, Palantir-developed AI technology misidentified the school as a military target. The attack killed 168 people, mostly schoolgirls, and, in the US, it has led, at the very least, to some hand-wringing, and to noticeable unease within parts of the US military.

In contrast, within Israel, and with the handful of exceptions noted above, there has been no meaningful discussion about the extent to which AI-driven military targeting is not a miracle, but a flawed system that has contributed to the colossal and unjustifiable slaughter of civilians in vast numbers, and which needs serious oversight before it proceeds any further.

Israel’s most disturbing actions over the last two months, however, took place on April 8, when, in a deliberately provocative snub to the US-Iran ceasefire deal, it launched the most devastating attacks ever seen on Beirut and southern Lebanon, striking over a hundred targets in a ten-minute period, claiming it was targeting Hezbollah strongholds without, of course, providing any evidence, and killing at least 357 people, who seemed quite clearly not to be the 250 Hezbollah “operatives and commanders” that Israel claimed to have killed.

Despite the threat that Israel’s actions pose to the Iranian ceasefire, it has still continued to engage in the destruction of southern Lebanon, is still destroying village after village, and also attracted global condemnation last week through its deliberate targeted killing of the renowned and tenacious Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, who, of course, it subsequently smeared as a “terrorist.”

Whereas the US still has allies throughout the Middle East which it needs to placate, even with Donald Trump’s tendency to insult and belittle even those closest to him, Israel has no friends or allies whatsoever, just a handful of countries that it manipulates — largely through infiltration — to fulfil its aims.

As its arrogance and its derangement have grown over the last 30 months, this now means endless war on as many fronts as possible not only against military targets, but against entire civilian populations who are all, following the Gaza model, regarded as, in one way or another, “associated” with Hamas, or Hezbollah, or the Iranian “terror state”, or even just through ever more hysterical interpretations of antisemitism, which the Israeli state has long insisted means any criticism whatsoever of its actions.

What the last 30 months have also shown us is that Israel’s predatory notions of “self-defense” extend far beyond the Middle East, via high-level influence over compliant governments in the west, and especially the US, the UK and Germany, which, as well as being Israel’s main arms suppliers (in the case of the US and Germany), have also obligingly initiated draconian clampdowns on free speechprotest and direct action in defense of Israel, and where (again, in the US and Germany) alarming efforts are also being made to make citizenship or employment dependant on allegiance to Israel.

Most alarmingly, as the dark forces behind the AI revolution openly manifest their true ugliness, not just via their enthusiasm for AI-driven warfare, but also for the surveillance and control of entire populations, Israel’s reach also now threatens all of us, wherever we are.

As Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the fanatically pro-Israeli Anti-Defamation League (ADL), explained at an event held by the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles in March, the group has analysts “working round the clock” to “take down” those regarded as “extremists” through monitoring social media and other platforms, sharing the information it gathers with the FBI. The extensive surveillance operation that he outlined “tracks activity across social media, messaging apps, video games, cryptocurrency platforms, podcasts, short-form video, Wikipedia and large language models.”

For those paying attention, it has been clear throughout the last 30 months that what has been happening in Gaza will not stay in Gaza. Instead, the genocide in Gaza is a template — for a world of limitless slaughter, and of total surveillance and control, that will persist as long as Israel, and those backing it, continue to be allowed to wield their depraved power.

For all our sakes, Israel and its backers need, across their many spheres of influence, to be restrained and disarmed.

miércoles, 29 de abril de 2026

This Isn’t Just Trump’s War on Iran. Both Parties Paved the Way for Disaster.

We must recognize Democrats share responsibility with the GOP for creating the climate that made such a war possible.

By

 Stephen Zunes , Truthout

Published

April 17, 2026

https://truthout.org/articles/this-isnt-just-trumps-war-on-iran-both-parties-paved-the-way-for-disaster/

Unlike the invasion of Iraq, which received the support of a sizable minority of congressional Democrats, Donald Trump’s war on Iran has received near-universal criticism. Still, the party has focused primarily on process-style critiques — such as the legality of declaring war under the Constitution and the war’s economic impact — rather than the humanitarian consequences and flagrant violations of international law.

That should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the U.S. bipartisan consensus on Iran: For over 20 years, a number of prominent Democratic leaders — and in some cases, large majorities of congressional Democrats overall — have helped pave the groundwork for Trump’s war by issuing exaggerated and alarmist statements about Iran’s supposed danger to the region, threatening the use of military force, and undermining diplomatic initiatives, sometimes even criticizing Republicans from the right.

In 2024, the Democratic Party platform criticized “Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency” by not responding militarily to attacks by Iran and groups in Iraq and elsewhere that share Iran’s strategic objectives. The platform cited four separate incidents that took place under his first administration, failing to acknowledge that each was a direct result of Trump’s aggressive policies against Iran, including the assassination of Qassim Suleimani, a top Iranian general.

By contrast, the party’s platform praised President Joe Biden for having “authorized precision airstrikes on key Iranian-linked targets,” which it claimed would “deter further aggression by Iran.” It praised “America’s ironclad commitment to the security of Israel and our unrivaled ability to leverage growing regional integration among U.S. partners to counter Iranian aggression.” Though eager to stress military means to counter Iran, the platform failed to directly call for a return to the Iran nuclear deal under the Obama administration, which considerably reduced regional tensions — a deal that Biden campaigned on reinstating but failed to do.

The month after the release of the party platform, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris attacked Trump in a presidential debate, declaring that her administration “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”

In an interview with CBS, when she was asked who she considered to be the greatest enemy of the United States, Harris said it was “obvious” that Iran — not nuclear-armed states such as Russia, China, or North Korea — was the “greatest adversary.” She explicitly said that she would not rule out going to war against that country.

This framing from the right continued into Trump’s presidency, even as the president began pushing more toward sustained military conflict. During Israel’s unprovoked bombing of Iran in June 2025, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer insisted that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” despite the fact that Israel had started the war. Just over a week before, he criticized Trump for even engaging in negotiations with Iran — negotiations that provided cover for the U.S.’s own bombing of multiple Iranian nuclear sites. Just prior to the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites during Israel’s war, Schumer posted a video to social media accusing Trump of “folding on Iran” by attempting to negotiate a deal, bemoaning about how “Trump always chickens out” regarding the use of military force.

Similarly, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries refused to criticize the Israeli attack or call for a return to the Iran nuclear deal. Although Iran has no capability of striking anywhere outside of the Middle East, Jeffries claimed “the Iranian regime poses a grave threat to the entire free world.”

Such hyperbole is not new. As far back as 20 years ago, Democratic leaders like then-Sen. Evan Bayh were claiming that Iran “may be only months away from having the capacity to build a nuclear bomb” and insisting military options should be considered. Similarly, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton argued during the Bush years that his administration was not taking the threat of a nuclear Iran seriously enough, criticizing it for allowing European nations to take the lead in pursuing a diplomatic solution, and insisting that the administration should make it clear that military options were being actively considered. These proclamations came even as the U.S. was struggling to maintain control of Iraq at the height of its occupation.

During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Clinton accused Barack Obama of being “naive” and “irresponsible” for wanting to diplomatically engage with Iran and other nations that U.S. policy has often antagonized. Despite these accusations, Obama selected her as his secretary of state, through which, according to a story in Time magazine, Obama administration officials noted she was “skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, and firmly opposed to talk of a ‘containment’ policy that would be an alternative to military action should negotiations with Tehran fail.”

Clinton was far from the only Democrat pushing back against the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts. In 2011, in an effort to sabotage any potential diplomatic contact with Iran, an overwhelming majority of House Democrats voted for a Republican bill declaring “No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that … is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran.” Administration pressure and constitutional questions prevented the bill from passing the Senate, but it underscored that over 90 percent of House Democrats were intent on undermining Obama’s efforts for a non-military resolution to the conflict with Iran.

The following year, a 
similarly large majority of House Democrats voted for a resolution urging the president to oppose any policy toward Iran “that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.” While Obama had already stated a willingness to consider taking military action against Iran if the regime procured nuclear weapons, this resolution significantly lowered the bar for war by declaring it unacceptable for Iran simply to have “nuclear weapons capability” — not necessarily any actual weapons or an active nuclear weapons program.

In 2013, after Clinton was replaced by the more liberal John Kerry as secretary of state and Iranians elected the reformist President Hassan Rouhani, yet another overwhelming majority of House Democrats joined Republicans in voting, over the objections of the White House, to impose punitive new sanctions on Iran. It was widely interpreted as a bipartisan rejection of the new Iranian president’s offer to enhance nuclear transparency and pursue “peace and reconciliation” with the West.

Additionally, in an apparent effort to poison the atmosphere on the eve of Rouhani’s inauguration, over two dozen Democratic senators signed a letter to President Obama demanding a “toughening of sanctions” and “a convincing threat of the use of force.”

In May of that year, every Democratic senator joined their Republican colleagues in supporting a resolution which “urges that, if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel.” The wording is significant in that it put Senate Democrats on record that the United States should support an Israeli war on Iran not only if Israel was attacked, but even if Israel attacked first. By giving Benjamin Netanyahu the authority to determine what might “compel” Israel to act in “self-defense,” this near-unanimous decision helped pave the way for Israel to make such claims in its U.S.-backed war in June 2025 and the joint U.S.-Israeli war this year.

Fortunately, by 2015, the Obama administration — along with Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China, and with the backing of the European Union and the United Nations — was able to negotiate an agreement whereby, in return for sanctions relief, Iran drastically curtailed its nuclear program to the degree that it was physically impossible to build a nuclear weapon, while also agreeing to strict monitoring to ensure compliance. It took perhaps the most intense lobbying efforts of the Obama presidency to get congressional Democrats on board. In the end, only two Democratic senators, Robert Menendez and Chuck Schumer, opposed the agreement, but their colleagues nevertheless elected them to senior positions — Menendez as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and Schumer as their Senate leader.

The 2016 Democratic platform endorsed the nuclear deal — but declared that, if Iran violated the agreement, rather than allow for the automatic reimposition of strict international sanctions to pressure Iran to come back into compliance as the deal outlined, a Democratic president “will not hesitate to take military action.” Since it would take Iranians at least a few years to rebuild their dramatically circumscribed nuclear program to the point where they could develop even a single nuclear weapon, there would be plenty of time, as well as serious punitive economic mechanisms, to push Iran to resume its compliance. Immediately launching a war, as the platform called for, would therefore not only be a direct violation of the United Nations Charter, it would be completely unnecessary.

This is only a partial list of ways in which Democrats have pushed for a military confrontation with Iran over the past couple of decades. Even today, the fact that Democratic leaders still support unconditional military aid to Israel and Netanyahu, Trump’s partner in the illegal attacks on Iran, raises questions about their sincerity in opposing the war.

It is highly unlikely the United States would have launched a full-scale war under a Democratic administration as it has under Trump. However hawkish many in the Democratic leadership have proven to be, they would have been far more likely to listen to allied governments, as well as the broad consensus of strategic analysts, intelligence officials, and military leaders that make up the foreign policy elite, many of whom have long warned of the serious consequences of going to war.

At the same time, it is important to recognize how Democrats share responsibility with Republicans for creating the climate that made such a war possible.

martes, 28 de abril de 2026

Trump: When the only friends you have left are Bushies and neocons

The warmaking president is shedding his base. But the last ones on the MAGA bus may be the first to leap off at any sign of political trouble.

Jack Hunter

Apr 27, 2026

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-base-iran-war/

In May 2025, President Donald Trump declared that the neoconservative era was over. This was of course not new rhetoric. He didn’t always live up to it, but Trump always made sure that bashing neocons and the Bush era and their endless wars were a staple in his long list of political excoriations.

After all, Trump began his meteoric rise during the 2016 Republican debates when he said to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of George W., that “obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?”

“They lied,” he added, referring to the Bush administration’s insistence that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction,” Trump blasted. “There were none, and they knew there were none.”

Presidential nominee Trump would later tell the 2016 Republican National Convention, “We must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria.”

Yet today, this American president is knee-deep in a seemingly endless regime change war with Iran over that country’s alleged and illusive weapons of mass destruction. The conflict, which has even earned praise from his former nemesis Jeb Bush, could arguably become even more disastrous than Iraq in the long term.

What made Trump go full neocon? Could it be that they are the only political faction left that still embraces his foreign policy?

It might be. Because increasingly, conservatives who aren’t reflexively hawkish are turning away. And polls keep showing that most Americans are not with him.

Three new surveys released this week now place Trump’s approval rating in the mid-30s. A Reuters-Ipsos poll shows it at 36%. A Strength in Numbers-Verasight poll has him at 35%. An AP-NORC survey says only 33% of Americans approve of Trump right now.

These numbers are all going down, not up, from surveys last week.

This poor standing mirrors George W. Bush’s slide during the Iraq war. “It was almost exactly this time 20 years ago that the bottom began to fall out on George W. Bush’s approval ratings,” CNN analyst Aaron Blake noted. “And as Bush’s numbers in most polls fell into the 30s for the first time in late winter and early spring, the culprit was clear: the Iraq war.”

“History could be repeating itself with President Donald Trump in 2026,” he wrote. “Just swap Iraq with Iran.”

Interestingly Trump appears to be more neoconservative. While 2003 wasn’t the first time the U.S. attacked Iraq, the warhawks had been begging for war with Iran for decades. Trump chose to fight a battle that his predecessors rejected, and in so doing he gave Netanyahu’s Likud government, which had been arguing for direct U.S. intervention non-stop since Trump won office in 2016, exactly what it wanted.

President Barack Obama’s former Secretary of State John Kerry told CBS’s Stephen Colbert in an interview Tuesday, “I think it was about two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that Netanyahu personally went into the Situation Room and presented the case, why this was the right thing to do. It was reported that he had attempted this with previous administrations.”

Colbert asked, “During the Obama administration, where you're secretary of state, did he make the same case?” Kerry replied, “yes.”

Colbert then asked, “And what was the response at the time?”

“No,” Kerry said emphatically.

“I mean, I was part of those conversations,” he added. “I remember them well.”

Trump’s former debate opponent Jeb Bush is now pleased with Trump’s decision to attack Iran, saying in late February, “This is their time to take their country back.” Bush serves as chairman of United Against Nuclear Iran, a group that lobbies for regime change in that country. Bush even made a special video praising the war in early March.

Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald said Thursday that Trump seems to have morphed into the very thing he campaigned against: the government officials who lied and scaremongered over “mushroom clouds” and “yellowcake” uranium.

“Trump is now completely reliant for every answer on the same exact claim used to sell the Iraq War: They're getting nukes; they'll give them to terrorist groups; they'll take out our cities; be afraid; we have to bear whatever cost to stop their WMD program,” Greenwald wrote.

A reporter asked Trump Thursday what might happen if oil prices reach $200 per barrel.

Trump replied, “There is nothing worse than a nuclear weapon that takes out one of your cities.” Vice President JD Vance said something similar in March, suggesting if we don’t fight Iran then terrorists could show up in American cities with nuclear weapons in backpacks.

While America First pundits, politicians, and formerly diehard Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson and ex- GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have become major critics of this president, today’s White House is much friendlier to neoconservatives like talk host Mark Levin and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham.

Carlson and Greene say they no longer recognize the man Trump has become. Levin, Graham and other Israel-friendly hawks have encouraged this significant shift in foreign policy by this president.

But how long do they stick around?

“It seems to me that Trump has three problems,” Washington Examiner magazine Executive Editor Jim Antle told RS.

“One is that his new friends were reluctant adopters of him at best and many were Never Trumpers in 2015 or 2016,” Antle said. “They will turn on him much faster than the podcasters did. Second, and relatedly, Trump is going to want to end the war before they are ready. They will cheerlead his bombing, but not his diplomacy. Finally, their audiences are primarily made up of people who are going to reliably turn out for Republicans in the midterms regardless.”

“These are dead-enders, not persuadables or new voters Trump brought into the coalition,” he added.

Curt Mills, Executive Director of the American Conservative, also believed Trump’s neocon fan club might not be around for long.

“George W. Bush once remarked on the subject of legacy: ‘History? We don't know. We'll all be dead,” Mills said in an email. “Increasingly, that seems to be how this president rolls, as well. He has disappointed ideological true believers and made a pact with neoconservatives, a group that will abandon him in posterity as swiftly as they opposed him during his ascent.”

Regardless, with Iran, Donald Trump is definitely losing support from the broader parts of his coalition. The war has sent him fleeing into the arms of those conservatives who he never purported to have anything in common with in the first place. It may be a fair-weather arrangement for both sides, but for the rest of us it is dark days ahead as long as these war pushers hold sway over the president’s foreign policy.