Bulent Gokay and Lily Hamourtziadou
Since the United States and Israel commenced their unwarranted and unprovoked strike against Iran, codenamed Operation Epic Fury by the US and Roaring Lion by Israel, the character of the offensive has become apparent. It constitutes a large-scale bombing campaign intended to systematically dismantle the Iranian state and subjugate the entire population. The US under Trump has started a war whose outcomes it neither anticipates nor controls. Its actions have an element of irrationality, but this irrationality is based on decades of aggression in the Middle East, and in particular against Iran.
Wesley Clark famously recounted seeing a 2001 Pentagon memo that detailed plans to “take out” seven countries over five years, culminating in Iran. Clark attributed the origin of these plans to the neoconservatives within the George W. Bush administration, specifically mentioning the influence of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) (Greenwald, 2011). PNAC was an influential think tank established in 1997, and almost all of its major figures found themselves in the George W. Bush administration after 2000. Considering US foreign policy in the Middle East since the start of this century, this attack should not be considered a surprise and is largely unrelated to the idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump, who is simply implementing a longstanding project aimed at establishing complete US dominance over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East. Furthermore, American (and Western) interventions in Iran have a long history.
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