A Year of Torturing Iran

Last June, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a surprise bombing of Iran that killed well over a thousand people.

That sneak attack opened what would soon be called the “Twelve Day War.” Israeli bombs targeted Iranian scientists and government officials, often while they were home with families. Precisely because the Israelis chose to attack these scientists and officials in their homes, they also killed many young women, including two who were pregnant, and 65 children.

Imagine if Russia, fed up by the steady escalation of NATO-directed Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow, retaliated by bombing London. Imagine those Russian bombs killing hundreds of carefully selected top British officials and scientists. At their homes. With their families.

The world would be aghast, right?

Yet Israel can do what others cannot.

Consider that the Hamas sneak attack of October 2023 killed about 1,200 Israelis (and took more than 250 hostage). Yet while the murder of those 1,200 Israelis was denounced with all appropriate dismay, the murder of 1,200 Iranians (including many children) last summer was mostly met with a shrug.

Of course, by then we’d become desensitized to mass child murder.

Israel, month in and month out, had been relentlessly killing Palestinians by the tens of thousands. The Israeli government called it the Swords of Iron War. This rage-filled response to the Hamas attack was a completely open and unapologetic ethnic cleansing campaign.

America cheerfully picked up the tab, to the tune of far more than $21 billion.

Both Democratic and Republican presidencies also provided diplomatic cover at the United Nations for the crimes of Swords of Iron, and proudly associated the American people with an “operation” that cut down about one child per hour for more than two years.

By the two-year anniversary of Swords of Iron last fall, at least 20,000 children had been killed across Gaza, many of them buried under rubble.

So it was that last summer, when Israel abruptly created yet another little war, this time in Iran, and killed yet another bunch of children at home with their families — well, it just didn’t register on the world’s overloaded outrage meter.

But the Iranians felt differently. Iran struck back. Israel and Iran traded missile strikes. There were small civilian death tolls on both sides, and it went on for eight days.

The main Iranian counterattack killed 28 Israeli civilians, including a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor and a 7-year-old Ukrainian cancer patient.

Finally, it seemed Donald Trump couldn’t stand the excitement.

Things were happening without him!

He could have tried peacemaking.

It’s something he claims to favor.

Instead, by day nine, at Trump’s direction we also started bombing Iran.

Why?

As the great singer-songwriter Jesse Welles puts it:

Sometimes you get out your B2s,
and go bomb Iran.
Sometimes you get out your B2s.
It’s all part of God’s plan.

The three sites we B2’d in Operation Midnight Hammer — yes, that’s what we called it — were officially chosen to (further) degrade Iran’s ability to ever manufacture a nuclear weapon.

It’s worth noting that there were zero human casualties reported from the U.S. strikes. And yet we voluntarily associated ourselves with a sneak attack murder-from-the-skies that, up until Trump dragged us into it, publicly at least was some other people’s crime. Now it was ours, too.

Donald Trump said back then that he was also thinking about murdering his Iranian counterpart.

“He is an easy target,” the U.S. president gloated.

But Trump said he had decided not to kill the ayatollah, “at least not for now.”

The President’s threat to kill! (his exclamation point) the ayatollah had to be taken seriously.

Five years previously, on Trump’s orders, a drone attack on a Baghdad airport (during an official Iranian visit to Iraq) had vaporized the ayatollah’s top general, Qasam Solamani, along with nine others. Iran had responded to the Solamani killing with outrage, and with a surprisingly restrained missile attack on U.S. military bases in the region that, per The New York Times, back then killed or injured no one, “although several military personnel … were checked for concussions.”

Now Iran had again been attacked: First by the Israeli sneak attack that killed more than 1,000, including pregnant women and dozens of children, and then, after days of Israeli-Iranian tit-for-tat attacks, with a follow-on American attack on Iranian infrastructure. But just as with the Solamani assassination five years earlier, the Iranian retaliation last summer came in a muted fashion: Tehran attacked our U.S. military base in Qatar but also informed us of it beforehand, so we could prepare, and shoot down the missiles.

This was face-saving theater, aimed at trying to avoid a wider war.

Again, no one was killed.

For evil lunatics, the Iranians sure do seem measured and judicious at times.

“CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!” wrote Donald Trump on Truth Social back then, announcing that, upon conclusion of Iran’s carefully choreographed retaliatory strikes, “an official END to THE TWELVE DAY WAR will be saluted by the World.”

In one memorable post during those tense final hours, Trump even claimed Israeli planes headed to bomb Iran would instead turn around and waggle their wings in a friendly salute, and “nobody will be hurt.”

But we kept at it. Trump had earlier announced a “maximum pressure campaign” to destroy the Iranian economy. He and other national security officials would also later reveal we’d engaged all winter in a U.S.-Israeli covert campaign to foster a violent uprising in Iran. It included spy agents on the ground helping to rile up demonstrations, the deployment of more than 200 Starlink™ terminals (perhaps for checking in with the home offices in Tel Aviv and Langley), and large-scale secret arms deliveries.

The stated justification for all this hatred, violence and negativity?

That would depend on the day of the week.

Some days, it was all to force Iran to sign a new agreement not to pursue nuclear weapons. There had been an old agreement, brokered in 2015 by Trump’s nemesis Barack Obama, which had also involved China, Russia, France, Germany, the European Union and the United Kingdom. Iran had honored it. But Trump tore it up, apparently so he could replace it with a Trump™-monogramed version.

Other days brought other justifications.

One alleged problem with Iran was that its people were suffering. How long they’ve suffered! It’s so unfair! Goodness, we can’t just stand by as ordinary Iranians suffer, can we?

Evidence of said intolerable-to-American-sensibilities suffering: the economic collapse we were boasting of creating, and the ensuing street protests we were Starlink™ing, arming, and steering toward more mayhem.

At other times, we needed to torment and possibly soon attack Iran because of “the 47-year war” the ayatollahs had allegedly been waging against America.

Why 47 years? Because that dates back to when the Shah of Iran fell from power, the Islamic Revolution seized his palace, and more than 60 Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy. (For younger readers, the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1981 was one of the deepest indignities in modern American memory; it pales in comparison to the attack on Pearl Harbor 38 years earlier, or to the 9/11 attacks 20 years later, but Trump would have grown up with rage in his heart over it.)

In any case: Maximum pressure!

The White House announced a plan this winter of “driving Iran’s oil exports to zero.” Zero!

This included by targeting all of the oil transport infrastructure, from tankers to ports to maritime insurers. We also continued to push them out of international financial markets, and to ratchet up restrictions on trade in iron, steel, copper, aluminum, and even pistachio nuts (California and Iran are the world’s leading producers) and Persian carpets.

Imagine if China one day announced a plan to drive American oil experts to zero, kill off our agriculture and crash our economy, even to the point of not letting us export, say, cowboy hats — all with the stated explanation that they wanted us to rise up and throw Donald Trump out a second-floor window.

Would that work?

No!

But as the repulsive just-deceased Senator Lindsey Graham demonstrated throughout his entire loathsome just-departed life: an evil plan that will lead to staggering levels of death and misery doesn’t have to make sense in order to be pursued by the U.S. security state. It just has to cough out billions of taxpayer dollars as rapidly as possible.

In December, one of Iran’s largest banks collapsed. New Year’s Eve approached, and Iranians started turning out for street demonstrations, to express their frustration with the economic chaos.

“What we have done has created a dollar shortage in [Iran],” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent proudly told Congress this past winter. “It came to a swift and, I would say, grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. The central bank had to print money. The Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”

Bessent added during a talk to world oligarchs at Davos: “So this is economic statecraft — no shots fired. And things are moving in a very positive way here.”

We’re calling this “statecraft.”

They think they are “statesmen.”

Actually, they are applying a civilization-wide version of peine forte et dure, the medieval torture practice used infamously in the Salem witch trials, where the accused have more and more heavy stones piled atop their chest until they comply (confess) or die.

Yet the torturers Bessent and Trump wanted to be congratulated! As if they were doing something clever!

After bragging about their “economic statecraft,” Team Trump started baying loudly this winter for Iranians to overthrow their government.

“TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!”

Trump cried on Truth Social, in all caps and with three exclamation points.

“HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

Channeling Graham’s stupid baseball cap joke, he added: “MIGA!!!”

The President also stated that if Iran “shots [sic] and violently kills” any of the protesters, America might have to invade Iran to protect them.

(We can’t help it, we just care too much not to.)

Here’s our president, up at 3 a.m., texting furiously and barely coherently with his fat little thumbs:

The Iranian government met the street protesters who turned out with harsh violence. It cut off Internet access, it shot live ammunition at non-violent protesters, and thousands were killed.

The protests had apparently been driven by dissatisfaction with the oppressive Iranian government, and by anger about the inflation and economic suffering America had so cheerfully inflicted — but also by agitators working with Mossad and the CIA.

This is not just what the Iranians say. Mossad and CIA officials themselves have broadly hinted at this. As a Jerusalem Post article noted, a Farsi-language social media account associated with the Israeli spy services encouraged Iranians to take to the streets and then added, “We are with you. Not just from afar and in words. We are with you in the field as well.”

Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, writing on X, echoed that. He offered an evidence-free claim that Iran had hired “mercenaries” to shoot at protesters — and then, in the same tweet, winkingly claimed that the protesters shooting back at the government would include Mossad agents playing a role of their own.

“Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets,” Pompeo posted on Jan. 2. “Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”

Trump himself blurted out even more. A Fox News reporter who interviewed the President reported, “[he] told me the United States sent guns to the Iranian protesters.”

“We sent them a lot of guns,” Fox quoted the President as saying. “We sent guns to the [Iranian] protesters, a lot of them.’”

Ah, did we?

Thank you for clarifying that!

Next time: Part II, when we move from “economic statecraft” and bungled covert ops to widespread murder-bombings of civilians; get hit hard in return; immediately lose the war we for no good reason started; and try to pretend otherwise.