In recent weeks I have despaired. Such anguish can feel, can seem self-centred and indulgent, less than genuine. As such I hardly share it publicly. Meanwhile, neighbours and friends are getting on with their lives, seemingly unaware of the evil enveloping the world. Or perhaps they are burning inside with anger and, like me, are too embarrassed to speak up. knowing they will not be thanked for disturbing the peace.

Earlier I was intending, at the very least, to post a couple of articles about the Israeli declaration of war on Iran, when I received this powerful and personal message from my dear friend, Siya Vash, who I was privileged to meet In Queensland, Australia almost a decade ago. We were together for only a few days but our friendship has deepened despite the oceans that separate us.

Siya Vash begins:

A War Foretold: The Manufactured Crisis Behind the Iran–Israel–US Conflict

The current war between Iran and the Israel–US alliance did not erupt suddenly. It is the result of decades of manipulation, ideological obsession, and calculated imperial ambition. It is a war seeded in lies, watered with treachery, and now blooming into a catastrophe many of us feared, because we have lived it before.

Memory of Fire: The Iran–Iraq War Never Ended

I was a teenager when the Iran–Iraq War began. Like many Iranians, we were told it would be over quickly. A border skirmish, a short-lived aggression. But it dragged on for eight horrific years, a conflict that devoured hundreds of thousands of lives and left deep, still-bleeding scars across our land.

I still remember the sirens. The sound of missiles and bombs landing. The fear etched into the faces of my friends, some of whom are still alive, barely. They are dying a slow, painful death caused by chemical weapons dropped by Saddam Hussein, weapons supplied to him by Western countries who watched from a distance, hands stained but silent. American AWACS radar planes even helped Saddam locate Iranian troop gatherings which he then bombed with poison.

This memory is why I now look at this war, this unfolding confrontation with Israel and the West with the same dread. The same lie is being told again. The same script, only updated for the digital age. And once again, it is the Iranian people who will suffer.

Netanyahu’s Eternal Alarm: The Cry of the Wolf

Since the early 1990s, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned the world again and again that Iran is “just months away” from acquiring a nuclear bomb. He has sounded this alarm so often, in so many forums from the Knesset to the UN, from U.S. Congress to global media that it has become the central pillar of Israel’s foreign policy narrative.

Yet these claims have been repeatedly contradicted by intelligence agencies, including Israel’s own Mossad and the CIA. They acknowledge Iran’s enrichment activity but have found no evidence of an active weapons program.

Still, Netanyahu’s warnings like a wolf crying for the camera have served their purpose: stirring panic, securing Western support, and justifying pre-emptive aggression. The Zionist lobby in the U.S. and Europe has amplified this message, pushing American and European leaders toward confrontation. It worked in Iraq. It’s working again this time, with Iran in the crosshairs.

The JCPOA: A Deal That Could Have Prevented War

In 2015, the world had a choice. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed between Iran and the P5+1 nations, offered a diplomatic solution: Iran would strictly limit its nuclear program, subject to the most rigorous inspections in the world, in exchange for sanctions relief.

Iran upheld its end of the deal. The IAEA confirmed it. But in 2018, Donald Trump under pressure from Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia, and hawkish advisors unilaterally withdrew. Europe condemned the move but eventually aligned itself with the U.S. position in silence, revealing a tragic hypocrisy.

Now, the very nations that once praised the JCPOA insist that Iran has no right to enrich uranium at all not even for peaceful, civilian purposes. The goalposts have moved. The truth has been buried.

The Nuclear Hypocrisy of Israel

While Iran is demonised for enrichment under international supervision, Israel, a nuclear-armed state, remains outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It has never admitted to its arsenal, but global consensus acknowledges that Israel possesses dozens, if not hundreds, of nuclear warheads.

Even worse, Israel has now been found guilty of genocide by the International Court of Justice and yet continues to enjoy Western backing, arms shipments, and diplomatic immunity. The historical trauma of Jewish suffering is weaponised again and again, not for healing, but for justifying new cycles of occupation, dispossession, and war.

Who else but Israel could commit war crimes while claiming perpetual victimhood?

Greater Israel and the Real Strategic Goal

The Iranian nuclear issue is a cover. The real objective is regional dominance. From assassinating scientists to bombing Damascus and Beirut, Israel’s long-term project is the dismantling of all resistance to its supremacy a vision loosely framed in the doctrine of “Greater Israel.”

Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah stand in its way. The path to their neutralization is paved with pretexts and nuclear hysteria has been the most effective one.

Empire in Decline, Searching for War

The United States, meanwhile, is a crumbling empire seeking relevance. After two decades of failed wars, the focus has shifted toward China. But Iran with its strategic location, energy reserves, and ties to Russia and China has become a critical pawn in Washington’s renewed Cold War.

Destroying Iran’s sovereignty isn’t just about Israel. It’s about control over the future of Asia. It’s about preventing the emergence of a new, multipolar order where America is no longer the center of the universe.

The West’s Two-Faced Game

Let us not forget: it was the West that helped bring Khomeini to power. They saw the Shah growing independent raising oil prices, strengthening the military and decided he was no longer controllable. Better to have a theocracy suspicious of both East and West than a nationalist king with ambition.

And now, some of the same Western elites who orchestrated that regime change are floating the idea of restoring Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son, as a new monarch. The circle of manipulation never ends. Freedom has never been the goal, only influence.

The Future: Remembering the Past, Resisting the Present

We have seen this story before. We have lived it. We remember what chemical war feels like. We know what it means to bury children whose only crime was being born on the wrong side of a border drawn by empires.

This new war was foretold. But it is not inevitable.

Iran may be battered, but it is not broken. The Iranian people despite their suffering under both foreign pressure and domestic repression are not passive pawns. They are resilient, resourceful, and rooted in a deep civilizational memory of resistance.

The West must reckon with its hypocrisy. And the world must finally ask: how many more lies, how many more dead, how many more wars before we say enough?

History will remember. Not just who launched the first missile but who wrote the script.

---

Complementary to Siya Vash’s calm yet intense explanation of how he is seeing matters unfold, I offer in addition these alternative and differing critiques of the present nightmare.

Israel’s attack on Iran: The violent new world being born is going to horrify you – Jonathan Cook

This is a key moment in the Pentagon’s 20-year plan for “global full-spectrum dominance”: a unipolar world in which the US is unconstrained by military rivals or the imposition of international law. A world in which a tiny, unaccountable elite, enriched by wars, dictate terms to the rest of us.

If all this sounds like a sociopath’s approach to foreign relations, that is because it is. Years of impunity for Israel and the US have brought us to this point. Both feel entitled to destroy what remains of an international order that does not let them get precisely what they want.

The current birth pangs will grow. If you believe in human rights, in limits on the power of government, in the use of diplomacy before military aggression, in the freedoms you grew up with, the new world being born is going to horrify you.

The Function of Stupidity in History – Jeff Noonan

Consider the profound moral stupidity of Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz’s pronouncement that Khameini is a “modern day Hitler” that “can no longer be allowed to exist” and that the missile strike on the hospital in southern Israel was a war crimes. One simply cannot believe the moral blindness of a man who belongs to a government whose armed forces have destroyed every hospital in Gaza, almost every house, shoots people begging for food that Israel has made artifically scarce and killed tens of thousands of people. All necessary, of course! If Khameini is Hitler for partially damaging one hospital what is Netanyahu for ordering the destruction of the whole life-infrastructure of Gaza?

A war criminal?

The War Against Iran: 30 Years in the Making – Piers Robinson

Whatever happens, Western publics should be under no illusion as to how this situation has come to be. The conflicts are the direct consequence of our governments and their associated military industrial complexes pursuing policies of war and, to do so, engaging in covert actions and major deceptions, which include the 9/11 false flag as well as the utilisation of brutal extremist groups in countries such as Syia. The death toll from these conflicts runs well into the millions while the misery is incalculable.

Propaganda, deception and lies, all in the name of war, are becoming firmly established as the parting legacy of the Western empire.

The American Game: Playing and Being Played on the Road to Nuclear War – Edward Curtin

“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”                        Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh

The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that. Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse. It is an economy based on fantasy and fake money with a national debt over 36 trillion dollars that will never be repaid. That’s another illusion. But I am speaking of pipe dreams, am I not?

And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their indifference and ignorance of its ramifications throughout the society and more importantly, its effects in death and destruction on the rest of the world. But that’s how it goes as their focus is on the masked faces that face each other on the electoral stage of the masquerade ball every four years. Liars all.

But they all speak the double-speak that creates pipe-dreams on the road to nuclear war.

Will we ever stop believing them before it is too late?

---

If, by chance, you read any of the above, not for a moment, do I expect you to embrace uncritically these viewpoints. I do hope for a provisional and questioning response, the very basis of give and take, a critical dialogue. I do hope for a response that refuses the cowardly, immoral and unethical ambivalence and ambiguity of the liberal and professional mouthpiece, that is the Guardian newspaper. And, for my sins, I do skim its pages everyday, hoping for a moment when it speaks plainly at last, when it condemns without caveat the genocide in Gaza and now the attack on Iran.