The skies over Tehran were black with oil smoke last weekend, and the streets were on fire after Israel bombed oil storage depots in the capital. These attacks put toxic fumes into the air that clung to the throats and lungs of millions of Tehran’s citizens.
The consequences in terms of illness, cancer and premature death in the coming years are immeasurable (remember, more died of dust-related cancers over subsequent years following 9/11 than in the initial attacks).
The scenes were apocalyptic, reminiscent of the first US-led Gulf war 35 years ago when Saddam Hussein’s retreating forces set fire to Kuwait’s oil wells, turning day into night over the skies of the Gulf. But that act of environmental destruction was not in the centre of a city of ten million.
Operation Epic Fury is a war of choice that began with the assassination of the head of state, Ali Khamenei, and dozens of senior officials, and a double-tap strike on a girls school that killed 165 schoolchildren.
This is not a new kind of atrocity for the US: in the 1991 Gulf war the US bombed a shelter killing 400 children and their parents.
This is a war on major cities and civilians. Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of war, has proudly dismissed any rules of engagement, describing with great relish “Iranian leaders looking up and seeing only US and Israeli air power… B52s, B2s, B1s, Predator drones, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky, all day long.”
Israel is meanwhile waging war against the entire civilian population of south Lebanon and the capital Beirut, forcing 700,000 people from their homes. Close to 600 have been killed in only a week, including 86 children.
If Iran or Hezbollah had caused so much death and suffering, the western media would be in uproar. Instead Israel’s relentless bombing is normalised as "military operations", as was Israel's genocidal war on Gaza.
'We are going to make a tonne of money'
Trump claimed to have ended seven wars in his first year of office, forming a Board of Peace that he said would bring peace to the world. But the truth is that the genocide in Gaza did not end last October.
Neither did the war on Lebanon end with the ceasefire of November 2024.
And now Trump has joined with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an unprovoked war on Iran, one that the Israeli leader has been planning for decades. Finally he has a US president who will do everything he asks.
“When this regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we are going [to] make a tonne of money,” pro-war Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said this week. “Venezuela and Iran have 31 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We’re going to have a partnership with 31 percent of the known reserves. This is China’s nightmare. This is a good investment,” said Graham.
His remarks show clearly that the US abduction of former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, and the Iran war were part of a strategy to gain control over global oil supplies and deny them to their chief rival, China.
The domestic US context that preceded this war is summed up in one word: Epstein. Trump is all over the Epstein files, as members of Congress who have seen them confirm. He launched the war in a week when previously suppressed testimonies were released from a witness who said Trump and Epstein sexually abused her when she was a young teenager. Trump denies all allegations.
This is a fatally compromised president, whose poll position is cratering and whose very weakness pushes him towards ever more reckless actions, now culminating in the US equivalent to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Like that invasion, the goal is regime change, and like that attack, it has radically destabilised the global order. Unlike Trump, Putin doesn't need to worry about the mid-terms when he sends Russian men to die in the Donbas.
If you look at a map of the world, there is an arc of war that rises in Sudan, passing through the Bab El Mandab strait into Yemen, through the Gulf states, to Iran, then to Israel, Lebanon and Gaza
If you look at a map of the world, there is an arc of war that rises in Sudan on Africa’s east coast, passing through the Bab El Mandab strait into Yemen, through the Arab Gulf states, to Iran, west to occupied Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, then north over the Black Sea to Russia and Ukraine.
To the east, an Iranian ship was sunk by US torpedo thousands of miles from the war zone off the coast of Sri Lanka. In the western hemisphere, Cuba is under US siege.
The wars that Israel and the US have fought since 7 October 2023 have now escalated to embroil the whole region and the world, thanks to the critical impact of the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz and strikes on Gulf oil and gas.
Russia has denied reports that it was supplying intelligence to Iran to assist in its missile strikes, while Ukraine is now sending experts to help Gulf states take down Iranian Shahed drones that were earlier sent to Russia and used against Ukraine. Some commentators, such as Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs, see this latest escalation in the Gulf as the early stages of a third world war.
No way out
How does this end? Nobody knows, although the Iranians sound remarkably confident that the US has started a war that it cannot finish. Iranian military and Islamic Revolutionary Guard chiefs say that they are prepared for a long war of attrition, with one IRGC spokesperson saying they have stocks for a 10-year war. “Even as we use our missiles and drones, our depots and stockpiles are full, overflowing and brimming.”
It took two months for George W Bush to claim mission accomplished in Iraq in May 2003. It was a false claim, as the war continued long after Saddam Hussein was captured six months later, leaving hundreds of thousands dead, including thousands of US troops. Trump now says this war is nearly over. Another lie.
The Nato Libya air campaign of 2011 in support of a rebel uprising took seven months until Muammar Gaddafi was killed. “We came. We saw. He died," Hillary Clinton infamously joked in October 2011 about the US-led overthrow of Gaddafi. But Libya fell into civil war and split into two. Only now, 15 years later, have US and French oil majors signed a $20bn dollar deal to extract Libyan oil profits.
Regime change may be coming. But to end this expanding conflict, it should be the reckless regimes in Washington and Israel that fall
The Islamic Republic is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, nor Gaddafi’s Libya - two regimes dominated by a ruling family, as was Syria until December 2024. Iran has huge institutional depth that can survive the killing of its supreme leader. It is a vast nation of 90 million people.
Netanyahu and Trump seemed to believe the regime would crumble after Khamenei’s death with people rising up at their command to overthrow their rulers, rather like the fantasy that was promoted before the invasion of Iraq 23 years ago.
Regime change wars tend to devolve into brutal struggles that unleash ethnic, tribal and sectarian tensions through the destruction of state institutions. This is actually what the Israelis want to see in Iran. Not so much the Americans, who just want the oil.
Regime change may be coming. But to end this expanding conflict, it should be the reckless regimes in Washington and Israel that fall.
Trump is in deep trouble. A new breed of anti-war Democrats are coming in November (although there seems to be no real attempt to break with the pro-war Republican-Democrat duopoly). Between Epstein and this disastrous war, it is hard to see Trump serving out his second term. Still, President JD Vance is not a prospect to savour.
As for Netanyahu, unlike Trump, he has the backing of three-quarters of Israelis for his wars on Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and who knows where next. Israel is in the grip of a messianic war fever.
Only the cutting of US support, sparked by America’s growing revulsion at its political capture by the Israel-linked Epstein class, will end Israel’s drive for regional domination. That, or a catastrophic defeat.
The new leader of Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, has very personal reasons to wish revenge on the US and Israel: they killed his father, his wife Zahra Adel, his mother, his son and his sister last Saturday.
Iran is no longer seeking to avoid conflict - instead it aims to inflict a decisive blow. As parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said: ”The Zionist regime sees its ignoble existence in perpetuating the cycle of 'war-negotiation-ceasefire and then war again' in order to consolidate its domination. We will break this cycle."
The question is which regime change comes first, and what price in blood and treasure will be paid.
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