Tag: iran

Does the 47-Year War with Iran Make Allowance for 2001 and 2002?

I’ve been reading many people on many sites claiming that we have been at war with Iran for 47 years. I found that odd because I thought I distinctly remembered good relations between the Iran and U.S. governments after 9/11. So I asked ChatGPT, “What did the Iranian government do in 2001 to help the U.S. government after the 9/11 attacks?”

I got a long answer that fit what I had vaguely remembered. Here it is:

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Iranian government actually provided several forms of practical assistance to the United States and the emerging Afghan government in the campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This cooperation was limited and short-lived, but it was real and fairly significant in late 2001.

1. Intelligence sharing and operational cooperation

Iran quietly cooperated with the United States during the early phase of the war in Afghanistan.

  • Iranian officials met with U.S. diplomats in Geneva in late 2001 to coordinate efforts against the Taliban.
  • Iran helped identify Taliban targets and provided intelligence that assisted U.S. bombing campaigns.
  • Iranian Revolutionary Guard elements working with anti-Taliban forces helped organize operations against Taliban positions.

Iran had strong reasons for this: the Taliban were a bitter enemy of Iran, especially after Taliban forces killed Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan in 1998.

2. Support for the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance

Before and after 9/11, Iran backed the Northern Alliance, the main Afghan force fighting the Taliban.

  • Iran supplied the alliance with money, weapons, and training.
  • When the U.S. began military operations in October 2001, the Northern Alliance served as the main ground force against the Taliban.
  • Iranian networks helped facilitate cooperation between Northern Alliance commanders and U.S. forces.

This assistance indirectly strengthened the U.S.-led campaign because Northern Alliance offensives, combined with U.S. airpower, rapidly toppled the Taliban government.

3. Direct assistance in the fall of Herat

Iranian special-operations forces (the Quds Force) reportedly worked with anti-Taliban fighters in western Afghanistan.

  • They helped organize an uprising in the city of Herat in November 2001, which helped drive out Taliban forces before U.S. troops arrived.

4. Diplomatic help creating the new Afghan government

Iran also played a constructive role in the Bonn Conference (December 2001), which created the interim Afghan government after the Taliban collapsed.

  • Iranian diplomats pressured Afghan factions they influenced to accept compromises.
  • They helped secure support for Hamid Karzai as the head of the new Afghan interim government.

Several U.S. officials later said Iran’s role was instrumental in reaching the final agreement.

5. Safety assurances and humanitarian cooperation

Through back channels (mainly via Switzerland):

  • Iran signaled it would help U.S. personnel who accidentally crossed into Iranian territory during operations near the Afghan border.
  • It also cooperated on refugee and humanitarian issues involving Afghanistan.

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Pro-War Republican Senator Apologizes For Iran Girls’ School Massacre After Trump Blames Tehran

A Republican senator apologized this week for what US military investigators have reportedly determined was an American missile strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran that killed around 175 people—mostly children—amid continued sidestepping by President Donald Trump, who has blamed Tehran for the massacre.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.)—who supports the US-Israeli war on Iran—first apologized for the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab during a Monday interview with NBC News senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur. “It was terrible,” Kennedy said. “We made a mistake… I’m just so sorry it happened.”

Kennedy repeated his apology Tuesday on CNN, telling political correspondent Kasie Hunt: “The investigation may prove me wrong. I hope so. The kids are still dead, but I think it was a horrible, horrible mistake. I wish it hadn’t happened. I’m sorry it happened.”

Reuters first reported last week that US military investigators believe American forces carried out the school strike, a preliminary conclusion that came on the heels of a New York Times analysis that found the US was “most likely to have carried out the strike” due to its near-simultaneous bombing of a nearby Iranian naval base.

This week, Iranian officials displayed fragments from what is believed to be the Tomahawk missile used in the school bombing. The remnants were marked with the names of two US arms companies, a Pentagon contract number, and the words “Made in USA”.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the ongoing military probe has determined that the US launched the Tomahawk strike, which paramedics and victims’ relatives said was a so-called “double-tap,” in which the attacker bombs a target and then follows up with a second strike meant to kill survivors and first responders. Investigators attribute the strike to a “targeting error,” according to the Times.

This, as Trump—who warned as his illegal war started that “bombs will be dropping everywhere”—continued sidestepping blame for the attack. On Saturday, Trump said aboard Air Force One that “based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.“

Two days later, the president falsely claimed that Iran has “some” Tomahawk missiles and may have used one of them to bomb the school. Iran has no Tomahawks—which are highly restricted and sold only to a handful of close allies—and the US does not sell weapons to the Iranian government, with the notable exception of the Iran-Contra Affair, when the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Tehran in order to fund anti-communist Contra terrorists in Nicaragua.

Other senior Trump administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz have declined to back the president’s claims and have instead deferred to the ongoing military investigation. Kennedy told NBC News and CNN that the school bombing was unintentional.

“Other countries do that sort of thing intentionally, like Russia,” he told Kapur. “We would never do that intentionally.”

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Western Leaders Pivot To Blaming “Putin’s Hidden Hand” As Iran War Not Going To Plan

Western intelligence officials believe Russia’s role in supporting Iran amid the US-Israeli military campaign is deepening, alongside potential expanding involvement by China.

Bloomberg, citing officials, writes in a fresh Thursday report: “Moscow is currently providing Iran with various forms of intelligence, including satellite imagery and drone targeting tactics, in an effort to help Iran hit back at US forces in the region, according to people familiar with US and Western intelligence.”

Within the first week of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury it was widely alleged that Russia was giving Iran targeting information concerning US bases and assets in the region. 

While there’s nothing in the way of smoking gun proof, all are in agreement that American bases have been hit hard, with US installations as far away as Jordan having suffered severe missile impact damage.

Western political leaders are now seizing on these allegations, to do more ‘Putin is a global menace’ hype. As a case in point:

“No one will be surprised to believe that Putin’s hidden hand is behind some of the Iranian tactics and potentially some of their capabilities as well,” UK Defence Secretary John Healey said at a military briefing in London on Thursday.

“Patterns of Iranian attack have the hallmarks of the way Russia is attacking Ukraine,” he said, adding that was to be expected “knowing how closely that alliance of aggression has been growing over the last few years.”

And they are also quickly saying the same of the ‘China menace’ – according to more from Bloomberg:

Following an intelligence briefing on Iran earlier this week, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said Russia seems to be aiding Tehran “actively and intensively, with intelligence and perhaps with other means” and added that “China may also be assisting Iran.”

Trump’s Iran gambit is certainly not going to plan, and may drag Washington into another (predictable) Middle East quagmire. 

These flurry of recent reports accusing Russia and China of rushing to to aid the Islamic Republic’s military machine seem motivated at least in part by a Washington political class who is completely unwilling to admit their own mistakes and stupidity. 

So now, each misstep and disastrous US action in the Persian Gulf region can be chalked up to “but Putin did this” or “Xi did that…” 

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British tourist, 60, ‘who filmed Iranian missiles’ in Dubai is facing two years in prison after being charged with cybercrime offence

A British tourist arrested after allegedly filming missiles hitting Dubai is facing two years in prison after being charged with a cybercrime. 

The 60-year-old Londoner, who was detained on Monday night, is said to have deleted the video immediately when asked. He insists he did not mean to break the law.

However, he has been charged alongside 20 others over videos and social media posts relating to recent Iranian missile strikes on the UAE, according to campaign group Detained in Dubai. 

The official allegation relates to ‘broadcasting, publishing, republishing or circulating rumours or provocative propaganda that could disturb public security’. The offence carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison. 

Dubai’s government heavily polices social media and responded to the outbreak of war by threatening jail against anyone sharing information that ‘results in inciting panic among people’.

Videos of drone and missile strikes were regularly shared on social media in the early days of the conflict, but these have largely disappeared and been replaced by a deluge of posts praising Dubai’s government. 

Once a tax-free haven attracting influencers from across the globe and thousands of Brits seeking warm weather and crime free streets, Dubai’s carefully crafted image has been shattered and some residents believe it is ‘finished’. 

The emirate, home to around 240,000 British expats including Rio and Kate Ferdinand, Luisa Zissman and Petra Ecclestone, has been targeted by constant Iranian missile and drone attacks as the regime strikes US allies in the Middle East. 

Dubai was hit by a fresh wave of drone attacks today, with a fire breaking out at a hotel in Creek Harbour in the early hours of the morning. Around noon, a building on the Sheikh Zayed Road was hit followed by a further incident in the Al Bada district. 

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Harris for Peace? Neocons Exist on BOTH Sides

The Democrats are taking to the media to declare that war could have been prevented has Kamala Harris won the election. That narrative is convenient politically, but it ignores what the politicians themselves actually said. The desire for confrontation with Iran has existed on both sides of the political spectrum for decades. The problem is not simply one president or one party. The problem is the bipartisan foreign policy establishment that has long treated Iran as the central strategic enemy in the Middle East. The neocons exist on both sides.

During the 2024 campaign, Kamala Harris herself made the position very clear. When asked which country she considered the United States’ greatest adversary, she replied that the answer was “Iran.” That statement alone shows how deeply the Iran war narrative had already taken hold in Washington. Once a country is publicly framed as the primary adversary, the policy direction becomes predictable. Sanctions escalate, proxy conflicts expand, and eventually military confrontation becomes increasingly likely.

Yet now many of the same politicians who previously described Iran as America’s top enemy are suddenly condemning the war. Harris has recently criticized the Trump administration’s actions toward Iran, arguing against the escalation of the conflict. The shift in tone is typical Washington politics. When out of power, politicians oppose the war. When in power, the same establishment often supports it. “Let me be clear,” Harris wrote in a statement shared on the social platform X. “I am opposed to a regime-change war in Iran, and our troops are being put in harm’s way for the sake of Trump’s war of choice.”

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The War on Iran Is Dumb. Here’s Why.

War with Iran is being sold as “strategy,” but it looks a lot like habit. A familiar pattern repeats: vague objectives, elastic legal theories, and a confident promise that the costs will be contained. Then the bill arrives anyway, in blood, money, and credibility.

In this round, the costs are already visible in the most predictable place: energy. Fighting that threatens traffic through the Strait of Hormuz does not just “hurt the other side.” It shakes a chokepoint that, in 2024, carried about 20 million barrels per day of oil, roughly 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption. Markets do not care about speeches. They price risk, and they pass it along to households and firms.

Calling this “a small price” is not analysis. It is marketing. Economies, including America’s, still operate inside a global price system for energy and shipping, and officials themselves acknowledge the conflict has pushed energy markets and prices higher.

The China excuse is bad strategy and worse economics

One of the more fashionable rationales for attacking Iran is the “China angle”: Iran trades with China, so breaking Iran breaks China. This is the kind of logic that sounds plausible until you compare it to reality.

Start with the basic arithmetic. U.S. goods and services trade with China totaled about $658.9 billion in 2024, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. That is not a footnote. It is a structural feature of the world economy. When two economies are connected at that scale, “hurting” one is not a neat chess move. It is self-inflicted collateral damage.

The International Monetary Fund has spent years warning about what happens when states turn economic integration into a weapon. In its words, greater trade restrictions “could reduce global economic output by as much as 7 percent” over the long run. That is not a slogan. It is a forecast about costs that do not vanish because a strategist wants them to.

Now add the Iran-specific detail that is supposed to make the “China angle” sound clever. China does buy large volumes of Iranian crude; much of it routed through sanctions-evasion channels. The Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy estimates that China imported about 1.38 million barrels per day of crude from Iran in 2025, around 12% of China’s total crude imports, and that China purchases about 90% of Iran’s oil exports.

But if your plan is to use war to interrupt an adversary’s energy supply, you have chosen the most globally contagious lever imaginable. The same chokepoint logic that supposedly pinches Beijing also squeezes everyone else. When shipping slows, insurance premiums jump, freight rates rise, and oil prices move. That is not a “China problem.” It is a world problem.

There is another flaw, even more basic. Treating China as the villain for “hedging” against U.S. power is rich coming from a government that has used economic sanctions and financial restrictions as routine tools of statecraft for decades. Great powers teach others how to behave. If the lesson is that supply chains are weapons, do not be surprised when other countries build armor, stockpiles, and alternative routes.

The nuclear lesson: if you want fewer bombs, stop rewarding them

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First Iran, Then Cuba: Trump Has Dropped the Peace-President Mask

Donald Trump did not merely let slip a reckless aside when he said he wanted to “finish this one first” – meaning Iran – before turning to Cuba. He revealed a governing mindset. Countries become items in a queue. War becomes a scheduling matter. One theater before the next, one pressure campaign before the next, one performance of toughness before the cameras move on. That is not strategic restraint. It is imperial casualness masquerading as command. Reuters reported on March 5 that Trump said he wanted to finish the war in Iran first and that it would then be only “a question of time” before attention shifted to Cuba; two days later, Reuters reported him saying Cuba was already negotiating with him and Marco Rubio.

What makes the remark more damning is the promise it betrays. Trump sold himself to voters as the man who would stop wars, not start them. In his inauguration address, he said his “proudest legacy” would be that of a “peacemaker and unifier,” and that America’s success should be measured not only by the battles it wins but by the wars it ends and the wars it never gets into. Even in late February, the White House was still branding him the “President of Peace.” Yet the administration is now openly talking about winning the war with Iran, rejecting negotiations, and even asserting a right to shape Iran’s political future.

You do not have to praise the Iranian state to recognize the danger in that. The issue is not whether one approves of Tehran. The issue is whether an American president who campaigned against endless war is now normalizing the oldest and most discredited habits of Washington foreign policy: regime-change rhetoric, contempt for diplomacy, and the fantasy that bombing can substitute for strategy. When Trump says he is not interested in negotiating and muses that there may be nobody left to say “we surrender,” he is not sounding like a dealmaker. He is sounding like every hawk who has ever confused devastation with victory.

The Cuba remark matters for another reason as well. It suggests that Iran is not being treated as a singular emergency but as one stop in a broader politics of coercion. That is how permanent interventionism works. Every crisis is packaged as exceptional, urgent, and morally self-evident – until the language starts to slide. First this country, then that one. First “finish” Iran, then move on. First present force as a necessity, then sell the next confrontation as inevitable. Trump’s words make that rhythm impossible to miss. The vocabulary may shift from threat to negotiation to triumphalism, but the premise remains the same: Washington decides, others adjust.

Congress, meanwhile, is doing what Congress so often does when presidents discover a taste for undeclared war: almost nothing. On March 4, a Senate majority voted to block a bipartisan war-powers resolution that would have required congressional authorization for hostilities against Iran. That abdication is not a procedural footnote. It is one of the great mechanisms by which American wars become easier to start, harder to stop, and almost impossible to own. Presidents escalate. Legislators grumble. Then the war machine keeps moving.

And it is moving fast. Reuters reported this weekend that the administration used emergency authority to bypass Congress and expedite the sale of more than 20,000 bombs to Israel, just as the joint U.S.-Israeli air war against Iran entered its second week. This is what “peace through strength” usually means in practice: fewer restraints, more munitions, and a shorter distance between rhetoric and rubble. The slogan is designed to comfort Americans into believing that force is a form of stability. More often, it is simply the marketing language of escalation.

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Drone Wave Hits Iran Streets, Hundreds Kill Regime Members Individually In Dystopian New Form Of Warfare

Reports from Iran say Israeli drones are now hunting Basij and Revolutionary Guard Corps checkpoints in the streets across Iran, in what appears to be a wave involving hundreds of drones.

The apparent goal is to clear the streets of the regime’s repression forces and allow opponents of the regime to come out, reports Israeli Live News.

Reports from Iran say drones and UAVs are exploding on motorcycles and vehicles, with dozens of Basij forces reportedly killed at checkpoints, bases, police stations and regime gathering points.

This is being described as Iran’s version of the pager attacks.

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Hegseth vows US will ‘go as far as we need’ to topple Iranian regime as conflict escalates — including possible ‘boots on ground’

War Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed he and President Trump will do whatever it takes to topple the Iranian regime — and didn’t rule out sending US ground troops into Tehran as Operation Epic Fury rages on.

“We’re willing to go as far as we need in order to be successful,” Hegseth told CBS News’ Major Garrett during a “60 Minutes” sit-down interview that aired Sunday night.

“We reserve the right. We would be completely unwise if we did not reserve the right to take any particular option, whether it included boots on the ground or not boots on the ground.”

Trump told The Post last week that US forces could be sent into Iran if that is deemed necessary.

Hegseth told Garrett that if a decision is made to deploy American troops — whether overtly or covertly — to the Middle East, it wouldn’t be shared publicly with the press.

“People ask, ‘Boots on the ground, no boots on the ground, four weeks, two weeks, six weeks? Go in, go in,’” he added.

“President Trump knows — I know — you don’t tell the enemy, you don’t tell the press, you don’t tell anybody what your limits would be on an operation.”

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Missile Fragment From Iran School Massacre Marked ‘Made in USA’ – But Trump Keeps Lying

As Iranian officials displayed US-marked fragments of a missile believed to have been used in Saturday’s massacre of around 175 mostly school children in Minab, President Donald Trump on Monday doubled down on his unfounded claim that Iran carried out the strike.

The president suggested during a press conference at his Trump National Doral Miami resort that Iran may have used a US Tomahawk missile to carry out the February 28 attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab.

Trump falsely claimed that Iran has “some” of the highly restricted cruise missiles after one of them was recorded hitting an Iranian military facility near the school just after Saturday’s strike there.

“A Tomahawk is very generic,” Trump added. “It’s sold to other countries.”

New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh pressed Trump on his claim, asking, “You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war… Why are you the only person saying this?”

Trump replied: “Because I just don’t know enough about it. I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are, are used by others. As you know, numerous other nations have Tomahawks. They buy them from us.”

Iran has no Tomahawks, which are not “generic.” Originally developed by General Dynamics and now manufactured by Raytheon, the BGM‑109 Tomahawk is a specific long-range cruise missile designed and produced in the United States. Only two other countries – Australia and the United Kingdom—are known to have Tomahawks in their arsenals, although Japan and the Netherlands have also agreed to buy them.

The US also does not sell weaponry to the Iranian government – with the extraordinary exception of the Iran-Contra Affair, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran in order to fund anti-communist Contra terrorists in Nicaragua.

Trump’s Monday remarks followed his Saturday comments to reporters aboard Air Force One, where he said that the bombing “was done by Iran.”

However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was accompanying Trump, notably declined to back Trump’s claim, saying only that “we’re certainly investigating” the strike.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz also did not endorse the president’s assertion, telling ABC News’ Martha Raddatz Sunday that he would “leave that to the investigators to determine.”

Waltz – a former Army Special Forces officer who served in Afghanistan – also told NBC News’ Meet the Press Sunday that “we never deliberately attack civilians.”

More than 400,000 civilians in over half a dozen countries have been killed in US-led wars since 9/11, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

Hundreds of Iranian civilians have been killed by US and Israeli bombing since February 28. Israeli airstrikes have also killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians during the same period.

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