Tag: perpetual war

Trump’s Genocidal Threats on Iran Are Enabled by a Vast Apparatus of Destruction

omehow, in a war already bent on turning Iran into a failed state, Donald Trump’s threats against the country have become increasingly disturbing. For days now, Trump has threatened to bomb key civilian infrastructure in Iran, from bridges to power plants. On April 5, in a terrifying screed, he wrote: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped in one, in Iran.” He went on to say, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

He doubled down on that threat the next day, when a reporter asked how his threatened strikes would not amount to a war crime. “They’re animals and we have to stop them,” he said. He also attempted to justify himself by suggesting that he was calling for Iranian liberation. “They want to hear bombs because they want to be free.”

Finally, on the morning of April 7, he issued his most chilling threat yet: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

These statements, from a man who directs the incomprehensibly lethal power of the U.S. military, should make the world stop. For me, personally, it does feel like the world has stopped: What do you do in the hours between the moment the president of the United States threatens to annihilate your homeland and the time he has vowed to conduct the actual act? Trump is holding an entire nation hostage. But, somehow, the rest of the world continues on. The markets chug along. Congress continues to be in recess, with dissent confined largely to social media posts. It is hard not to feel like we have failed some critical test of the bounds of our own humanity.

Now, as the entire world waits to see what kind of fate a single man will inflict upon an entire nation, we have entered new territory. As I type these words, most people with common sense are speculating whether Trump will use one of the United States’ 3,700 nuclear weapons on Iran. Let us not forget that Israel — the only actually nuclear-armed state in the region, the one that’s spent nearly three years now committing genocide against Palestinians and is currently wiping out entire villages in Lebanon — also has an estimated 90 nuclear weapons.

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Trump Is Openly Targeting Innocent Civilians

President Donald Trump got straight to the point. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” he wrote in a Tuesday morning social media post directed at Iran. Despite unfounded speculation that Trump was planning a nuclear attack, the post likely referred to Trump’s earlier threat to blow up all the bridges and power plants in Iran.

For years, bureaucrats and the chattering class in Washington have tried to justify innocent people’s suffering from war and sanctions. America’s enemies hide among civilians and weaponize civilian infrastructure, they argued. Military strategy and sanctions policy were designed to leave civilians alone, they claimed. Wars and sieges would actually liberate people suffering under evil regimes, they asserted. Trump keeps making their job harder by speaking frankly about what his goals actually are.

When the U.S. military bombed the B1 highway bridge outside Tehran, killing eight people at a nearby family picnic, Axios breathlessly repeated anonymous officials’ claims that Iran was using it as a “military supply route.” Except that was impossible, because the bridge wasn’t finished when it was bombed. And Trump himself bragged about destroying “the biggest bridge in Iran,” making it clear that the attack was meant to send a message to Iranians.

When Trump first threatened to blow up the Iranian power grid, The Wall Street Journal reported that electrical infrastructure is fair game in war if attacking it “makes a concrete contribution to a military operation and the potential harm to civilians is minimized.” CNN’s Jake Tapper similarly claimed that “the President could argue that the infrastructure has dual use and also is utilized by Iran’s military.” But Trump said bluntly that his goal was to send Iranians “back to the Stone Age, where they belong.”

Although Trump is unique in his verbal aggression, the project of sending Iran to the Stone Age was years in the making—and bipartisan. Both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration imposed sanctions on Iran’s civilian industries, for example, on the grounds that steel mills and automakers were supporting the Iranian military. The first Trump administration even put terrorism sanctions on an Iranian university, calling it a “recruitment network” for the Iranian military and intelligence services.

The exact same logic was on display when warplanes bombed Iranian factories and college campuses over the past week. (The Israeli army, which carried out the campus bombings, claimed that some of these campuses trained future military officers and researched weapons technology.) Ironically, one of the targeted universities, the Sharif University of Technology, had been the site of renewed anti-government protests right before the war.

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Senior BBC Iran reporter exposed as opposition activist

After a top reporter at the BBC drew outrage for publishing a quote demanding Iran be nuked, she’s been revealed as a dedicated regime change activist whose career was launched by a CIA-founded propaganda network. Serious questions remain about the BBC’s editorial process. 

On April 6, 2026, horrified social media users began drawing attention to an extraordinary statement allegedly provided to the BBC by a twenty-something Iranian:

“About them hitting energy infrastructure, using an atomic bomb, or leveling Iran – my honest reaction is that I’m okay with all of these.”

Three hours later, as the uproar grew, the quote suddenly vanished from the BBC’s article. It had been replaced by a far less controversial criticism of the Iranian government. The episode raises serious questions about the BBC’s editorial process, as well as the background and motivations of the author responsible for the article.

Who is Ghoncheh Habibiazad?

At the ripe old age of 27, Ghoncheh Habibiazad has already achieved more than most British journalists will in their lifetime. After just four years in the field, she has already risen to the position of ‘Senior Reporter’ at BBC Persian – a prestigious and influential role which requires a “minimum of 8 – 10 years of experience in journalism,” according to a BBC job listing.  

Following four years of higher education on the Iranian government’s dime, Habibiazad graduated from the University of Tehran in 2020, and immediately began aligning herself with her country’s enemies. In October 2021, she was brought on as an intern at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a CIA propaganda project founded by notorious spymaster Allen Dulles which nominally separated from the Agency in the 70s. During her time at the network’s studio in Prague, Habibiazad’s LinkedIn page notes that she conducted such groundbreaking investigations as “an article on “hidden disabilities”” while “working remotely for Radio Farda,” an RFE/RL subdivision that serves as Washington’s official Persian-language mouthpiece.

The same month she began interning for RFE/RL, Habibiazad joined forces with Marjan TV, another outlet founded by expat regime change activists. She would spend the next year and half developing social media content for the outlet and its subsidiary, Manoto TV. The broadcaster has been described by Iranian academic Shahab Esfandiary as “a pro-monarchy network with the mission of glorifying the Pahlavi dynasty, one of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century.”

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Trump’s Monstrous Threats Against the Iranian People

The president marked Easter with more deranged threats against the country and people of Iran:

The US president gave Iran until 8pm eastern time on Tuesday to reopen the crucial shipping lane after earlier threatening to unleash “hell” in an expletive-laden social media post.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

The president is making explicit threats to commit massive war crimes against the civilian population. He means to inflict collective punishment on tens of millions of people because their government will not yield to his unhinged demands. He is treating the Iranian people as hostages, and he is threatening to shoot the hostages if he doesn’t get what he wants. The message the president has sent amounts to telling the Iranian people, “Trump, or I burn the country.”

It is not an exaggeration to say that the president is threatening genocidal violence against the people of Iran. Trump has referred to Iranians as “animals” in a chilling echo of Israeli officials’ statements at the start of the genocidal war in Gaza. He said this morning that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back” if Iran does not capitulate. This is eliminationist language directed at a country of more than ninety million people. These are the words of a madman, and coming from the head of a nuclear weapons state they are terrifying.

It should be clear by now that this is a war on the Iranian people, and it was never going to be anything else. The aggressors want to wreck Iran and leave it in ruins. That should have been obvious from the start after what the Israeli government did to Gaza and is currently doing to Lebanon with Washington’s full support, but now it is undeniable.

Trump’s Iran policy has always been defined by collective punishment. His “maximum pressure” sanctions have impoverished the Iranian people and strangled their economy for the last eight years. Attacks on civilian infrastructure in his criminal war threaten the entire population with even greater deprivation and hardship. As ever, the destruction is the point. The president is not really trying to achieve anything. He simply wishes to punish and harm those that will not submit to him.

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Pentagon calls Individual Ready Reserve a ‘mobilization asset’ in new policy

A new Pentagon policy for veterans still in the Individual Ready Reserve puts a sharper tone on how the Pentagon views inactive soldiers, moving from a last resort to a backup source for manpower.

“First and foremost, the [Individual Ready Reserve] is a mobilization asset. Deliberative plans will be in place that account for the use of the IRR, especially in plans for full mobilization,” according to a Department of Defense instruction released March 23.

The Individual Ready Reserve, or IRR, is made up of service members who have left active duty or traditional reserve roles with remaining time on their original service contract. IRR members return to civilian life and are considered veterans rather than military members, but are subject to recall to active duty in times of war or national emergency if needed.

The updated IRR rules arrive just months after Congress directed the military to do a 21st-century mass mobilization exercise. 

Though the day-to-day policies in the new guidance are largely unchanged from the last decade, including the rules around attending musters, the language reflects a “new philosophy” for the Inactive Ready Reserve, said Steve Minyard, director at Reserve Organization of America.

“The IRR used to be a place where you would just go and sit and the military didn’t really care what you did, and they didn’t care your skill set, because you just sat there to fulfill your full contract,” said Minyard, a former senior enlisted advisor for the Pentagon office that oversees IRR policy and guidance. “You may have done four years on active duty, and then you owe four years into the IRR, you don’t want to actively drill, so you just sit there.”

But laying out a vision for the Inactive Ready Reserve as a “mobilization asset” suggests a new role.

“That is new,” Minyard said. “That was not in the other one. So this isn’t just a place for people to ride out their contract.”

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Pete Hegseth Says Largest Volume of Strikes to Date in Iran Expected Today Before Tomorrow’s “Complete Demolition” of Iran

War Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on Monday that Iran would face its heaviest round of US strikes ahead of Trump’s deadline for Iran to make a deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face “complete demolition.”

President Trump held a press conference on Monday with Secretary Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine, and CIA Director John Rattcliffe, following the successful search and rescue operation for the crew of an F-15 Strike Eagle fighter jet that was shot down last week over Iran.

While discussing the mission to rescue two downed Airmen in Iran over the weekend, Hegseth praised God for the successful mission and the Easter miracle, commending the brave heroes’ “faith and fighting spirit.” The pilot who was stranded for nearly 50 hours in enemy territory, Hegseth said, sent his first message, after surviving the incident and making it to safety, from inside Iran on his emergency transponder, saying “Good is good.”

He further revealed that the President had ordered “the largest volume of strikes since day one of this operation” before tomorrow’s deadline, where bombs will rain down “even more than today.”

“And then Iran has a choice. Choose wisely because this President does not play around. You can ask Soleimani, you can ask Maduro, you can ask Khamenei,” Hegseth declared.

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The US and Israel Are Making Gaza-Style War The New Normal

One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.

Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the New Yorker ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.

What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.

The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union — and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails.

It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to pretend to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend.

What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action.

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Israel bombs Tehran as Iranians taunt Trump

Israel has conducted yet another wave of strikes against infrastructure targets including an airport in Tehran, after striking at least two petrochemical facilities in Iran the day before.

In the meantime, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Defense claimed the debris from a successful “interception and destruction” of at least seven ballistic missiles fell in the vicinity of its energy facilities, with the damage still being “assessed.”

Israeli forces attacked Iran’s largest petrochemical facility in the South Pars natural gas field and a petrochemical complex in the city of Marvdasht earlier on Monday – as US President Donald Trump has stepped up threats to strike Iran’s infrastructure if American and Israel-linked shipping is not allowed through the Strait of Hormuz by Wednesday.

“It is Trump who has about 20 hours to either surrender to Iran or see his allies return to the Stone Age. We will not back down!” Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, claimed.

Tehran has reportedly rejected a US ceasefire proposal, circulated by Egyptian, Pakistani, and Turkish mediators, instead offering a ten‑clause plan that calls for a permanent end to the war. The demands reportedly include an end to conflicts across the region, protocols to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the lifting of sanctions, and provisions for reconstruction.

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War-Torn Congo Agrees to Take U.S. Deportees Under Latest Trump Crackdown

The Trump administration has secured a new agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to take in deported illegal aliens.

Deportees will begin arriving in the troubled African nation this month under the new arrangement, according to the country’s Ministry of Communications.

The arrangement is described as temporary, with the U.S. covering all logistical costs.

The DRC said the agreement reflects its “commitment to human dignity and international solidarity” and confirmed each case would be reviewed individually.

Their statement read:

This initiative is established in accordance with the sovereignty of the Democratic Republic of the Congo regarding the management of access to and residence of foreigners on its territory, and is part of its international and regional commitments regarding the protection of migrants’ rights.

It also reflects the Congolese State’s unwavering commitment to human dignity and international solidarity. A country deeply affected by humanitarian realities and already hosting populations of diverse nationalities, the Democratic Republic of Congo remains committed to the values of hospitality and shared responsibility among nations.

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