Iran and the Israel/US Axis
This months supplementary article covers the attacks on Iran.
On Friday, 13 June 2025, Israel attacked Iran. Nearly 10 days later on the 22nd, the US joined the party and bombed three nuclear sites in Iran. The attacks from both countries were entirely illegal and unprovoked. Israel has been looking for this to erupt for decades. But what is particularly shocking about Israel’s attacks is that it took place during negotiations between the US and Iran over Iran’s nuclear program, as Jonathan Cook notes in this article. This should not be surprising. Treachery is the hallmark of extremist regimes.
I recently published an article outlining the parallels between Nazi Germany and Israel.
Israel’s attack on Iran mimics an action taken by Nazi Germany. On 24 August 1939, the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, aka the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (amongst other names), was signed. As the US Holocaust Museum outlines:
The German-Soviet Pact consisted of two parts, one public and one secret. The public part was a non-aggression pact in which each country promised not to attack the other.
It was supposed to last for 10 years. The pact intended to set up spheres of influence in eastern Europe, with Poland being partitioned between the two entities:
With the pact in effect, Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, without fear of Soviet intervention.
The pact allowed the Soviets to occupy the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and parts of Romania. But the whole process was an elaborate and tactical deception, to allow Germany to defeat France and Britain, by neutralising any threat from the Eastern front. As a result Germany finally invaded the Soviet Union, marking the end of the Pact:
On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive 21 (code-named “Operation Barbarossa”). This directive was the first operational order for the invasion of the Soviet Union. From the time they began planning the invasion, German military and police authorities intended to wage a war of annihilation. They considered their enemies to be the Soviet Union’s “Judeo-Bolshevik” Communist government as well as Soviet citizens, particularly the Jews.
The parallels here are obvious. According to the The Jerusalem Post, from an Israeli official:
the round of US-Iranian nuclear negotiations scheduled for Sunday was part of a coordinated US-Israeli deception aimed at lowering Iran’s guard ahead of Friday’s attack.
There has been many conflicting reports concerning the levels of damage at Iran’s nuclear sites following the attacks, so what’s the status of Iran’s nuclear program? This article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists provides some background. It indicates that some damage has been done and that the IAEA:
estimates that over 400 kilograms of the uranium hexafluoride gas have already been enriched to 60 percent—a level considered highly enriched, but not yet weapons grade. This material sits outside of international oversight, Ian Stewart, a non-proliferation expert, explains. It’s enough for about 10 nuclear weapons, he says.
Centrifuges and the enriched uranium would have been moved to secret undisclosed sites. There is of course the potential of radioactive leakage, but this does not appear to have occurred after the attacks. But this subsequent article from the Bulletin indicates, it may not be difficult for Iran to pursue a nuclear weapon with the material it has already. But here there is another party to the deception - the International Atomic Energy Agency itself. An article from Press TV outlines how a trove of documents acquired by Iran from Israel reveals direct cooperation between Israel and the Director General of the (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, against Iran:
The newly released documents show that the IAEA chief has been closely cooperating with Israeli officials and has carried out their directives and orders in full, the report said. This raises questions over the neutrality and independence of the IAEA.
The documents were revealed on social media.
The information contained in the documents allowed Israel to carry out the assassination of senior Iranian scientists. More background information is provided by this exposé from Common Dreams:
Rafael Grossi, director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
Grossi had produced a report that claimed that Iran was in violation of its non-proliferation obligations. The IAEA Board of Governors then convened a vote that found Iran in non-compliance with its obligations, whilst the US was involved in back-room arm twisting behind the scenes prior to the vote, which gave Israel the green light to attack Iran:
revealing how much Israel valued the IAEA resolution as diplomatic cover for the war.
The IAEA board meeting was timed for the final day of President Trump’s 60-day ultimatum to Iran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement. Even as the IAEA board voted, Israel was loading weapons, fuel and drop-tanks on its warplanes for the long flight to Iran and briefing its aircrews on their targets. The first Israeli air strikes hit Iran at 3 a.m. that night.
As a result, Iran filed a complaint against Grossi with the UN. The report Grossi produced stemmed from a Mossad intelligence report that claimed that Iran had produced enriched uranium before 2003. However the Iranians believe that uranium may have been planted.
Grossi’s predecessor, in December 2015, following an investigation:
published its “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program.”
The IAEA assessed that, while some of Iran’s past activities might have been relevant to nuclear weapons, they “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.” The IAEA “found no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material in connection with the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”
And this completely sums up the brazen collusion that took place to create a war footing for Israel:
The Israelis have a long record of fabricating false evidence about Iran’s nuclear activities, like the notorious “laptop documents” given to the CIA by the MEK in 2004 and believed to have been created by the Mossad. Douglas Frantz, who wrote a report on Iran’s nuclear program for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, revealed that the Mossad created a special unit in 2003 to provide secret briefings on Iran’s nuclear program, using “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere.”
And yet Grossi collaborated with Israel to pursue its latest allegations. After several years of meetings in Israel and negotiations and inspections in Iran, he wrote his report to the IAEA Board of Governors and scheduled a board meeting to coincide with the planned start date for Israel’s war.
It goes without saying that Israel has escaped scrutiny of IAEA, over its nuclear program, which I documented in detail here.
US dirty tricks with the IAEA go back to the days of George W. Bush during the tenure of Egyptian IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei, who exposed CIA forged documents purporting that Iraq was aiming to produce a nuclear weapon. In 2005, ElBaradei and the IAEA:
were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for exposing Bush’s lies, speaking truth to power and strengthening nuclear non-proliferation.
After that, the US was determined to plant someone within IAEA that was subservient to US interests. After Yukiya Amano was appointed in 2009:
U.S. diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks revealed details of his extensive vetting by U.S. diplomats, who reported back to Washington that Amano “was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program.”
Grossi continued the trend after his appointment. ElBaradei wrote a memoir, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times which outlined the events that defined his tenure at the IAEA. The Dreams article finishes with this statement:
Rafael Grossi should resign as IAEA Director before he further undermines nuclear non-proliferation and drags the world any closer to nuclear war. And he should also withdraw his name from consideration as a candidate for UN Secretary General.
At this point its worth delving into to the historical precedents that has led to this conflict. Invariably it revolves around resources, specifically oil. I’ve covered some of that story here.
Iran, formally Persia, became the focal point for Middle East oil discoveries at the turn of the 20th century. As a result, I noted:
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), a British company, was founded in 1909 following the discovery of a large oil field in Masjed Soleiman, Persia. Prospecting began in 1901, through the direction and funding from William Knox D'Arcy, a British-Australian businessman and one of the principal founders of the oil and petrochemical industry in Persia, who negotiated a deal with the Shah of Persia, with some diplomatic help from the British Government. Oil was eventually struck in 1908. In 1914, the British Government purchased a 51% shareholding in the APOC.
This was important to the British war effort during WW1. As further discoveries were made in the region, the colonial powers jostled for control. This led to the mandate system being introduced and the carve up of the Middle East post war, with Britain controlling much of the region.
After WW2, US influence in the Middle East increased markedly. Saudi Arabia in particular ‘gave US oil interests access to a strategic and vast source of oil reserves’. But it was in Iran that a dramatic shake up occurred:
with the election of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1951, who took an anti-imperialist approach and attempted to nationalise the oil industry. He was deposed in a western backed coup two years later. This allowed US interests to consolidate their presence further in the Middle East.
This was the spark that soured relations with Iran and the west. As this article from NPR outlines it was the CIA that engineered the coup that overthrew Mossadegh, bringing the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavito to power. Documents declassified in 2013 and published by the National Archives reveals the US role in the operation.
The Shah then imposed a brutal authoritarian dictatorship. But his reign ended after 25 years, when he was deposed in the 1979 Iranian revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to Iran on 1 February 1979, taking over the seat of Government. Iran was once again persona non grata to the west. But what really fuelled US resentment towards Iran up until the present day was the hostage crisis. History sums up what happened:
On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 American hostages. The immediate cause of this action was President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow Iran’s deposed Shah, a pro-Western autocrat who had been expelled from his country some months before, to come to the United States for cancer treatment. However, the hostage-taking was about more than the Shah’s medical care: it was a dramatic way for the student revolutionaries to declare a break with Iran’s past and an end to American interference in its affairs. It was also a way to raise the intra- and international profile of the revolution’s leader, the anti-American cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The students set their hostages free on January 21, 1981, 444 days after the crisis began and just hours after President Ronald Reagan delivered his inaugural address. Many historians believe that hostage crisis cost Jimmy Carter a second term as president.
In short, a conflict with Iran had been brewing for a long time, with extremist maniacal Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu claiming for the best part of the last 30 years that Iran was making nuclear weapons. From Israel’s perspective it was removing any challenge to its domination in the region. But for the US/Israel axis, it was proxy Israel ensuring that US hegemony prevailed in the region, which would ultimately ensure domination of Middle Eastern resources across the board. It ultimately boils down to neoliberalism and the military/fossil fuel industrial complex. As I noted in my ‘Gas’ article much of this was outlined in an interview video, which I’ll reproduce here again.
As I noted:
Clark had seen a classified document from the Secretary of Defense's office saying that the US was going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran. This was perfectly in keeping with the historical pattern noted in this article regarding resource consolidation. This was effectively confirmed by Clark in the video, saying that oil was the decisive factor. If there was no oil in the Middle East it would be just like Africa. Greater Israel may have been initially a Zionist dream. But for US imperialism, its a wet dream of oil and gas riches. 5 years prior to this, as noted by Jonathon Cook, a document called A Clean Break was produced.
It remains to be seen how the situation unravels in the weeks to come.