On the morning of June 13, 2025 the jets took off. They were Israeli jets, carrying American-made munitions, aimed at a country that had spent decades being economically asphyxiated, its scientists assassinated, its currency gutted, its sick denied medicine. They called it Operation Rising Lion. Sit with that name for a moment – the lion, that old symbol of dominion, of empire announcing itself. The Iranian cities of Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were bombed. A ceasefire came on June 24. Twelve days. The wreckage will last generations.
A Double Standard Written in Treaty Law
The pretence for the attack was that Iran was building a nuclear arsenal. No evidence of the claim was offered. Here is a fact that the architects of this assault did not want you to dwell on – Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT). In 1968, Iran put its name to a document that said, in essence, we will not build the bomb. In exchange, the nuclear powers promised security, cooperation, protection. The bargain was explicit.
The aggressor in June’s attack is not a signatory of the NNPT, despite having approximately one hundred nuclear warheads at its Dimona facility, a place that has never once opened its doors to international inspection. And yet, it was Israel that flew the fighter jets that bombed the civil nuclear facilities of a treaty signatory, with the enthusiastic blessing of the United States government.
The Arms Control Association said what Western governments would not – this was an illegal attack on Iran by two nuclear-armed states, one of which has refused to join the very treaty being invoked as justification. The selective application of international law is not incidental to how white-bodied empire operates in this region. It is the mechanism. It is the point.
Forty Years of Economic Warfare
Before the bombs, there were the sanctions. There are always the sanctions. The United States has had Iran under economic siege, in various forms, since 1979 – since the Iranian people had the audacity to overthrow a Shah that the CIA had forcibly installed in 1953. Forty-six years of punishment for the crime of self-determination.
By the time the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign had fully metastasized, the war had long since moved into the hospitals. Six million Iranian patients found themselves rationed out of treatments for cancer, multiple sclerosis, haemophilia, epilepsy, and kidney failure. Anaesthetics ran short in operating theatres. During the COVID-19 pandemic, sanctions blocked two million doses of influenza vaccine from reaching Iranian soil.
Human Rights Watch concluded that US sanctions were draining Iranians’ right to health – not as a side effect, but as a foreseeable consequence of deliberate policy. The United Nations’ own special rapporteur identified the worst affected – people with severe diseases, disabled people, women-led households, children.
This is what empire does. It does not only send the jets. It makes medicine disappear. It makes the dying look like natural causes. And then, when the bombs finally come, it says it had no choice.
Death by a Thousand Cuts – Assassination and Sabotage
The June 2025 war did not arrive from nowhere. You must understand the years that preceded it as the same project, in smaller strokes.
In April 2024, Israel bombed the Iranian consulate complex in Damascus. A consulate. A building protected under international law, a building that carries the legal status of sovereign territory. They killed senior officers inside it and faced no international sanction whatsoever. In July 2024, on the day of a presidential inauguration in Tehran, Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in a military guesthouse. The audacity of that operation – carried out in the Iranian capital, on a ceremonial day – required years of intelligence penetration so deep it should have shocked the world. It did not.
By the time the war began, Israeli operations had killed multiple Iranian government officials, two chiefs of staff, the air force commander, numerous nuclear scientists. An Israeli official later confirmed that Israel had built a drone base on Iranian soil. Brookings Institution analysts noted the extraordinary nature of this penetration – Israel had managed to identify and track key Iranian military leaders and smuggle drones deep into Iran over an extended period.
Think about what it would mean if Iran had built a drone base on Israeli soil. Think about the language that would be used. Think about the international emergency sessions, the emergency resolutions, the talk of existential threat. The rules of the international order are not applied universally. They are applied to discipline the unaligned and excuse the client states of Western power. This has always been true. It remains true.
The Human Cost and the Iranian Paradox
Intellectual honesty demands acknowledgment of what this analysis cannot erase – the Islamic Republic is an authoritarian government. It executes dissidents. It imprisons journalists and activists. It has suppressed protest movements. These grievances are real and are held by some Iranians – not manufactured by Washington or Tel Aviv, who care about them only insofar as they are useful.
This is precisely the corruption at the heart of the regime-change project. The suffering of Iranians under their government has been weaponised as cover for a campaign whose actual objectives are strategic – the elimination of a regional power capable of resisting Israeli and American hegemony, the reassertion of Western control over the Middle East’s political direction, the removal of the one state in the region that consistently refuses to make the accommodations demanded of it.
Iran, for all its many sins, represents something that the architects of permanent American-Israeli dominance find genuinely threatening – a large, ancient, resource-rich civilisation with its own self-confidence, one that refuses to be absorbed into the client-state network that Washington has spent decades constructing. It maintains independent foreign policy positions. It supports movements that challenge Israeli occupation. It refused the Abraham Accords framework – the deal that sought to normalise Israeli regional power while the Palestinian question was quietly interred.
The Moral Authority Problem – Who Is America to Lecture Anyone?
Before receiving the United States as the guarantor of an international rules-based order, it is worth examining the state of that order at home. The country waging war on Iran – by proxy through Israel, and directly through its own bombers – is governed by a president who, as a private citizen, was convicted of 34 felony counts in a New York court. Donald Trump became the first convicted felon to assume the American presidency, a fact normalised with remarkable speed by institutions trained to treat the extraordinary as routine. His administration has pursued what the Vera Institute of Justice described as the most expansive assault on due process in modern American history.
I am not listing these facts to distract. I am listing them because you cannot understand the bombing of Iran without understanding who carries it out.
Israel’s Credentials – Apartheid, Pager Bombs, and a Secret Arsenal
If the United States makes for an uncomfortable champion of international law, Israel’s credentials deserve equal scrutiny. The country leading the military campaign against Iran for its nuclear activities is itself a nuclear state that has never submitted to international inspection and maintains what it calls “nuclear ambiguity” – a policy of refusing to confirm or deny an arsenal the entire world can see.
In 1986, Israeli nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu was lured from Britain to Italy by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, where he was drugged and abducted. He was secretly transported to Israel and ultimately convicted in a trial that was held behind closed doors. Vanunu spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 in solitary confinement.
Beyond the nuclear question, three major human rights organisations – Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli group B’Tselem – have independently concluded that Israel operates a system of apartheid against Palestinians. Amnesty International’s comprehensive report documented seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality – all constituting, under international law, a system of apartheid. The International Court of Justice has ruled Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory unlawful. Israel has ignored these rulings. The United States has shielded Israel from consequences for them.
Then there is the pager attack. In September 2024, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies simultaneously exploded across Lebanon and Syria, killing 42 people – including children – and wounding over 4,000, many of them civilian bystanders who lost fingers, hands, eyes. Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, had spent years embedding explosive material inside the devices, selling them through shell companies in Budapest and Sofia. Netanyahu personally approved the operation. When he visited Washington in February 2025, he gifted President Trump a commemorative golden pager. Trump reportedly responded: “That was a great operation.”
All of this against the backdrop of genocide. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory issued what CNN described as the most authoritative UN finding to date – Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza, having committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on Genocide. The United States is Israel’s largest arms supplier, accounting for more than two-thirds of Israel’s total arms imports. By September 2025, Amnesty International was explicit – states that continue to transfer arms to Israel must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and risk complicity in it. The Trump administration’s response was to withdraw from the Human Rights Council body that commissioned the finding.
This is the moral universe in which Iran is being bombed for its civilian nuclear programme.
Conclusion – The Dream of Sovereignty and the Empire That Cannot Permit It
The bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, the assassinations of its scientists and commanders, the sanctions that killed patients who needed blood thinners and chemotherapy and now the execution of its Supreme Leader – these are not isolated policies debated independently on their merits. They are chapters in a very old story. You have read this story before, dressed in different costumes.
You read it in 1953, when the CIA and British intelligence overthrew Mohammed Mosaddegh because he dared to nationalise Iranian oil – oil that the empire had decided belonged to it by virtue of its own appetite. You read it in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Sudan, and Yemen. The pattern is not hidden. The pattern is the policy.
The Iranian government is not innocent. Its victims within its own borders deserve acknowledgment and solidarity but that solidarity cannot be the same thing as endorsing an Israeli-American imperial campaign whose explicit logic – documented in policy papers, repeated by serving ministers, traceable across decades of white-bodied empire building – is the elimination of the last major independent power in a region that Western imperialism has spent generations trying to reorganise in its own image.
What is actually being destroyed here? Not merely nuclear centrifuges. Not merely military installations. What is being destroyed – methodically, deliberately, with the full institutional weight of the most powerful military alliance in human history behind it – is the principle that a nation may exist outside the orbit of Western imperial permission. That a people, however flawed their government, however inconvenient their independence, however loudly they refuse to bend the knee, may nonetheless claim the right to determine their own fate.
The ground is shifting beneath us. What is being built in the rubble of Iran’s cities and the wreckage of its institutions is dominion disguised as democracy. It has always been dominion. The bombs fall. Empire wins.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
