President Trump and his minions assured America that he was a man of peace who would abandon the “failed policy of regime change”. Yet, since taking office in 2025, he has bombed seven countries and threatened several more.
As a man without principles, Trump is an empty vessel into which zealots pour their venom. The xenophobe Stephen Miller dehumanizes immigrants, the mercantilist Peter Navarro extols tariffs, and the indicted war criminal Bibi Netanyahu excoriates Iran.
Netanyahu has met with Trump at least seven times since Trump regained the presidency in 2025. As pointed out by the Times of Israel: “Netanyahu’s last meeting with Trump was a hastily arranged visit on February 11, 2026, which included a three-hour meeting at the White House, uncharacteristically closed to the press. The day after that meeting, the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, the world’s largest warship, departed the Caribbean, where it was supporting US military action in Venezuela, for the Mediterranean.” Secretary of State Rubio first suggested that Israel was the driving force behind the war, and now Trump’s top counter-terrorism expert, Joe Kent, confirms that the war was started “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.
Iran has not initiated an offensive war in 300 years, a fact which apparently failed to register in the mind of President Trump. Trump explicitly stated that “based on what Steve [Witkoff] and Jared [Kushner] and Pete [Hegseth] and others were telling me, Marco [Rubio] is so involved, I thought they were going to attack us”.
Trump and his minions will argue that Iran has attacked us numerous times at the hands of Iraqis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, organizations that Iran has supported. A little over 1,000 Americans have died at their hands, fewer than those who died at the hands of Saudi Arabians on 9/11. More than half a million Iranians died during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, a war initiated by Iraq but sustained by US support for Iraq, which included critical reconnaissance data, financial aid, and the export of biological and chemical agents usable for weapons of mass destruction.
One thousand dead Americans render Iran a rogue nation. Half a million dead Iranians leaves the US a beneficent one? Just how beneficent is the US?
Iran did not orchestrate a coup to overthrow the elected leader of the US. The US did orchestrate a coup to overthrow the elected leader of Iran in 1953.
Iran did not establish a secret police force used to violently suppress dissent and torture political prisoners in the US. In setting up SAVAK, the American CIA (along with Israel’s Mossad) did so for Iran in 1957.
Iran did not place sanctions or embargoes on the US or encourage other countries to do so. The US has done so to Iran for 47 years.
Iran did not sail warships into American territorial waters. The US has done so to Iran on numerous occasions, from the “Tanker War” of the 1980s through to the present day.
Iran did not shoot down an American civilian airliner flying in a commercial airline corridor. The USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988, killing 290 people, including 66 children. The US subsequently lied about the USS Vincennes being in Iran’s territorial waters and initially claimed that the Iranian airliner was not in the commercial airline corridor. The US never apologized, and two officers on the Vincennes were subsequently awarded medals.
Iran did not unilaterally withdraw from the nuclear deal with the US. It was President Trump who did so.
Iran did not conduct military exercises within sight of the US. The US has conducted military exercises in the Persian Gulf on multiple occasions.
Iran did not assassinate a major general of the US. President Trump ordered the assassination of the Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.
Iran did not fly spy drones over US territory. The US has been conducting such flights over Iran for a long period.
Iran did not bomb US territory. The US has bombed Iranian territory in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 and again beginning on February 28, 2026.
Iran has not killed innocent American children. In the very first hours of the American preemptive war on Iran, one of the very first strikes was on a girls’ school in southern Iran, which killed an estimated 110 children. When President Trump was asked if the US had bombed the school, he said, “No, in my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.” He continued: “We think it was done by Iran – because they are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Iran is constantly castigated for its support of proxies. Indeed, in 2020, the US State Department estimated that Iran spent more than $16 billion on support of its proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen between 2012 and 2020. But that support is dwarfed by American support for its proxies. In 2016, the US signed a law pledging $38 billion in military assistance to Israel from fiscal year 2019 to 2028, and Israel is by far the largest recipient of US aid, amounting to $330 billion (adjusted for inflation) from 1946 to 2024, nearly three-quarters of that being military assistance.
If Iran is complicit in the deaths attributed to its proxies, then America is complicit in the deaths attributed to Israel.
Investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, in his book Rise and Kill First, documents Israel as having carried out more targeted assassinations than any other Western nation since WWII. Many of those assassinated have been Iranians. However, that record may soon be eclipsed by American targeted killings in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Iran, Nigeria, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.
The toll of death from American actions in the Mideast is truly staggering. According to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, US military operations in the Mideast post 9/11 are estimated to have directly killed more than 940,000 and indirectly killed an additional 3.6 to 3.8 million.
Iran is not an imminent threat to the lives of millions; Donald Trump is.
Michael C. Monson holds degrees in both law and non-western history, has traveled extensively in more than forty countries on five continents, and is a freelance writer published in Reason, The Freeman, The New Individualist, and various newspapers.
