In building his case for his war on Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump says he asked his team for a list of Iranian attacks on the U.S. and U.S. interests: “Over the last 47 years. I said, ‘give me all of the attacks.’ If I told you all of them I’d still be talking.”
Trump has a short memory. He asked for and recited a similar list when he delivered his 2017 speech decertifying the 2015 JCPOA Iran nuclear deal, an illegal decision that helped pave the way to the current crisis and conflict. At the time, then Iranian President Hassan Rouhani suggested that Trump re-read his history books.
Trump recited a long list of charges against Iran; some of them historical, some of them contemporary, and many of them false.
Trump began his eight-minute video with the opening remark that “For 47 years, the Iranian regime has… waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States [and] our troops.” He then itemizes the charges.
The first “was to back a violent takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, holding dozens of American hostages for 444 days.” Iran is guilty of this charge, and there is no defense for the taking of hostages. But there is a context.
Vali Nasr, Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, has explained that “In the popular mind, the hostage crisis was seen as justified by what happened in 1953.”
What happened in 1953, that Trump leaves out, is that the U.S. and Britain took out Mohammad Mosaddeq, the democratically elected leader of Iran, in a coup. They placed the Shah back on the throne, thwarting the will of the Iranian people and ushering in years of savage and repressive dictatorship; this included the repression of opposition media, political parties and unions by the Shah, as well as his murderous SAVAK secret police and their notorious torture chambers.
When the students took over the U.S. embassy in the hostage taking, they were able to piece together shredded documents. They would discover that there were CIA offices in SAVAK headquarters, and that the CIA had been involved in the training of SAVAK officers. Stephen Kizner tells the story of the U.S. hostage who complained to his Iranian captor about his imprisonment. “You have nothing to complain about,” said his captor. “The United States took our whole country hostage in 1953.”
The hostage taking was wrong. But it was a response to an earlier wrong. In 1953, the Iranians chased out the Shah only to have the U.S. intervene and put him back on the throne; in 1979, the Iranians finally chased him out again, only to have the U.S. take him in and provide him with sanctuary. The Iranians saw the hostage taking as an attempt to prevent American midwifery from delivering the same fate again.
Trump then moves forward four years, charging that “In 1983, Iran’s proxies carried out the marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel.” Again, true; but again, without context. The 1983 Hezbollah bombing was an attack on a military base in Beirut belonging to a foreign invader that was actively and currently bombing Lebanon. The bombing is plausibly seen more as an act of war than an act of terrorism.
Trump then jumps forward seventeen years and says that “In 2000, they knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole.” The attack on the USS Cole, an American destroyer that was taking on fuel in Yemen on its way to the Persian Gulf to help enforce UN sanctions on Iraq, killed seventeen sailors. But it was not Iran that attacked the Cole – it was al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack, and the official FBI website says that “The extensive FBI investigation ultimately determined that members of the al Qaeda terrorist network planned and carried out the bombing.”
Finally, Trump says that “Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.” The U.S. has long known this is not true. The 2024 Global Terrorism Index states that the “deadliest terrorist groups in the world… were Islamic State (IS) and its affiliates, followed by Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM), Hamas, and al-Shabaab.” None of these groups is Shiite, and none, with the exception of Hamas, is affiliated with Iran. The U.S. has long known that many of these organizations are supported by Saudi Arabia. Iran has sided with the U.S. against some of these groups and has itself been the victim of attacks by them.
Trump then moved from historical grievances to contemporary ones. The most important thing is that Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon…. They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.” Trump has repeatedly said that “They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words, ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon’.”
That’s not true. It was Iran who signed and honored the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement that closed all paths to a nuclear weapon; it was Trump, in his first term, who illegally blew the agreement up. Since then, the U.S. has continued to assess that Iran is not on a quest for a nuclear weapon. And Iran has continued to negotiate a guarantee against military enrichment that preserves the legal right to civilian enrichment. Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who was mediating talks between the U.S. and Iran, said hours before bombs began to fall on Iran that “A peace deal is within our reach.”
As for the secret words, Iran uttered them multiple times. As recently as February 24, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, declared that Iran’s “fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon; neither will we Iranians ever forgo our right to harness the dividends of peaceful nuclear technology for our people.” Those were the exact words, and they were far from secret.
Trump then moved from illegal nuclear weapons to legal missiles. Iran, Trump claimed, “continue[s] developing the long range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland.”
It is not true that Iran will soon be able to strike the U.S. with missiles. Iran has no intercontinental ballistic missiles, and has stuck to a self-imposed limit of making missiles with a range of no more than 2,000 km. A May 2025 report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency stated that “Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily-viable ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.” That’s nine years away, and that’s if they decide to pursue the required technology–hardly the imminent threat the U.S. was citing as a justification for war.
Elsewhere, Trump has cited the need for a preemptive strike because of an imminent threat Iran was about to strike first. But there was no imminent threat. In a mandated letter to Congress in which laid out the justification for the war, there was no mention of any imminent threat. In private meetings, the Trump administration told congressional staff that “U.S. intelligence did not suggest Iran was preparing to launch a preemptive strike against the U.S.”
On March 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked if “there was an imminent threat.” He said there “absolutely was.” But there wasn’t. “[t]he imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked – and we believe they would be attacked – that they would immediately come after us.” But striking back after you are struck is neither preemptive nor imminent.
The U.S. has yet to lay out a case for a war that is clearly in violation of the UN charter and international law. There was no Security Council approval, and there was no imminent threat to defend against. Trump laid out a litany of reasons, both historical and contemporary, but none of them justify the war.
