Trump Admission Proves 'Saving the Iranians' Was Never the Goal

Some right-wingers, centrist Democrats, and independents defend the Iran War by citing the Iranian regime’s mass killing of protesters in late 2025 and early 2026. But it doesn’t add up.

The most reliable numbers from the Human Rights Activists News Agency stand around 7,000 people killed, of which over 200 were security forces. The Western media salivated over these numbers, in contrast to the well-documented genocide in Gaza, with some claiming the death toll at 30,000. President Donald Trump has offered no evidence whatsoever to claim 45,000 people were killed. However, the media correctly note that this latest government clampdown was indeed the largest number of protesters killed in the history of the Islamic Republic.

Trump warned that if the Iranian government didn’t stop violence against the protesters, the US would attack Iran. Not too long after, when protests had somewhat died down, the United States launched a second war against Iran during peace negotiations. The stated reasons were all over the place but they can be summed up as follows:

a) Israel was going to attack Iran, Iran would therefore attack US positions, so US attacked first.

b) To diminish Iran nuclear and missile capabilities.

c) To protect Israel from future Iranian attacks.

Last, but not least, this one seemed to stick in people’s minds:

d) Protecting Iranians from their own government.

In the past few weeks, reports confirmed what many had already surmised, completely throwing the “saving Iranians” argument for war out the window. The US was involved in fueling the violence by sending weapons through Kurdish intermediaries to arm Iranian protesters.

The results bore fruit, as intended. The Iranian expert Trita Parsi explained on Democracy Now! that the organized armed elements within the protests attacked civilian infrastructure, mosques, and government forces. This resulted in hundreds of government forces being killed. In response, a far larger number of protesters were killed than in past Iranian protests. The Iranian government is repressive, but this level of violence against protesters indicated something else was at work.

It was the CIA with a tried-and-true method of overthrow and internal political machinations. It called to mind 1953, when Iran was a democracy under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Due to his attempts to nationalize the country’s oil, the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt hatched a plan for a successful coup d’etat after failing a first attempt days earlier.

The CIA paid Iranians to topple statues of the Shah. Pro-democratic Iranians joined in, creating a sense of anarchy. Mossadegh chose not to act against these actions for a day and pro-Shah elements, supported by the US, came into the street shouting “Death to Mossadegh!” Under this contrived sense of disorder, Iranian Colonel Nasiri placed Mossadegh under arrest and the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, took power. During the 1970s the Shah became increasingly oppressive (and staunchly backed by the US), leading to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It was a revolt against historic outside intervention in Iranian politics by the US and Great Britain.

In 1953, the CIA deposed a nationalist democratically elected leader that the US and Great Britain didn’t approve of to get the more pliable ruler. This winter, the US attempted to create a real-life stage play that depicted a fairly oppressive regime that suddenly appeared unrestrained in its use of mass violence against its citizens. The script showed this regime going off the deep end in killing protesters in the thousands within a relatively short period of time. But within this legitimate protest movement, the Kurds (at the behest of the US) distributed weapons that were used to shoot and kill government forces. Imagine, for a second, China arming a US protest movement and hundreds of US police, national guard officers, or ICE members were killed. How would the government respond? With smile emojis?

Last week, the rich, historic Iranian civilization that Donald Trump was supposedly at war to protect, he threatened to annihilate. Well before threatening war crimes against Iran, for Americans to believe that a brutal, unjust war was for the wellbeing of the Iranian people was wildly naïve. As if conducting mass violence and indiscriminate attacks against a people and their society would save them. The Secretary of War said as much, stating clearly that the US would not be concerned about “stupid rules of engagement,” which is pretty much a direct admission to war crimes subsequently committed.

The US and Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of schools, hospitals, universities, a synagogue shows the truth of the war’s aims: to crush any opposition to US empire and Israeli regional hegemony, regardless of civilian mass deaths and infrastructure damage incurred. Just as the 1953 coup of Mossadegh put perceived US imperial interests front and center, so did the fueling of violence in the Iranian protests to paint a picture of an Iranian regime gone mad in its violence towards civilians.

So, to the naïve among us, when your government tells you it is killing people to help them, maybe this time think twice.