The Iran War: Don’t Blame Israel, Blame the Empire and Its Demagogue

Israel has been a junior partner of the US empire’s Middle East policy since its military success in the 1967 Six Day War. While there are instances of Israel pushing the US into conflict, most directly in the US-Israel war against Iran in June 2025, the current war in Iran was driven by the US empire’s perceived interests plus the Trump factor.

Israel has long been pressuring the US to fight Iran, but the empire did not find it worthwhile to initiate a full-scale war against the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress during the Obama era warned of an impending Iranian nuclear weapon. But, instead, President Barack Obama continued the diplomatic route through establishing the Iran Deal, ensuring Iran would not develop nuclear arms. Long before that, neocons dreamed about attacking Iran, from John Bolton’s pressuring the Bush administration to attack the Persian nation to John McCain’s 2007 bomb Iran song.

In addition to the neocons, several other segments of the population have long been eager for an Iran war: Christian evangelicals, Christian Zionists, Jewish Zionists, and pro-Israeli American lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Also, the pro-military US public, while not supportive of this war, seems to have an inadequate sense of war's gravity based on their overwhelming majority support for most American wars since WWII. Then, of course, there is the American military-industrial complex, which is seeing high demand for armaments and missile technology as the US spends at least $1 billion a day on the Iran War. With oil at over $100 a barrel, the other main corporate beneficiary to the war is the petroleum industry.

These are all very active and influential internal American elements that have existed for quite some time. With a demagogue in the White House seeking to turn the US into a dictatorship, war has proven to be the answer, whether with Venezuela, threatening a takeover of Greenland, and now Iran. An important factor in pushing President Donald Trump are the Epstein files: war is not only good for accumulating power domestically but a convenient distraction from scandal.

In essence, the US empire, with a Nero-like figure at the helm riddled with scandal, has created a disastrous mess.

American oil interests, the military-industrial complex, and the US’ general policy demanding obeisance from other nations have always seen Iran’s theocratic republic as a particular thorn in their side. Historically, when the US has interfered in the Middle East, Iran, through allied groups like Hezbollah, the Houthis, or its more distant ally, Hamas, have not remained quiet. This was seen during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza with the Houthis attacking Israel and when Iran-backed militias attacked US soldiers in Iraq during the mid 2000s. The question in the US media was never about what right the US had to be in sovereign Middle Eastern countries. It was, rather, that no one had the right to push back against US interference. The US seemed to think that if countries didn’t bend over backwards like the Gulf States, they were a problem. And, to Washington, Iran has been especially troublesome.

Israel, as has been said by many scholars, is essentially a US fortress in the Middle East. From 2023 to present, Israel has weakened its local enemies and set its sights on Iran’s destruction with increased intensity. Yet it is the perceived American imperial interest, led by an infantile, power-hungry US president with the Epstein scandal hanging over him, that caused the Iran War. Before this, there was hesitation to attack, despite Israeli pressuring, because of the difficulty of changing the deeply embedded Iranian regime, Iran’s ability to strike back at neighboring countries and their US bases and embassies, and the economic blowback of closing the Strait of Hormuz that we now see unfolding.

Furthermore, while only about 40% of Americans support the war, the lack of significant anti-war demonstrations and the general war-normalized zeitgeist of Americans indicates that they are not too opposed to it either. The leading Democrats are no better: They’ve offered only procedural rather than principled criticism of the Iran War.

In essence, the US empire, with a Nero-like figure at the helm riddled with scandal, has created a disastrous mess. It has started an unplanned, unrationalized and, most importantly, unjust war replete with probable war crimes against the people of Iran and Lebanon. It is true, Israel sometimes has wagged the dog, but despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s war justification (one of many from the administration), the blame lies squarely with the empire, vested internal interests, and its wannabe dictator. Some blame also lies with the pro-military American population that still sees war as noble, even if sometimes the means of carrying it out aren’t pretty.

Yet war is never noble unless a nation is attacked or a nation has a boot pressing against its neck. Even then, war is ugly. This fact, more than a spurious desire to “liberate,” is what Americans need to remember.