On June 12, 2025, for the first time after more than twenty years, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors passed a resolution declaring that Tehran was breaching its non-proliferation obligations. The day after, on June 13, Israeli warplanes began a campaign of bombing Tehran and other major Iranian cities. With the help of their proxies inside the country, they assassinated top military commanders, killed leading nuclear scientists at their residence along with their families, bombed the cabinet meeting in Tehran, wounding the President, indiscriminately shelled urban residential areas, and even targeted Evin prison where most political prisoners are incarcerated. The U.S. offered intelligence, refueled their jetfighters in mid-air, and finally entered the war directly by bombing the Iranian nuclear enrichment sites with bunker buster weapons.

This unprovoked Israeli attack happened in the midst of seemingly constructive negotiations between Iran and the U.S. in Rome and Muscat. The Friday the 13th attack happened just before the two countries were to meet on Sunday the 15th to finalize a framework for further agreements on the Iranian enrichment program. In all close to 1000 people were killed in the Israeli attacks, thousands injured, and hundreds of families lost their homes.

There is no solid evidence whether the IAEA board coordinated the release of their report with the Israelis. But the suspicious choreography of the timing of the report’s release with the Israeli attacks affords credibility to the Islamic Republic’s claims that some of the IAEA inspectors spied for Israel. In its report, the IAEA excavated questions from twenty years earlier about highly enriched particles found in three Iranian sites. The case for the Iranian noncompliance is primarily based on the Agency’s conclusion “that these undeclared locations were part of an undeclared, structured programme carried out by Iran until the early 2000s, and that some of these activities used undeclared nuclear material” (my emphasis). Obfuscated in the report was the fact that the IAES has found no evidence of any weaponization program or military component in the Iranian nuclear activities. It was only a few days after the attacks that the IAEA’s Director General, Rafael Grossi, reiterated that “Iran has not been actively pursuing a nuclear weapon since 2003.”

Israel used the IAEA report to legitimize its unlawful military actions. However, such all-out attack was in the making for months, if not years. It could not have been launched simply in response to the IAEA report. For more than two decades, since the established one of the most intrusive regimes of inspections on the Iranian enrichment program, the IAEA had not cited Iran for breach of its obligations. This was not unprecedented. In the 1990s, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), whose mandate was to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program, worked closely with the U.S. intelligence agencies. Through UNSCOM, during Clinton administration, the CIA carried out ambitious spying operations to penetrate the Iraqi intelligence and defense apparatus.

Now, the so-called 12-day war is over. Iranians have returned to the devastating perpetual violence of U.S. led sanctions and targeted assassinations by the Mossad. The Trump administration and its European allies have called on Iran to accept its defeat, surrender unconditionally, and “return” to the negotiating table. They ask Iran to dismantle its nuclear technology, halt the production of its advance missile program, cease its support of the Palestinian cause, and terminate its network of what is known as the “axis of resistance” against the Israeli and American expansionism. In other words, become a client state. Iran is one of the few remaining fronts of defiance against the American extortionist posture and the Israeli carnage that has engulfed the Middle East. That defiance comes with a very hefty price.

The United States desires a return to the pre-1979-revolution Middle East alignment, complete with Iran as a client state that shields American interests in the region. For more than four decades this objective has informed the U.S. strategic position toward Iran. Successive American administrations have pursued this policy with campaigns of intimidation, building more than a dozen permanent air base and naval facilities in the region, sabotage, military threats, draconian sanctions, and ultimately, under the Trump administration, bombing nuclear enrichment sites. The U.S. does not necessarily aspire to bring the prerevolution monarchy back to power, though the CIA uses the son of the disgraced Shah as a scarecrow in photo-ops. But it seeks to install a state that lacks the authority to challenge the American regional influence—a state without sovereignty. In the absence of that, perhaps a failed state will do…

The United State has surrounded Iran with permanent military bases to contain any influence the Islamic Republic might assert in regional politics.

The avowed objective of the Israeli government has been the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and the Balkanization of Iran. The Israelis, with the help of their American and European supporters, wish to exploit the multiethnic composition of Iran, particularly the Kurds, Azeris, and Baluchis, and to deepen the tensions between the minority Sunni communities and the ruling Shi‘ite class to replicate a Syrian/Libyan model of the failed state. Since the end of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the Mossad and the IDF strategists have devised and executed a variety of plans to infiltrate minority opposition groups to foment ethnic unrest to partition Iran. Israel also supports opposition parties, particularly the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and the royalist........

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