Since the United States and Israel commenced their unwarranted and unprovoked strike against Iran, codenamed Operation Epic Fury by the US and Roaring Lion by Israel, the character of the offensive has become apparent. It constitutes a large-scale bombing campaign intended to systematically dismantle the Iranian state and subjugate the entire population. The US under Trump has started a war whose outcomes it neither anticipates nor controls. Its actions have an element of irrationality, but this irrationality is based on decades of aggression in the Middle East, and in particular against Iran.

Wesley Clark famously recounted seeing a 2001 Pentagon memo that detailed plans to “take out” seven countries over five years, culminating in Iran. Clark attributed the origin of these plans to the neoconservatives within the George W. Bush administration, specifically mentioning the influence of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) (Greenwald, 2011). PNAC was an influential think tank established in 1997, and almost all of its major figures found themselves in the George W. Bush administration after 2000. Considering US foreign policy in the Middle East since the start of this century, this attack should not be considered a surprise and is largely unrelated to the idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump, who is simply implementing a longstanding project aimed at establishing complete US dominance over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East. Furthermore, American (and Western) interventions in Iran have a long history.

Iran once had a democratic and secular government led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who initiated the nationalization of the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in 1951 primarily to assert Iranian sovereignty and improve national welfare. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 responded by orchestrating a coup d’état to overthrow Mosaddegh. The coup installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as an absolute monarch – shifting the country towards authoritarianism and restoring favourable Western access to Iran’s oil. Over two decades later, in 1979, the Shah was overthrown in a popular uprising by a broad coalition of Iranians. However, a fundamentalist Islamic group led by Ayatollah Khomeini took control. Leaders of other opposition groups were purged and executed, and Iran became an Islamic Republic later that same year.

A lot of the exceptional violence that the Middle East has seen in the 21st century has been instigated by the US. Trump’s pre-emptive attacks on Iran have been preceded by George W. Bush’s pre-emptive attacks on Iraq in 2003, as well as attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Obama administration. Whoever the President might be, whether Democrat or Republican, there is a consistency in that remote killings are a big part of an “ethical” US foreign policy that purportedly aims to “democratise” the uncivilised and morally backward through armed interventions.

The social construction of all war requires an ‘othering’ process. In 2001, when he addressed the nation, Bush described the hijackers as “evil”, as “enemies of freedom”, as “faceless enemies of human dignity”, while America is “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity” that “will always work and sacrifice for the expansion of freedom” (Hamourtziadou, 2020, 28). In addition, in the launching of the War on Terror, old orientalist tropes were used to serve imperial aims, in line with the “clash of civilizations” framework, which we now see again when it comes to Iran. Once again, the two civilizations that are clashing are the one that promotes democracy, freedom, tolerance, justice and equality, and one that espouses intolerance, oppression, tyranny, injustice and dictatorship. And once again, it is an opportunity for America to project its culture, ideas and purported values. This was an era of “tremendous opportunity” for America to present its national values as universal ones and impose them on the globe, through violent means (Fouskas and Gokay,........

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