To understand the war now engulfing Iran, we should start from the obvious but rarely stated premise: this is the expression of a U.S. imperial ideology, not an accident or a defensive reflex. Since the Iranian Revolution, America has had the ambition of toppling the \u201cregime\u201d in Iran.<\/p>\n
The ideology is durable, institutional, and bipartisan. It circulates across the Pentagon, think tanks, foreign\u2011policy elites, and the confluence of the military industrial complex and Israel\u2011aligned networks inside Washington. It treats Iranian sovereignty as conditional and regards war as a \u201clegitimate\u201d instrument of regional \u201cmanagement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Planning Domination<\/strong><\/p>\n In March 2007<\/a>, General Wesley Clark bluntly recalled a Pentagon plan to \u201ctake out seven countries in five years\u2026 finishing with Iran.\u201d That was not his eccentricity, it was the articulation of America\u2019s presumption that it has the right to reorder whole societies, and notably to secure american \u201cinterests\u201d through violence.<\/p>\n The same ideological confidence reappears in polished form at venues like the Munich Security Conference<\/a>, where this year the United States celebrated its custodianship of \u201ccivilization.\u201d The official transcript of Secretary of State Marco Rubio\u2019s address is unambiguous in its self\u2011congratulation so the extend that even sympathetic observers noted the speech functioned as a defense of imperial prerogatives and not its renunciation.<\/p>\n There are multiple historical examples of U.S. officials and documents revealing ambitions to dominate or control Iran. A prominent case is the Brookings Institution\u2019s 2009 report titled, \u201cWhich Path to Persia?<\/a>\u2019<\/p>\n The document cited several Options for a \u201cNew American Strategy toward Iran\u201d and calmly lists various pathways to coerce or topple the Tehran regime. These include:<\/p>\n Far from mere academic thought experiments, the document presents these as practical \u201coptions\u201d available to a global hegemony. When bombs began falling, America did not follow \u201cfailed diplomacy\u201d so much as disrupt it.<\/p>\n There never was a nuclear bomb<\/strong><\/p>\n Days before the strikes, Oman\u2019s foreign minister publicly said U.S.\u2013Iran negotiations had made \u201csubstantial progress\u201d, including Iranian agreement<\/a> to reduce enriched uranium to minimal levels and allow full IAEA access. Then Washington and Tel Aviv attacked anyway. A detailed timeline shows the joint assault began two days after high\u2011stakes talks in Geneva, which undercuts the mythology of \u201cimminent Iranian aggression\u201d.<\/p>\n Gareth Porter<\/a> has documented, in detail, how the central accusations of an Iranian weapons program rested on manipulated or falsified \u201cintelligence.\u201d Even the IAEA Director\u2011General<\/a> acknowledged on air last year that the Agency had no proof of a \u201csystematic effort\u201d by Iran to build a bomb. Meanwhile, Israel maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal \u2014 long estimated at 80\u201390 warheads,<\/a> under a doctrine of opacity \u2014 and is modernizing its capabilities.<\/p>\n A rational American policy genuinely concerned about nuclear weapons could have revived the JCPOA, moved toward a Middle East Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone, and institutionalized verification. None of it mattered to a U.S. administration for which unconstrained violence remains the preferred language.<\/p>\n The Glorification of Violence<\/strong><\/p>\n At the Pentagon podium, Pete Hegseth declared the assault was \u201cnever meant to be a fair fight\u201d and that the U.S. was \u201cpunching them while they\u2019re down.\u201d<\/p>\n\n