Caitlin Johnstone || America’s latest forever war continues to ravage the middle east as US forces bomb Iran for the tenth consecutive night in a series of exchanges which The New York Times reports have caused a significantly higher number of injuries to US troops than the Pentagon has acknowledged.
President Trump is saying that “Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over” while simultaneously guaranteeing more Iranian retaliations with the ongoing onslaught, which could of course easily end up killing more US troops.
Amid these escalating hostilities, Yemeni forces have announced a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia as the ceasefire the two nations have maintained since 2022 hurtles toward collapse. Trump inherited a ceasefire in the horrific war between Yemen and Saudi Arabia and seems to be flushing it right down the toilet, just like he inherited the Iran deal and torched it so he could start a war. He is a disgusting, evil war pig.
One of the dumbest popular narratives you see today is the idea that Zionists persuaded a reluctant Trump to start a war with Iran after he was re-elected, like they were chasing him around going “Would you like to bomb Iran?” like the guy from Green Eggs and Ham while he yelled “Not in a box! Not with a fox!” until he eventually caved in.
It is now abundantly clear that this war was planned a long time ago. Not in 2026, not in 2025, not in 2024, and not even during the Biden administration. This was planned before Trump was ever elected president. He campaigned on tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, and that’s exactly what he did once he got into office the first time around.
As soon as the JCPOA was torched in 2018 the Trump administration began dramatically ramping up aggressions against Iran, smashing them with starvation sanctions in its “maximum pressure” campaign with the explicit goal of regime change and then escalating to the direct assassination of Iran’s top military official.
There was no reason to do that if your goal was peace. There was no reason to do that if your goal was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The Iran deal was working. Iran was fully compliant. The escalations were the goal.
Trump has openly admitted to giving the Adelsons everything they wanted in exchange for the massive campaign donations which put him in the White House. In 2013 Sheldon Adelson made headlines by saying the US should drop a nuclear bomb on the Iranian desert and then say “See? The next one is in the middle of Tehran” in order to scare the Iranians into groveling.
Everything we’ve been seeing throughout Trump’s second term makes it glaringly obvious that the only reason he’d received the oligarchic and institutional support necessary to become an American president was because he had provided enough powerful people with enough reassurance that he would do what no other president had dared to try: start a war with Iran.
All that we have seen throughout 2026 has been the seeds of those early assurances coming to fruition. All those murdered schoolchildren. All the dead and injured US soldiers. The bombed-out civilian infrastructure. The blackened skies. The blockades. The fear. The economic strife. This was all planned years ago, with the full complicity of a psychopathic monster who wanted to become president.
He campaigned on ending the wars, and he was lying the whole time. He wasn’t pressured and persuaded, he was an active and eager participant.
Anti-interventionists on the right often try to spin it as Trump getting suckered by the Israelis, because this allows them to retroactively justify their support for Trump with the belief that they voted for someone who was well-intentioned at the time.
But Trump was never well-intentioned. He had always intended to start a war with Iran in his second term, once he no longer had to worry about getting re-elected. He was always a deceitful war slut, as evil as any we’ve ever seen in the White House.
Evil people are the only ones who are ever allowed past the many gatekeeping mechanisms to the presidency. In order to help run a murderous empire that is fueled by human blood, you’ve got to be a psychopath. They don’t let you in unless they’ve been adequately assured that you are sufficiently psychopathic to do the job.
Trump provided them with those assurances. That’s the only reason he sits where he now sits.
