COMMENTARY: Israel at the centre of a U.S. war against Iran

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If a catastrophic, no-holds-barred war breaks out between the United States and Iran and thousands of American troops are killed by Iranian ballistic missile attacks on US bases in the Gulf region and on U.S. Navy vessels within range of the Iranian coastline, an angered American population will need to reflect on why such a conflict broke out.

They will need to ask the following questions:

1. Does Iran pose a threat to American national security?
2. How many Iranian-allied Shia militias in Iraq and Lebanon have carried out attacks on defenceless American citizens?
3. What is the true reason why Iran was threatened and attacked?

The answers are:

1. No, Iran does not pose any threat whatsoever to America. It has not invaded another country for over 200 years, and it has only responded to attacks on it when:

. Invaded by the Western and Sunni Arab backed action by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussien in 1980
. The Donald Trump-approved assassination of General Qassem Soleimani
. The Donald Trump approved preemptive attack on Iran in June 2025 and the US bombing of Iranian nuclear energy development sites.

2. A range of statistical data shows that attacks on Western civilian targets by Muslim extremists have come from Sunni groups of the al-Qaeda variety -the very groups supported by the CIA and Israeli intelligence in various theatre conflicts such as the ‘dirty war’ in Syria.

3. America's reason for attacking Iran is because of pressure from the State of Israel and Zionist lobby groups in the United States.

This is a plain and simple fact.

Zionist Israel operates under an ideology which entails that Israel must expand it territory which was ruthlessly taken from Palestinian inhabitants and must maintain undisputed military and economic hegemony in the region.

Iran is hated by Israel because it backs the Palestinian cause. It also backs Hezbollah, the Shia Lebanese party, which has prevented Israel from expanding its border into southern Lebanon up to the Litani River.

Now, the U.S. Senator named Lindsay Graham recently invoked the name of the late President Ronald Reagan in an attempt to pressure Trump into acting against Iran.

What Graham does not grasp is that Ronald Reagan correctly believed that the United States had been lured into Lebanon by the Israelis when embarked on a murderous invasion of that country in the early 1980s. When American (and French) troops were massacred by Shia forces in Beirut (a reponse to massacres of Shia civilians when U.S. navy carriers were shelling the Bekaa valley), Reagan did not spark an all out war against Lebanon - he withdrew American forces because he realised that Israel wanted to use the U.S. to wage war against Lebanon on Israel's behalf.

Subsequent U.S. Presidents have been unable to resist Israeli pressure aimed at luring the United States into West Asia to fight wars on its behalf. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and “Operation Timber Sycamore”, the CIA orchestrated covert war against the secular Ba'athist government in Syria begun in 2011, are two examples.

Iran has been targeted for destruction by Israeli interests for decades. Binyamin Netanyahu has long spearheaded this campaign since the 1990s, continually and erroneously citing Iran being on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Other Israeli leaders have also called for the same. For instance, in 2003 when the United States was on the verge of attacking Iraq, the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called on America to disarm “Iran, Libya and Syria”.

Pro-Zionist think tanks have also promoted the idea of attacking Iran. These include the now defunct neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which was co-founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan and the Israeli-affiliated Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), which produced the 1996 document titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”.

The recollections of retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark pertaining to what he described as the “hijacking” of U.S. foreign policy by neoconservative figures in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks are also revealing. Clark told of how former colleagues at the Pentagon alerted him to the existence of a secret memorandum detailing how the United States was going to “take out seven countries in five years”. They were to be Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.

The rationale here was to bring down key states who were opposed to Israeli domination of the Middle East. Iraq, Syria and Libya were led by secular Arab nationalist governments, while Lebanon’s Shia Hezbollah military force resisted Israeli expansion and Shia Iran supported Hezbollah, as well as the cause of Palestine.

These pressures to remould the Middle East in a way to favour Zionist hegemony go far back to the time of the creation of Israel. for instance in on March 31^st, 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States presented a paper entitled “Force Requirements for Palestine”, part of which read that 'Zionist strategy will seek to involve (the United States) in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.'

But this warning went unheeded.

In 2019 wrote the following in an essay I titled "An Examination of the History of the Pro-Zionist Lobby":

'Many of America’s most important military commanders at that time were of the opinion that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would adversely affect the strategic interests of the United States in “the Near and Middle East” and that Zionists would lobby the American government to pursue actions and policies that would not be in the country’s interests. This was clearly the opinion of General George Marshall, a Chief of Army Staff, who later as Secretary of State clashed with President Harry Truman over US recognition of Israel.'

Sadly, this blind obedience of the U.S. political and military class to the interests of a foreign state is leading America into an abyss from which it will be unlikely to recover because its leaders are bought off and/or blackmailed to act against its own national interests.

 © Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

 Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

A critique of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s claim that Britain has been “colonised” by immigrants who are draining resources from the state

In an interview with Sky News, the English billionaire businessman Jim Ratcliffe claimed that Britain has been "colonised" by immigrants who are draining resources from the state.

But what does "colonised" mean?

. Do these "colonisers" control the levers of political power? No, they don't.

. Do many of these "colonisers" come from countries which were exploited by the British Empire when it colonised a good deal of the earth? Yes, they do.

. Do many of these recent "colonisers" come from countries where Britain participated in or supported illegal overt and covert wars overseen by the U.S. Empire? Yes, they do.

. Are many of these "colonisers" used as cheap labour? Yes, they are.

. Do the majority of these "colonisers" pay business and income taxes? Yes, they do.

. Do these "colonisers" staff vital institutions such as the National Health Service as doctors and nurses where they are overrepresented, albeit underrepresented as senior management in its bureaucracy? Yes, they do.

. Meanwhile after "draining" resources from the nations where these "colonisers" originate during the era colonisation and now through the usurious global financial system and corporate primacy in the age of neoliberalism, this odious tax exile and his supporters wallow in their self-satisfied "telling-it-like-it-is" delusion.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Project Overthrow: The Iranian Exile Community and the Dream of Destroying the Islamic Republic

Iranian exiles deserve a place in the pantheon of global exiles along with the Miami Cubans.

With the exception of the Mujahidin-e-Khalq (MEK) terror group, they are not as deadly as those Cubans who affixed themselves to the US National Security State. Think: Bay of Pigs, Watergate, the drug lords who worked in the service of the CIA and, of course, the Cuban CIA man Felix Rodriguez's role in tracking Che Guevara and overseeing his execution by soldiers of the Bolivian army.

But the level of hatred and willingness to "liberate" their countries from "usurping" Communist and theocratic governments by any means necessary and at any cost is a thing to behold.

As for the Iranian exiles who are concentrated in places such as "Tehran-geles" on the US West Coast, I am simply bemused as to how they are taken in by every negative about the anti-Islamic government regardless of its truth, semi-truth or untruth.

I will say that much of the Western media-disseminated narrative about the protests in Iran has consisted of many distortions and outright untruths.

Yet many in the Iranian diaspora who listento the anti-Mullah propaganda on BBC, US and Gulf Arab-owned Persian-language stations are either oblivious of this or do not care that the aim of those foreign actors who wish to destroy the Islamic government care nothing about the harm and destruction to ordinary Iranians if any of their so-far failed regime change plots ever come to fruition.

First of all, the US government together with Israel and its Arab Gulf allies attacked the Iranian currency through a series of currency manipulations that led to the collapse of one Iranian bank and misery for the Iranian population and its business class known as the Baazaris.

How can you be an Iranian "patriot" if you know the sort of harm crashing a currency does to the wider population?

The Bazaaris staged peaceful protests due to the hardships caused by the devaluation of the currency but this led to stage two of an intended regime change plot.

The discontent created the opportunity for Israeli intelligence, no doubt with the backing of their American counterparts, to infiltrate the protests and expand them.

I ask myself whether those in the exile community backing the so-called protests are aware that among those who took to the streets were Mossad and CIA-trained and directed Kurds, Baluchis, and Arabs. Many of the Baluchis and Arabs were sleeper cells activated for the purpose of stirring violence, while Kurdish infiltrators (many of who were caught trying to enter Iran because of a tip off by Turkish intelligence) sought to join in the mayhem. It is also likely that members of the Iranian MEK who commit acts of terror within Iran at the behest of Israel and the United States were shipped in from their base in Albania.

These gunmen and saboteurs destroyed mosques, government buildings and attacked Iranian police, killing over 300 of them.

They also shot and killed ordinary Iranians.

Thus, what happened earlier this month were not a series of "peaceful protests" organised by democracy-loving members of the Iranian populace but was in fact an armed insurgency orchestrated by foreign actors with motives which are far from wanting to engineer the creation of a powerful and successful Iranian nation state.

The violent insurrection was put down not by the Iranian government mowing down thousands of "peaceful protests" with gunfire, but by the Iranians -perhaps with the help or either Russia or China- hacking into Starlink to cutoff the instructions being relayed to the puppet gunmen by their Mossad handlers.

The falsehoods in relation to the amount of casualties and the duration of the disorder still seem prevalent among Iranian exiles.

What all should bear in mind, especially those among the Iranian exile community, is that if the attempt at regime change had succeeded, the result would not be the enthronement of "democracy" with the promise of "peace" and "prosperity" but the balkanisation and impoverishment of Iran including the Persian heartland.

The largely non-Persian (apart from the MEK) gunmen belong to separatist movements whose goals fit into the long-term objective of Zionist Israel to split the neighbouring Arab and Muslim world into small ethno-states.

The present United States government for its part, just as the predecessor administration which authorised "Operation Ajax" in 1953, wants American oil companies to control the oil and gas resources in the Persian Gulf region.

It also wants to end Iran's pivot towards the emerging Eurasian world by blocking an essential part of China's new "Silk Road". An important component of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which seeks to consolidate a trade route from China to Russia via Iran.

If any of the exiles stop to think rationally about their support for the dismantling of the Iranian government they would discover that both Israel and the American government would not care if what remains of a fractured Iran lives in poverty and is engulfed in perpetual wars among ethnic Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis and others.

There is no opposition waiting within Iran to succeed the Mullahs. The narrative that the son of the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi would be a unifying figure capable of amassing huge levels of support is a laughable one which covers up the reality of the chaos which would follow the toppling of the Islamic government.

It is doubtful that any figure or movement within the Iranian diaspora has any influence in US government circles. But even if they did, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves about Niccolo Machiavelli’s frequent warnings about the danger of using desperate and emotionally-driven exiles in foreign policy and statecraft.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.