No war with Iran. It’s Iraq all over again.

^{Photo: Destruction of Tehran in the aftermath of Israeli strikes, June 13, 2025. Majid Saeedi / Getty Images}

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Since the Israeli military carried out an unprovoked attack on Iran last Thursday night, the two states have been exchanging missile strikes in a dangerous and escalating war that once again reflects the Israeli government’s fervent desire to pull the entire region — and beyond — into a catastrophic forever war.

After more than a year and a half of impunity for committing a genocide in Gaza, the Israeli government has been itching to expand its war of annihilation against Palestinians throughout the region, bombing Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran at varying intervals over the past 19 months.

Thursday night’s attack, however, was a major escalation by Israel, assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and military leaders, including a top Iranian negotiator meant to take part in the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks scheduled for only days later. Israeli strikes on Iran have since killed more than 224 people, over 90% of whom were civilians, with 14 Israelis killed in Iran’s retaliatory strikes.

The propaganda machine is hard at work

In the days since Israel’s attack on Iran, the mainstream media has been working overtime to initiate a drumbeat for war reminiscent of the pre-Iraq invasion days. And despite Trump’s supposed “anti-war” stance, he’s come out in full support of the Israeli strikes.

But this is not the early 2000s, and pro-war media and politicians are facing a steep uphill climb in their attempts to manufacture consent for this war of the Israeli government’s making. A poll released Tuesday found that the vast majority of people in the U.S., Democrats and Republicans alike, oppose U.S. military intervention and support negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

It comes as no surprise that people in the U.S. have little desire for war with Iran — especially when spending billions more on a regional war that would undoubtedly ruin millions of lives is exactly what Trump campaigned against. The world has watched as the U.S. funds Israel’s livestreamed genocide to the tune of tens of billions of dollars; people remember, too, the trillions spent on disastrous forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, the U.S. economy is being pushed over the edge by Trump’s ruinous trade policies, all while Republicans in Congress are poised to slash Medicare and crucial social services even further.

The truth is that the Israeli government has run an anti-Iran propaganda campaign for decades, doing everything in its power to provoke the Iranian government into the kind of war that we’re now seeing. Since October 2023, Israel has been escalating its belligerence against Iran — most significantly, bombing the Iranian consulate in Syria in April 2024, killing 16 people in what was recognized at the time as a major Israeli escalation towards regional war.

The “nuclear double standard”

Israeli politicians claim its attack on Iran was “preemptive,” responding to the possibility of Iran developing a nuclear weapon.

But the Israeli government has invoked this same bogeyman for more than 30 years. Since the 1990s, the Israeli government has been claiming that Iran is right on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, with no Iranian nuclear weapon yet to show for “Benjamin Netanyahu’s long history of crying wolf.” CNN shared clips of all the times that Netanyahu has warned that Iran was “close to a nuclear weapon,” going back to 1996:

CNN put together a collection of clips of Netanyahu warning Iran is close to a nuclear weapon going back to 1996 pic.twitter.com/Pt2Bmys994
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 18, 2025

What’s more, Netanyahu’s supposed concern about Iran’s nuclear development has never stopped him from doing everything in his power to torpedo diplomatic efforts by Iran. In 2015, he flew to Washington to oppose the landmark JCPOA agreement reached between the U.S. and Iran to bring the Iranian nuclear program under international oversight — an agreement that restricted Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and one that Trump ripped to shreds during his first term in office.

Still, Iran has continued to allow some inspections of its nuclear facilities, and as recently as March of this year, both U.S. intelligence and the IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency, assessed that Iran “was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon.”

By contrast, Israel is about as close as it gets to the dictionary definition of a rogue nuclear state. It is neither a party to the international nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the NPT, nor does it allow IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities. Israel has never been held accountable for developing its nuclear weapons program in secret — the exact thing it is now accusing Iran of doing — and it has spent the last two years doing everything in its power to stoke a full-scale regional war in order to continue its genocide of Palestinians.

Israel’s impunity got us here

International impunity for Israel’s unspeakable crimes against Palestinians has led us to this point.

Over and over again, the Israeli military has been allowed to bomb children while they slept, burn people alive in their hospital beds, shoot starving people waiting for food aid, orchestrate a famine, torture detainees, and nearly every other war crime imaginable, in a nineteen-month-long genocide funded and armed by the U.S. At the same time, the Israeli government has been bombing sovereign states at will, all without repercussion.

Criticism of the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians is mounting every day, increasingly from within its own ranks. There is widespread understanding that Netanyahu and the Israeli government is continuing this genocide in order to preserve its own grip on political power. Just last week, Netanyahu’s governing coalition was facing a vote of no confidence from his opposition, with protests and criticism only increasing. But attacking Iran, CNN reports, has “banished” the internal political challenges Netanyahu was facing “in an instant.”

The Israeli government has yet to face real accountability for its crimes — so once again, it seeks to save itself by expanding its war, attempting to drag millions more into a catastrophic future rather than end its genocide in Gaza. War with Iran would be an unmitigated disaster, ruining millions of lives. The only way to put an end to this spiral of violence is for the U.S. to stop arming Israel and permanently end its policy of Israeli impunity.

Tell Congress: NO WAR WITH IRAN.

Members of Congress just introduced War Powers Resolutions to try to prevent war with Iran.

After 20 months of escalating genocidal violence against Palestinians, the Israeli government has launched unprovoked attacks against Iran and is bringing the entire region to the brink of disastrous war.

Write your members of Congress today to tell them to support the War Powers Resolutions and to stop arming Israel.

Email Congress

Tell Congress: Block the Bombs to Israel now.

Earlier this month, Representatives Delia Ramirez, Sara Jacobs, Mark Pocan, and Pramila Jayapal led their colleagues in introducing historic legislation to block U.S. bombs to the Israeli military.

Thanks to an immediate mobilization of constituent demands, more co-sponsors have already begun to join the legislation. Now, as Israel tries to spark a regional war while continuing to carry out a genocide against Palestinians, every single elected official must hear from us: BLOCK THE BOMBS NOW.

Email Congress

What we’re doing: JVP-Chicago hunger strikes to say Stop Starving Gaza.

As media attention shifts towards Israel’s attack on Iran, the Israeli government is continuing to starve over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza and massacre Palestinians waiting for aid.

With Gaza hurtling towards a famine, JVP-Chicago members this week announced their hunger strike, with 6 JVP members refusing all food in an effort to call attention to the humanitarian crisis that the Israeli government has inflicted on more than 2 million people in Gaza. The tactic of hunger strikes has a long history among Palestinian prisoners to call attention to Israeli apartheid and oppression, and JVP members join more recent hunger strikers across the U.S. calling for an end to Israeli genocide and starvation of Palestinians.

JVP-Chicago hunger strikers held a press conference on Monday alongside Representative Delia Ramirez to elevate their demands to stop all U.S. arms to Israel and stop starving Gaza.

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