Just days after the U.S. and Israel launched their war against Iran, Trump regime Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson stated that the U.S. decision to wage war against the Islamic Republic came after administration officials were informed of an imminent, unilateral Israeli attack, suggesting that Trump acted to protect American forces from expected Iranian retaliation.
President Trump’s allegation that Iran was only “days away” from possessing a nuclear weapon that could destroy Israel is not considered credible by many nuclear experts and is in conflict with some U.S. intelligence assessments. For 40 years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made regime change in Iran the focus of his political career. Now with Trump joining him in attacking Iran, Netanyahu may be on the verge of partially or fully realizing his goal.
On the 18th day of the war, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a longtime MAGA white nationalist extremist, resigned his post with a letter to Trump in which he stated, “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Branko Marcetic, a Jacobin staff writer, who examines Israel’s role in fomenting this disastrous and deadly U.S. war against Iran.
BRANKO MARCETIC: The president of the United States is the most powerful office in the world. It is certainly the more powerful out of the two governments of Israel and the United States. Israel is completely dependent on the United States to fight its wars for its military defense and so on. So Trump had leverage. Trump could have said no. But what we have seen in recent years—we saw this with Biden as well—when you do not have a strong leader who is able to resist the pressure that Israeli prime ministers and the Israeli state is able to bring to bear on both the president of the United States as well as Congress and the entire U.S. political system, what we see is that the U.S. unfortunately can be pushed into a war that it does not want. It does not serve anyone’s interests in this country.
Even though Trump could have said no, what we have seen from these public statements that you mentioned and from some of the reporting in places like the Washington Post, the New York Times, is that Israel may not have been the be-all and end-all of what led to this war, but it certainly played a very large and single role into pushing Trump to launch this war. Including apparently, again, according to several different sources, the Israeli prime minister threatened to basically go to war with Iran by himself without U.S. support, knowing that Iran planned—if it was attacked again—to hit back not just against Israel, but against the United States, thereby pulling the United States into the war, even if it didn’t end up doing it.
And according to all these different figures around Trump and some of this reporting, that’s sort of part of the way that Netanyahu convinced Trump that he had to do this. And the point I make in that article—and I think the point that people in the United States really to think about—is the U.S. gives billions of dollars of military aid to Israel. It gives us the ability to fight all these wars.
But if it turns out, I mean, if all of this reporting is correct, then what it is also doing by giving Israel this military aid is it’s giving Israel effectively the mechanism by which it can draw and pull the United States into conflicts in the Middle East that the American public doesn’t want, that American politicians don’t even want to be part of. That the American president doesn’t want to be part of. That is a very serious and alarming thing.
SCOTT HARRIS: With the genocide in Gaza and widespread and growing disillusionment with the conduct of Israel, both in Gaza and these regional wars—one after the other, as well as the treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank—you have evolving public opinion in the United States that is turning decidedly against the close U.S. alignment with Israel. Your response, Branko, to that?
And now because I think a lot of people are looking at what is happening in Iran, they’re looking at 13 U.S. service members who were killed so far, the hundreds who have been seriously injured, the damage that’s being taken to U.S. assets in the region and then also the way that prices are going up—and they’re saying we didn’t ask for any of this.
None of this serves us. We don’t want a war with Iran. We actually voted for this guy because we thought he was going to keep us out of this war. And they’re seeing, based on these public statements, not just Rubio and Tom Cotton and Mike Johnson, as you mentioned, but also Trump himself who was several times in public basically said, “Well, the reason we’re at war is they were going to attack Israel and we have to defend Israel.”
I think people are starting to think, “Well, hold on. If we have a security partnership with a country, the idea is that this is meant to be mutually beneficial. Our security is meant to be enhanced, their security is meant to be enhanced.” But what’s happening is that the Israeli partnership is increasingly one-sided. It only really serves Israel’s security and is actually undermining U.S. security, which now has lost all these lives and all this damage and being embroiled in the economic crisis that’s coming, if it were not for the fact that Israel was determined to start this conflict with Iran.
For more information, see Branko Marcetic’s Jacobin articles. Branko Marcetic is author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Branko Marcetic (20:01) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter.
