Become a paid subscriber to gain access to our private Discord server, subscriber-only AMAs, chats, and invites to events. The U.S.-Israeli War of Aggression Against IranIn a rare interview following her firing by Yale, blacklisted Iranian scholar Helyeh Doutaghi discusses the U.S.-Israeli agenda and how Iran will confront the possibility of a wider war.
It has been ten days since Israel launched an unprovoked campaign of sustained bombing against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hundreds of Iranian civilians have been killed as Israel assassinated dozens of military and intelligence leaders, including commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as nuclear scientists and other technical experts. In some cases, these assassinations have been conducted in crowded residential buildings. Israel has also attacked medical sites, ambulances, and civilian neighborhoods, intensifying its attacks on Tehran on Monday. Estimates range from 400 to 900 Iranians killed and well over 3,000 injured. Iran’s Red Crescent and regional civil defense organizations estimate that more than 40,000 people have been displaced since the bombing began. This weekend, the U.S. overtly joined Israel’s war against Iran, launching a series of bombings targeting several Iranian nuclear sites in Operation Midnight Hammer. President Donald Trump claimed that Iran’s nuclear capability has been totally decimated and praised himself for his decision to bomb Iran despite no evidence that Iran posed any imminent threat to the United States. Iran has suggested these attacks, which included the use of fourteen 30,000 pound bombs, did far less damage than the U.S. and Israel have suggested and that Iran may well have evacuated its most important assets, including enriched uranium and vital equipment, in advance of the anticipated attacks. On Monday evening local time, Iran launched a barrage of missiles at the headquarters of U.S. Central Command which is situated at Al Udeid air base in the Gulf nation of Qatar. Initial reports about Iran’s strike indicate that Iranian officials informed Qatar of the strikes in advance in an effort to prevent loss of life or other casualties. Iran likely selected the CENTCOM headquarters because it serves as the main operations hub for U.S. military operations in the Middle East. In a statement released after the strikes, the General Secretariat of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran said:
A Pentagon spokesperson said that a combination of medium- and long-range rockets were fired at the base, though no injuries or deaths were reported. The facility has a sophisticated array of air defense systems and video of the attack shows missiles being shot down in the skies over Qatar. Shortly before Iran’s strikes, which were conducted in response to the U.S. bombing of several Iranian nuclear sites on Sunday, I interviewed Iranian scholar Helyeh Doutaghi, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tehran. Doutaghi was a prominent scholar at Yale University until last spring when she was politically targeted and driven out because of her political activism in support of Palestine. Doutaghi has rarely granted interviews since her firing by Yale. This weekend, Trump and other U.S. officials threatened even greater use of force against Iran should it retaliate against the unprovoked U.S. bombings this weekend. The U.S. position is that Iran must capitulate to the demands of the U.S. and Israel. On several occasions, Trump and Israel have floated the possibility they would seek to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with Trump saying that the U.S. knows his precise location. While Trump administration officials have claimed the U.S. does not seek a wider war in Iran, current developments suggest that is not the case. On Sunday night, Trump posted on Truth Social: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” When Israel first launched its bombing campaign against Iran, the U.S. was publicly claiming to be involved in good faith negotiations with Iran over the nuclear issue. Another round of talks was scheduled for June 15. In reality, the U.S. was engaged in a concealment operation aimed at giving Israel the element of surprise as it launched its bombing of Iran on June 13. The same scenario played out late last week. Just 30 hours after the White House announced that Trump would make a decision in the next two weeks on whether the U.S. would directly attack Iran, B2 bombers, subs, and other U.S. assets were bombing sites across Iran. They were the first publicly acknowledged U.S. military strikes inside Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. What the world is now witnessing is a U.S.-Israeli war of aggression against Iran that notorious neoconservatives like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz spent their careers working toward. Never before in history has an Israeli ruler been more empowered and unrestrained than Benjamin Netanyahu has been over the past 20 months. His genocidal war in Gaza continues to intensify as the world’s attention has shifted. Every single day, many dozens of Palestinians are murdered as they desperately seek access to the meager supplies of food that the U.S. and Israel have allowed into Gaza. Israeli disseminated maps showing areas it has declared off-limits to Palestinians in Gaza depict an ever shrinking killing cage where Palestinians are being forced into as Israel continues what it has described as a war of conquest aimed at expelling or killing all Palestinians in Gaza. With the formal launch of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, the whole notion of any sort of rules-based global order has been tossed into the waste bin of history. Both Trump and his close ally, the indicted war criminal Netanyahu, have made clear they have no respect for any international conventions, laws, or world courts. The stated justification for the war against Iran is a nuclear grade fraud, an epic lie that Netanyahu has spent his political career trying to sell. Israel is the sole entity with nuclear weapons in the region and has used that fact as part of its wars of annihilation and aggression. The consensus in the U.S. intelligence community since 2003 has been that Iran had not been actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program. It was Donald Trump who ripped up the nuclear agreement with Iran in his first term. The message sent by the U.S.-Israeli war right now is that nuclear weapons are the only real deterrent against Israel and its chief sponsor and protector. Israel is not a member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran is. Iran’s foreign minister said Sunday that the NPT had failed to protect Iran. Iran’s speaker of parliament announced Monday that Iran will cease cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Trump has portrayed the war against Iran as a joint effort, saying after the U.S. bombing, “We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before, and we've gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel.” There are reports that the U.S. gave Israel lists of air defense targets to hit ahead of the American bombing raids. While Netanyahu and Israel were close partners in the U.S. attack, the Trump administration said it did not inform U.S. congressional leadership of the attacks until after the bombing was completed and the U.S. warplanes were out of Iranian airspace. Dr. Helyeh Doutaghi is an Iranian scholar of international law and geopolitical economy. Earlier this year, she was suspended and ultimately fired by Yale University after a Zionist-led campaign to portray her as a member of a terror organization. She served as the deputy Director of the Law and Political Economy Project at Yale. I did the first interview with Dr. Doutaghi in March as she was being targeted and threatened. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tehran. Become a Drop Site News Paid SubscriberDrop Site News is reader-supported. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. A paid subscription gets you:✔️ 15% off Drop Site store ✔️ Access to our Discord, subscriber-only AMAs, chats, and invites to events, both virtual and IRL ✔️ Post comments and join the community ✔️ The knowledge you are supporting independent media making the lives of the powerful miserable You can also now find us on podcast platforms and on Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Telegram, and YouTube. © 2025 Drop Site News, Inc. |