https://www.wrmea.org/iraq-iran/ongoing-u.s.-israeli-crime-against-peace.html
Ongoing U.S.-Israeli Crime Against Peace
- Bruce Fein
- Regions
- Iraq-Iran
- Posted On August 26, 2026
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2026, pp. xx-xx
Special Report
By Bruce Fein
THE ONGOING American-Israeli war against Iran is indistinguishable from the crimes against peace perpetrated by the Third Reich against Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Greece, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in World War II.
The International Military Tribunal (IMT) sitting at Nuremberg and championed by the United States convicted twelve high-level Nazi officials of crimes against peace, i.e., planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression or in violation of international treaties or agreements:
- Hermann Göring: Reich Marshal and commander of the Luftwaffe
- Rudolf Hess: Deputy to Adolf Hitler
- Joachim von Ribbentrop: Foreign Minister
- Wilhelm Keitel: Chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces
- Alfred Rosenberg: Nazi ideologue and Minister for the Eastern Territories
- Wilhelm Frick: Minister of the Interior
- Walther Funk: Minister of Economics
- Karl Dönitz: Grand Admiral of the Navy
- Erich Raeder: Grand Admiral and naval commander
- Alfred Jodl: Chief of Operations Staff of the Armed Forces
- Arthur Seyss-Inquart: Commissioner for the Occupied Netherlands
- Konstantin von Neurath: Foreign Minister
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court also defines criminal wars of aggression to include blockades, attacks on the armed forces of a state, or bombardment of the territory of a state not in self-defense.
Göring, von Ribbentrop, Keitel, Rosenberg, Frick, Seyss-Inquart and Jodl received death sentences.
Former Attorney General Francis Biddle and Judge John Parker served as IMT judges along with six other colleagues from France, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson served as Chief Prosecutor. He made clear in his opening statement that the international law principles established by the IMT were to be universal, not sui generis to the Third Reich:
“We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well…
And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.”
Last February, the United States and Israel unleashed the crime of aggression against Iran and in violation of the United Nations Charter. The latter authorizes force only in self-defense. Iran had not invaded the United States or threatened to do so. It sported no military bases near the perimeter of the United States in contrast to the U.S. military establishments in Iran’s neighbors like Oman, Qatar, Bahrain or Kuwait. Iran’s nuclear ambitions are dwarfed by Israel’s hundreds of nuclear warheads and over 5,000 possessed by the United States. Israel and the U.S. prohibit any outside inspection of their nuclear arsenals whereas Iran permitted inspection of its nuclear program, however imperfect. Iran’s premier atomic scientists have been assassinated. It was struggling to suppress domestic insurrection fueled by political persecution, a collapsing economy, and likely covertly supported by the CIA and Mossad.
The United States had overthrown Iran’s popularly elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 to install a corrupt, brutal, megalomaniacal puppet, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The United States supported Iraq during its 1980-1988 opportunistic war of aggression against Iran. The latter has never attempted regime change in the United States.
Consider President Donald Trump’s anticipatory self-defense justification. He argues that Iran hopes to join the nuclear club of Israel, the United States, France, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Russia, China and the United Kingdom; and that if Iran’s ambition is accomplished, Iran might be emboldened to attack the U.S. at some indeterminate date even at the risk of nuclear annihilation of 90 million Iranians.
Anticipatory self-defense was argued by the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg and definitively rejected by the IMT. Adolf Hitler had maintained that the countries the Wehrmacht invaded or the Luftwaffe bombed were coiled to attack or aid and abet an attack on the Third Reich. Take Poland. Hitler claimed Germany had been attacked by its neighbor on Sept. 1, 1939. He said the Soviet Union was poised to attack Germany prior to Operation Barbarossa. He unfolded the claim of a preventative measure against a British or Allied invasion to justify the attack on Denmark and Norway, on April 9, 1940.
Every war could be justified by anticipatory self-defense—even to prevent learning quantum mechanics which decades later might conceivably eventuate in a nuclear warhead with a sub-miniscule probability of use against the invading country. Abraham Lincoln elaborated the limitless power to commence war under an anticipatory self-defense banner in a February 1848 letter to William Herndon:
“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure—Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose—If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he will say to you ‘be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’”
This is not to defend Iran’s theocratic despotism. But the law protects saints and sinners alike. Otherwise it is not law, but a regression to “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” as related by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War.
President Trump and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu should be prosecuted for the crime of aggressive war against Iran. Language reporting on the war should not indulge euphemisms or echo Orwellian assaults on truth by the United States and Israel.
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of American Empire Before The Fall.