FeaturesOn Saturday morning, February 28, the United States and Israel launched coordinated military strikes on Iran, hitting targets in Tehran, Isfahan, Qom and other cities across 24 provinces. Iran’s Red Crescent reported at least 201 people killed and 700 injured. US President Donald Trump announced “major combat operations” and openly urged regime change. Iran retaliated by launching missiles at Israel and US military installations across the Gulf States.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk deplored the strikes, noting that the parties “had been actively seeking a solution only hours earlier.” He stated that “bombs and missiles are not the way to resolve differences but only result in death, destruction and human misery,” and warned that continued escalation “risks an even wider conflict, that will inevitably lead to further senseless civilian deaths and destruction on a potentially unimaginable scale, not just in Iran but across the Middle East region.” He reminded all parties that under international humanitarian law, “the protection of civilians is paramount” and that violations “must lead to accountability.”
The strikes came 48 hours after the conclusion of a third round of US-Iran indirect nuclear negotiations in Geneva, mediated by Oman, that had produced what multiple parties described as an unprecedented breakthrough. The bombardment appears to have killed not only Iranian civilians, but also the potential for the strongest nuclear agreement ever negotiated with Iran.
Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi told CBS News February 27 that Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium, with existing stockpiles to be down-blended to the lowest possible level and converted into irreversible reactor fuel under full International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verification. “The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never, ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb,” Albusaidi said, describing the understanding as “something completely new,” stronger than the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated under Obama.
Albusaidi said that technical discussions with the IAEA had been scheduled for the following week in Vienna. Broad political components of a deal “can be agreed tomorrow,” Albusaidi said, with implementation related to stockpiles, verification, and access achievable within 90 days. He was unequivocal: “I don’t think any alternative to diplomacy is going to solve this problem.” He warned that military action would only “complicate resolving this problem and delay it.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi responded to Saturday’s US-Israel strikes by raising a question that indeed demands an answer: “I do not know why the US administration insists on beginning a negotiation with Iran and then attacking Iran in middle of talks.” He speculated that “perhaps the US administration was dragged into it,” and directed a pointed message at ordinary Americans: “Our enmity is not with the American people, who are being lied to yet again.”
The echo of Iraq in 2003 is unmistakable.
Israel Will Sabotage Any Agreement
This follows a pattern that is now undeniable. When the Obama administration negotiated the JCPOA in 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waged an extraordinary campaign against it, even addressing Congress to lobby against a sitting president’s foreign policy. When Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018 despite Iran’s verified compliance, Israel celebrated. Obama warned that withdrawal would leave the world “a losing choice between a nuclear-armed Iran or another war in the Middle East.” Now, with a deal on the table that went further than the JCPOA, bombs were chosen over diplomacy once again.
The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) study on the Middle East WMD-Free Zone, based on more than eighty interviews with officials from over twenty states, makes the broader context clear. Iran has supported a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East since 1974, when it co-sponsored the UN General Assembly resolution alongside Egypt calling for one. Iran continued that support even after the 1979 revolution. Every Middle Eastern state has expressed support for such a zone except for one: Israel.
Israel, the only country in the region that possesses nuclear weapons, is the only country in the region that refuses to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and the one whose participation in disarmament processes has been conditioned on so many prerequisites that Arab and Iranian officials described themselves as being led down an endless “long corridor” of demands. The UNIDIR study also documented a bilateral understanding between the United States and Israel, dating to 1969, under which Washington committed to never pressuring Israel to join the NPT. The country waging war to prevent nuclear proliferation is the only nuclear-armed state in the region that refuses all non-proliferation frameworks.
Reza Pahlavi and the 1953 Playbook
The regime change fantasy already has a leading man, and his family name should alarm anyone who knows Iranian history. In January, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the ousted 1979 dictator of Iran, announced that if brought to power his immediate priority would be to recognize Israel, not pursue the democratic and economic reforms Iranians have been dying in the streets to demand.
Reza Pahlavi is the son of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was installed by the CIA after the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s first democratically supported prime minister. Mossadegh’s crime was nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, which had been controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP). The CIA bribed politicians, religious leaders, and street gang leaders, deployed agents posing as communists to discredit Mossadegh, and orchestrated riots that killed some 300 people. Mossadegh was overthrown and imprisoned. The Shah ruled for twenty-six years as a brutal US-backed dictator whose secret police tortured and disappeared Iranian citizens, producing the 1979 revolution as a direct consequence.
As academic Noam Chomsky observed in 2013, “for the past 60 years not a day has passed in which the U.S. has not been torturing Iranians.” Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men, argued that the 1953 coup sent a message across the entire Middle East: “the United States does not support democratic governments and the United States prefers strong-man rule that will guarantee us access to oil.” That message holds today. The United States is now bombing Iran while positioning the same dynasty it installed in 1953 as an alternative, led by a man whose first priority is recognizing the state committing genocide in Gaza, not serving the people of Iran.
The Wreckage of Regime Change
The historical record of US-led regime change is unbroken catastrophe.
In Iraq, the 2003 invasion, championed by Israel, was launched on the false premise of weapons of mass destruction. John Nixon, the CIA analyst who first interrogated Saddam Hussein, revealed that Hussein had no weapons program, was hostile to al-Qaeda, and had largely delegated governance to focus on writing a novel. Hussein warned Nixon: “You are going to fail in Iraq because you do not know the language, the history, and you do not understand the Arab mind.” Saddam also predicted the rise of Sunni jihadism after his removal, a prediction fulfilled by ISIS. Nixon called the invasion “a catastrophe” without “a shred of doubt” and said: “If the Iraqi people wanted to remove Saddam, that was for the Iraqi people to do. There should have been an Iraqi solution, not an American solution.” Over a million people died.
In Libya, President Obama himself acknowledged that the failure to plan for the aftermath of Gaddafi’s US-led overthrow in 2011 was the “worst mistake” of his presidency. Prior to Gaddafi’s overthrow, Libya was a country that had maintained basic state functions and, in 2010, had the highest Human Development Index in Africa. Libya, after the US-led overthrow of Gaddafi, became a failed state, carved up by rival militias, with ISIS gaining another foothold, and the country became a transit point for human trafficking into Europe.
In 2004, the United States, Canada, and France helped orchestrate the removal of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s democratically elected president, amid armed insurrection. Aristide himself stated he was effectively kidnapped by US forces. Haiti has never recovered. Two decades later, the country lacks a functioning government, is terrorized by armed gangs, and has experienced repeated cycles of foreign intervention that have done nothing to establish stable governance. The Haitian case strips away even the humanitarian veneer: the United States did not remove an authoritarian government to install democracy. It removed a democratic government and left chaos.
The Fate of Iran Belongs to Iranians Inside Iran
Iran’s domestic human rights crisis is real. A Human Rights Watch report released Tuesday documented mass arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances and torture tied to nationwide protests that erupted in December. The UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution in January calling for an urgent investigation into the crackdown, during which Türk delivered key messages demanding Iran end extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions. But the answer to Iran’s human rights crisis is not American bombs killing Iranian civilians. It is not installing the son of a CIA-backed dictator whose first loyalty is to Israel rather than to the Iranian people.
The correct path was the one that was working: negotiations. The Geneva talks produced a framework stronger than anything previously achieved. That path was destroyed not by Iran but by Israel and the United States.
Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft warned before Saturday’s strikes that “both sides actually believe that a short, intense war may improve their negotiating position,” calling the situation “extremely dangerous.” The Trump administration believes its “overwhelming military power” can force Iran to “capitulate.” Tehran calculates it can inflict sufficient damage on US interests and regional oil infrastructure to compel Washington to back off. Parsi noted these are “calculations that are completely contradictory to each other’s.”
This is the logic of escalation, not strategy. And Parsi identified what regional states understand but Washington and Tel Aviv refuse to acknowledge: the likely outcome of military confrontation is not a clean regime change but “state collapse, potentially civil war, massive amounts of refugees flowing into other countries” and “secessionist movements on the borders that will take advantage of the situation.” Parsi stated that regional states, with the exception of Israel, are “completely against” this confrontation — because they will bear its consequences.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk stated the obvious: “Bombs and missiles are not the way to resolve differences but only result in death, destruction and human misery.”He noted that the parties “had been actively seeking a solution only hours earlier” and warned that continued escalation “risks an even wider conflict”.
What is being destroyed by the US-Israel war against Iran is not merely a nuclear agreement. It is the possibility of a diplomatic resolution that would have been stronger than anything previously achieved — zero stockpiling, full IAEA verification, a framework that made the enrichment question, in Albusaidi’s words, “less relevant.” It is being destroyed by the same forces that destroyed the JCPOA, for the same reasons: because a diplomatic resolution with Iran threatens the regional order that Israel seeks to maintain, one in which it faces no meaningful constraints and no meaningful rivals.
The Iranian people, those who have protested for democratic reform and economic justice at the cost of their lives, are not served by bombs falling on their cities. They are not served by a would-be ruler like Reza Pahlavi whose first instinct is to normalize relations with the state responsible for the destruction of Gaza rather than to address their demands. And Iranians inside Iran will not be served by the state collapse, civil war, and refugee crisis that American military intervention has produced in every country it has been visited upon.
History does not suggest this war will lead to peace. History tells us, with the accumulated weight of Iraq, Libya, Haiti, and every other American regime change project, exactly what it will lead to: greater violence, deeper instability, more death, and the empowerment of the very forces it claims to oppose. The only question is how many people will die before that lesson is acknowledged—if it ever is.
