Trump quickly asserted US complicity in the attack on Iran, but US overt and covert involvement with Israel and the war in Ukraine is very dangerous, argues Chris Bambery

American denials of involvement in Irael’s attack on Iran did not last long, hours at the most. Before Israel’s attack on Iran on Friday, Trump had stressed he was pursuing diplomacy and his special Middle Eastern envoy, Steve Witkoff, would be returning to talks over the Iranian nuclear programme in Oman on Sunday, In other words, military action by the US and Israel was off table.

It was a deception to lull Iran into a false sense of security, and accordingly, it was caught off guard by the surprise attack. A number of US political commentators have compared it to Pearl Harbor, the December 1941 surprise attack by the Japanese on America’s key Pacific naval base. It is a fair comparison.

Immediately after Israel’s attack, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said that Israel acted unilaterally and without American assistance. Then, in an incredible post on X , written in the early hours of Friday morning, Trump claimed: ‘I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to “just do it”, but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done.’

He went on to warn Iran: ‘I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come.’

He added, ‘Certain Iranian hardliners spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!.’ Continuing, Trump said there was ‘still time’ for Iranian officials to make the ‘slaughter’ by Israeli forces ‘come to an end’ before ‘even more brutal attacks’. The conclusion was, ‘Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left.’ US diplomacy then is ‘accept what we demand or die.’

Tehran will have got the message but not in the way Trump means. For accepting that ultimatum, Iran would cease to be a sovereign state and revert to being the catspaw of various imperialist states it was in the early twentieth century.

Trump’s words will also have been noted in Beijing and Moscow. How can you trust Washington in light of all this? His duplicity, in claiming to reject a military option while knowing all about the Israeli attack, carried out with US weaponry, and refusing to stop it, will also be noted.

On Friday he went on to tell CNN that the US ‘of course’ supports Israel ‘and supported it like nobody has ever supported it’. He said of Israel’s strikes, ‘I think it’s been excellent,’ in an ABC interview. He added that the US gave Iran a chance, but they didn’t take it. ‘They got hit about as hard as you’re going to get hit. And there’s more to come – a lot more.’ Warming to the theme he told Reuters, ‘We knew everything.’ Meanwhile, two Israeli officials claimed to Axios that Trump and his aides were only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in public. ‘We had a clear U.S. green light,’ one claimed.

Lies and covert operations

Israeli gas-lighting has also been underway. Danny Danon, Israeli ambassador to the UN, said on Friday morning that the attack was a result of intelligence suggesting that Iran was ‘moving forward’ with plans to ‘destroy Israel’. He further said, ‘they were going to initiate another attack like October 7^th. Once we gathered the information about that, we decided not to wait. We believed their intentions.’

That is not true. Trump’s own intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, testified in March that the US ‘continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.’ It’s an assessment shared by the CIA.

After taking the oath of office for his second term in January, United States President Donald Trump said he would push to ‘stop all wars’ and leave a legacy of a ‘peacemaker and unifier’. His involvement and support for the attack on Iran and the increasing dominance of ‘regime change’ neocons in his administration is creating major strains within his support base who supported his call to end US involvement in foreign wars.

On Friday, the right-wing commentator, Tucker Carlson, a major champion of  Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, said the US should not support the ‘war-hungry government’ of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ‘If Israel wants to wage this war, it has every right to do so. It is a sovereign country, and it can do as it pleases. But not with America’s backing,’ the Tucker Carlson Network morning newsletter stated.

Trump’s support for Israel is out of step with public opinion. A Gallup poll published in March found that: ‘Although Americans remain more likely to say their sympathies in the Middle East situation are with the Israelis rather than the Palestinians, the 46% expressing support for Israel is the lowest in 25 years of Gallup’s annual tracking of this measure on its World Affairs survey. The previous 51% low point in this trend of Americans’ sympathy for Israelis was recorded both last year and in 2001.

At the same time, the 33% of U.S. adults who now say they sympathize with the Palestinians is up six percentage points from last year and the highest reading by two points.’ One in four Americans say they support Hamas!

In conclusion, there is one more thing to say about Israel’s attack on Iran. For some eight months, Israel had been placing attack drones in the deserts of western and central Iran which were used to assassinate three of Iran’s senior military commanders and five top nuclear researchers. If you think this sounds familiar, then you are right, it is exactly how Ukraine carried out its attack earlier this month on Russia’s nuclear bombers.

Coincidence? Well read this in the Daily Mail: ‘Israel is expert in such clandestine operations. Even so, the methodology represented a “hat-tip” to Ukraine, which is understood to secretly exchange “tactics, techniques and procedures” (TTPs), in military vernacular, with Israel.

‘The rationale for that cooperation from Israel’s perspective is it supports Ukraine – though it does not publicise that support – because Iran supplies Russia with thousands of drones.’ It has long been reported Mossad has been, like Britain, involved in Ukrainian ‘special operations’.

On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Britain of being 100% involved in Ukraine’s ‘terrorist attacks’ against Russian bases. Lavrov said Ukraine would be ‘helpless’ in its ‘terrorist attacks’ without Britain’s support.

Russia has now shifted its description of its invasion from being a ‘Special Military Operation’ to being a ‘War Against Terror’. If Lavrov has 100% proof of British involvement – and he is a cautious politician – Russia would feel entitled under international law to retaliate. Same regarding Israel.

Few in senior levels think a war against Iran would be easy. The US would find it difficult to penetrate to the bunkers dug into the mountains where Iran’s nuclear facilities and ballistic missiles are based. US bases strung along the Persian Gulf are obvious targets.

On its own, Israel cannot defeat Iran. It would require US air-refuelling planes to operate in any strength over Iran. However, this is not just a regional issue. Trump’s actions in backing up Israel will only contribute to increased tension with Moscow and, more importantly Beijing. After all, he has given them fresh reasons why they should not believe what he says.