The US is engineering a war, actively bombing the sovereign nation of Iran in a premeditated, unprovoked act of aggression, for no reason other than to sell the bombs it is dropping, and the resources it hopes to pillage. There is no existential threat. Just as Iraq had no “weapons of mass destruction”, it is abundantly clear that Iran has no nuclear weapons, and is not in the process of creating any. And even if it did, Iran is a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and has continually cooperated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to have its nuclear power infrastructure thoroughly inspected.
The United States is not being “dragged into” a conflict with the so-called “Axis of Evil.” It engineered it. The “war on terror” is not a response to religious extremism. It is the aftershock of U.S.-engineered coups, assassinations, and imperial greed.
For over a century, Western powers—chief among them the U.S.—have treated the SWANA region not as sovereign nations, cultures, and histories, but as a giant oil tap. When democratically elected leaders resisted that role, they were branded threats, terrorists, radicals. But in reality, their greatest crime was economic independence.
Iran: The Blueprint for Manufactured “Extremism”
In 1953, Iran had a secular, democratic government. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was elected by the people and committed the ultimate sin in the eyes of the West: he nationalized Iran’s oil. British and American oil companies—used to extracting wealth with impunity—panicked. The U.S. and U.K. responded not with diplomacy, but with Operation Ajax, a CIA-orchestrated coup that overthrew Mossadegh and installed the Shah, a monarch who would reign through brutality for the next 25 years.
The Shah’s regime—propped up by U.S. weapons and training—unleashed SAVAK, a secret police force that tortured and executed political opponents, especially secular leftists, students, union organizers, and feminists. The U.S. didn’t just know about these atrocities; it funded them.
By the late 1970s, the Iranian people had had enough. But by then, there were no viable secular leaders left: the U.S.-backed Shah had jailed, exiled, or killed them, with American support. Into the vacuum stepped Ayatollah Khomeini, a religious figure who channeled the people’s rage. Khomeini didn’t overthrow democracy. He replaced what the U.S. had already destroyed.
This wasn’t a miscalculation. It was a pattern.
The pattern repeats like a curse:
Iraq: The U.S. backed Saddam in the 1980s, until he stopped obeying. Arming and funding his war crimes, then using them as a pretext to invade in 1991. In 2003, it toppled him completely, giving birth to ISIS (previously funded & trained by the CIA).
Afghanistan: In the 1980s, during the Cold War, the U.S. armed the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets, calling them “freedom fighters.” Among them? Osama bin Laden. The CIA didn’t just look the other way—it trained them. The result: decades of war, the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
Libya: Gaddafi was vilified and removed after years of courting the West. What followed was open-air slave markets. Just before his assaination by US and NATO forces, he was planning to introduce a united African currency to free the continent from the shackles of the US global petro-dollar.
Egypt: When Egyptians rose up in 2011, they briefly tasted democracy. But after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory, the U.S. supported a military coup that reinstated dictatorship under el-Sisi—because democracy that isn’t subjugated to American corporate interest isn’t allowed to last.
Syria: A proxy war that fractured an entire nation. Who benefited? Weapons contractors, oil traffickers, and jihadist recruitment campaigns. The newly minted leader? A former Al-Qaeda leader.
A Policy of Manufacturing Enemies
These are not foreign policy failures. They are features of Empire. The U.S. does not fear Islamic fundamentalism—it fuels it when convenient, then feigns horror when it spirals out of control. It installs kings and strongmen, then disavows them when their usefulness expires.
The West doesn’t fear “extremism.” It fears independence. It fears sovereign nations taking control of their own resources. Every time a secular, non-aligned leader emerges, they are either killed or removed. The strategy is simple—divide and exploit. Crush secular movements. Demonize socialism. Arm reactionaries. Steal resources. And when the inevitable blowback comes, call it “terrorism,” bomb the rubble, and start again.This
The list is long, but here are some starting places: Mossadegh (Iran 1953), Árbenz (Guatemala 1954), Lumumba (Congo 1961), Goulart (Brazil 1964), Allende (Chile 1973), Perón (Argentina 1976), Sukarno (Indonesia 1965-67), Noriega (Panama 1989), Aristide (Haiti 1991), Zelaya (Honduras 2009), Yanukovych (Ukraine 2014).
So when politicians speak of “spreading democracy” or “liberating women in Iran,” ask yourself: who strangled that democracy in the first place? Who funded the torture chambers? Who erased secular leadership and left only theocrats behind?
These are not blunders. US and Western policy isn’t driven by fools. It is driven by a very clear profit motive.
Keep in mind: 71% of the Department of Defense’s budget goes to private contractors. Meaning, half a trillion dollars gets sucked out of the American people every year, and is injected back into corporations whose profit motive is more war. So we must be very clear-eyed about this — the pattern of creating enemies is not a failure, it is a feature of the military-industrial complex. The investors, CEOs, and politicians want war. They need a “bad guy”. So they create them.