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(if you read an earlier version of this on my facebook page, this version is updated with new info.)
June 23 2025
By Marc Cooper
1. Iran agreed to halt forward movement on nuclear weapons development in negotiations with Obama more than a decade ago.
2. Iran agreed to limit uranium enrichment to 5%-- well below weaponization grade.
3. In 2018 and for no rational reason, Trump voided the agreement. Uranium enrichment immediately escalated to 60%, very close to bomb grade.
4. Netanyahu has been using Iran as a political foil for 20 yrs and unsuccessfully tried to kill the original deal made with Obama. He made his move now because he is bereft of any answers for Gaza and knew that Iran was weak and that a stuoid and vainglorious Trump was also in need of desperate distraction from his sinking poll numbers as well as a cheap ego boost.
5. Israel's unprovoked unilateral attack on Iran came while Iran was in the middle of restarted talks between Iran and the US. Netanyahu’s goal has little to do with uranium enrichment. It had everything to do with sinking the current talks and making sure there could be no deal with Iran.
6. The last thing that Netanyahu wants is a contained non-nuclear Iran as it would rob him of his needed political enemy. He would risk losing power and going to jail for corruption.
7. Netanyahu needs a "nuclear Iran" the same way the Cuban regime needs the US embargo. Take them away and the raison d'etre of both regimes collapses. Imagine Trump’s dilemma if all immigrants magically disappeared. He’d have nothing to mumble about.
8. The Iranian leadership could easily anticipate an attack on Fodom and it is most likely they had already moved their uranium stockpile elsewhere. And the stockpile is the key component to nuclear development. The Times of Israel is now reporting the Iranians evacuated the three targeted sites some days ago. Maybe yes, maybe no. But claiming they did is good for Bibi as it gibes him the predicate to continue pounding Iran,
9. Either way there is no way to know how much damage was wrought. Trump's declarations of complete obliteration is the translation of Mission Accomplished. One note: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan “Raisin'“ Caine immediately undercut the Trump/Hegseth line about total oblitertion, telling reporters that while an initial assessment indicated “severe damage and destruction,” it would take time for the final battle damage to be known.
10. Statements by JD Vance that we are not at war with Iran but only with its nuclear program are taken from a late nite show monologue of stupid jokes. Better ask the Iranians first and wait till most Americans can find Iran on the map. Iran is certainly at war now with us and our allies. When they close the Strait of Hormuz as they now threaten and cut off 20% of the world oil supply, you can count on gas prices skyrocketing and industry sucking air. At least until Trump blows a hole in the blockage in a tit for tat conflagration.
11. Trump did NOT want a prolonged war with Iran. But he was played like a violin by Netanyahu. Not able to "finish" the job, Bibi bet that Trump's ego and his stupidity would lead him to see an opportunity to be a hero at little cost and his delusional desire to get a Nobel Peace Prize would lure him into this quagmire. He was right.
12. The call for peace now made by Trump is absurd. The Iranians have already responded with a successful missile attack last night on Israel creating a lot of damage. And some 40 Iranians drones have penetrated Israeli air space as of Sunday night. Next up: US military bases within short range of Iran's arsenal of short range ballistic missiles. Sitting ducks. And the door to full scale war by the U.S. in response.
13. Iran is a sophisticated nation of 90 million people with a third of the population as militant Islamic supporters of the Mullahs. Any ground incursion into Iran will be a wholesale meat grinder.
14. If a lucky bomb hits right or an Israeli or American commando team or popular chaos in Iran takes out the Supreme Leader and causes regime change, the likely successor will be the economically rich military led by the Revolutionary Guard and the regime will be more radical.
15. Nobody's home in the National Security apparatus of the US to offer any rational counsel. Trump and Hegseth are dumb and dumber and the other sycophants don't even register on any IQ scale. The talk about bi-partisan” congressional disapproval is horse puckey. Only 3 or 4 of the usual and marginalized GOP electeds have outright condemned the intervention (Gaetz, Massie, Rand and MTG). Meaningless. Another 4 or 5 Trumpanzees have “expressed concern” but they are not going to go any farther. And the Democrats clutched their pearls in the public run up to the attack.
16. The consequences of this supposedly one and done will kick off bloody and perilous outcomes for many years to come with possibly catastrophic events. This is the beginning, not the end.
17. The bombing is one more giant step toward the death of democratic rule in the U.S. We are governed by a pathological authoritarian man-baby who unconstitutionally ignored congressional approval and will face no consequences except for some wet noodle press releases from some Democrats.
18. And while big American cities have gone on high alert fearing domestic terror attacks, Trump Appoints A 22-Year-Old Ex-Gardener and Grocery Store Assistant to Lead U.S. Terror Prevention. Feel any safer?
19.Israel is now a rogue state immune to international law and basic decency led by yet another unbalanced authoritarian who clearly places zero value on the lives of Arabs or Iranians. He is today the single greatest threat to Israel’s long-term security. The U.S. is following suit down Bibi’s path to the abyss.
20.This extremely dangerous escalation in a second regional war comes as Netanyahu still lacks any rational plan as to what to do with two million Gazans he has made homeless in the first one. And in the last few weeks, as many as 400 Gaza Palestinians have been gunned down by the IDF as they scrambled for scarce food aid,—provided by Israel. Go figure that one out.The population of Iran is 50 times greater than Gaza. There are no plans. Just bullets and bombs and bullshit.
21.While I am a fierce critic of Netanyahu and company I fully support Israel’s right to exist and to protect itself. Just as I support the Palestinian right to self determination and self-defense. I oppose terror and random killing from both sides and their respective allies. As to Iran, I hold nothing but contempt for its violent religious dictatorship and hope one day its people will achieve full liberation. Since my teens I have opposed theocratic regimes, like Iran and Israel. ++
In a timeline of Trump’s decision to drop 12 of the reportedly 20 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs the U.S. military possessed on Iran, New York Times reporters confirmed what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo judged from the beginning: Trump wanted in on the optics of what seemed to be Israel’s successful strikes against Iran.
Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone reported conversations with administration officials who confirmed there was no new intelligence to suggest Iran was on the brink of producing nuclear weapons.
Mark Mazzetti, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper reported yesterday in the New York Times that Trump had warned Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu against striking Iran but changed his mind after seeing how Israel’s military action was “playing” on television. The reporters write: “The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved.”
Trump began to hint he had been part of the operation, and military advisors began to draw up plans for a strike. According to the reporters, by June 17—three days after his military parade had fizzled and more than 5 million Americans had turned out to protest his administration—Trump had decided to bomb Iran.
Rather than keeping the mission quiet, Trump issued increasingly aggressive social media posts appearing to hint at a strike. David E. Sanger of the New York Times cited reports from Israeli intelligence saying that Iranian officials had removed 400 kilograms (about 880 pounds) of enriched uranium from the Fordo enrichment plant to another nuclear complex, although at least some equipment and records would likely have remained there.
Republicans have talked about bombing Iran to stop its nuclear aspirations since the early 2000s, but the relationship between the U.S. and Iran relating to nuclear technology actually reaches back to 1953. In that year, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United Kingdom supported a coup against the elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after he called for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which British interests controlled a majority stake.
In his place, the former leader of the country, Mohammad Reza Shah, retook power. In 1954, Iran accepted a 25-year agreement that gave western oil companies 50% ownership of Iran’s oil production.
At the same time, President Eisenhower proposed trying to defang international fears of nuclear war by shifting nuclear technologies toward civilian uses, including energy. On December 8, 1953, he spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City on how atomic energy could be used for peaceful ends. The initiative, known as “Atoms for Peace,”
provided reactors, nuclear fuel, and training for scientists for countries that promised they would use the technology only for peaceful civilian purposes.
In 1967 the U.S. supplied a nuclear reactor and highly enriched uranium to Iran, and trained Iranian scientists in the United States. In 1974, according to Ariana Rowberry of the Brookings Institution, the shah announced he intended to build 20 new reactors in the next 20 years.
Then, in 1979, the Islamic revolution in Iran forced out the shah and put Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in power. In 1980, after the U.S. admitted the shah into the country for cancer treatments, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy, taking 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Iran, imposed sanctions, froze Iranian assets in the U.S., and ended the civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Iran.
Iran turned to Pakistan, China, and Russia to expand its nuclear program. Tensions between the U.S. and Iran increased until Republican politicians talked about bombing the sites of Iran’s nuclear program. Famously, Arizona senator John McCain joked about bombing Iran in 2007 when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ classic song “Barbara Ann.”
McCain lost the 2008 election to Democratic president Barack Obama, and in 2013 at the beginning of his second term, Obama began high-level talks to cap Iran’s enrichment of uranium that could be used for weapons. In 2015, forty-seven Republican senators, led by then freshman senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, tried to blow up the talks, sending an open letter to Iranian officials to put them on notice that “the next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”
This was an astonishing breach of the longstanding U.S. tradition of presenting a united front in foreign negotiations. Nonetheless, in 2015 the U.S., Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the European Union signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that limited Iran’s enriched uranium in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
At about the same time, negotiators settled an unrelated case between the U.S. and Iran at The Hague, involving the return of American prisoners to the U.S. and Iranian assets frozen in the U.S. to Iran. Since Iran was cut off from international finance systems at the time, the U.S. returned some of those assets in 2016 as Swiss francs, euros, and other currencies. Donald Trump, who was then running for the presidency, insisted that the Obama administration had sent “pallets of cash” to Iran as part of a deal to free the prisoners. “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power,” Trump told reporters.
Then, in 2016, voters put Trump in the White House. Although the nuclear deal appeared to be working, Trump left it in 2018, calling it a “horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.” Without the U.S. the agreement broke down. Iran resumed its program for enriching uranium.
A week and a half ago, on June 12, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched strikes against Iran, and on June 21, Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, claiming that after 40 years of Iranian hostility, “Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
In fact, the effect of the strikes is not at all clear, although Trump insisted yet again this afternoon that “[o]bliteration is an accurate term!... Bullseye!!!”
Trump’s strikes on Iran underscore how Republican leaders see governance. They seemed to see the careful negotiations under Obama and the international inspections that certified Iran’s adherence to the JCPOA as signs of weakness, preferring simply to use American military might to impose U.S. will. Trump has combined that dominance ideology with his enthusiasm for performances that play well on television.
This afternoon, Iran responded to the U.S. strikes with its own missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar, after warning of the upcoming attack to enable Qatar to intercept the missiles.
Trump posted on social media: “Iran has officially responded to our Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities with a very weak response, which we expected, and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired—13 were knocked down, and 1 was ‘set free,’ because it was headed in a nonthreatening direction. I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”
Ten minutes later, he posted: “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!”
Republican dominance politics began in the 1950s as a way to prevent the federal government from protecting Black and Brown civil rights. Since then, it has reinforced the idea of asserting power through violence. And it has always reinforced the power of white men over women and racial and gender minorities.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration's request to allow it to deport migrants to places other than their country of origin, often to countries plagued by violence. The administration has claimed this power as part of its campaign to scare immigrants from coming to the U.S. by demonstrating that they could end up in a third country with no recourse. The court majority did not explain its reasoning; the three liberal justices—Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—dissented sharply.
“In…earlier rulings, the court cleared the way for the government to treat as many as a million migrants as removable who previously weren’t,” legal analyst Steve Vladeck told Angélica Franganilla Díaz and John Fritze of CNN. “And today’s ruling allows the government to remove those individuals and others to any country that will take them—without providing any additional process beyond an initial removal hearing, and without regard to the treatment they may face in those countries.”
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