With ‘Epic Fury’, regime change radicals go to war on Iran

After again pretending to engage in diplomacy with Tehran, the US and Israel launch a new catastrophe in West Asia.

(Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Operation Epic Fury, the US and Israel’s new regime change war in Iran, began early Saturday with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and bombings across the country, including at a girls’ elementary school that reportedly killed over 115 people, mostly children. The attacks escalated today with Israeli-US strikes on Tehran that have reportedly killed hundreds more. Iranian reprisals against US military bases in the Gulf region have claimed the lives of at least five US servicemembers. The war quickly widened with Israeli forces killing dozens in Lebanon after Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, fired rockets into northern Israel for the first time since late 2024.

Two weeks before the US and Israel launched their latest act of joint aggression, a follow-up to the 12-day war that they started last June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted that the Trump administration had no interest in a diplomatic alternative.

“It’s going to be hard,” Rubio said during a visit to Hungary. “It’s been very difficult for anyone to do real deals with Iran because we’re dealing with radical Shia clerics who are making theological decisions, not geopolitical ones.”

President Trump’s own record with Iran shows his top diplomat’s claim to be false. The US reached a deal with Iran in 2015 that constrained its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. After Trump took office, multiple US government bodies, including the State Department that Rubio now heads, certified that Iran “continued to adhere” to its commitments until Trump withdrew from the pact in 2018.

In his dismissive portrayal of a “radical” clerical government in Tehran unable to make agreements, Rubio was also projecting. Just days later, Trump’s Israel Ambassador Mike Huckabee declared that when it comes to stealing Middle Eastern territory, including that of Gulf allies, Israel is biblically entitled to “take it all.” Huckabee’s comments illustrated that the Trump administration contains radical, theological elements in lockstep with an even more openly extremist Israeli government.

The Trump administration brought that Israel First zealotry to ensuing negotiations with Iranian officials brokered by Oman in Geneva. While listing off different demands in public, including that Iran curb its ballistic missile program and support to regional allies, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner privately “agreed to focus the talks just on the nuclear program,” as the New York Times reported. After the session concluded on Thursday, and an announcement that follow-up talks on two different tracks would continue this week, an Iranian official present in Geneva shared a qualified assessment that a deal was on the horizon.

“It’s been very positive and the parties have reached some elements of a possible agreement,” the Iranian official told me. “An agreement seems within reach.” Cognizant of the last time the two sides met in June, when Trump abandoned fruitful talks to join an Israeli bombing of Iran, the official added a caveat. “If it’s not sabotaged again, of course... Our previous experience says that Witkoff’s positive attitude could not be trusted that much. In previous negotiations, he seemed fully convinced at the table, but the mood changed completely after he went back to DC. But let’s hope for the best.”

As the Iranian official feared, the Trump team had yet again pretended to engage in good faith diplomacy while paving the way for regime change. In Geneva, they had agreed to focus on the nuclear file all while plotting a war alongside Israel to overthrow Iran’s government and wipe out its missile deterrent to their aggression.

To justify the ruse, the White House put forward a series of false and contradictory statements. Hours before the attack on Friday, Trump repeated his assertion that Iran won’t “say the keywords: ‘We are not going to have a nuclear weapon.’ They just can’t quite get there. They want to enrich a little.” In fact, Iran had repeatedly renounced the pursuit of nuclear weapons, including last week and in the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump sabotaged. As the JCPOA’s opening paragraph states: “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”

Trump’s casual assertion that Iran wanted to “enrich a little” revealed that he was blurring the pursuit of a nuclear weapon, which requires 90% enrichment, with the token amount that Iran had in fact agreed to. After all, Witkoff had previously agreed to “a little” as well, publicly accepting the JCPOA’s 3.67% cap before backtracking under neoconservative pressure last year.

Sensing that another US reversal was at hand, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi took the extraordinary step of flying to Washington to make a public appeal. In an interview with CBS News, Albusaidi confirmed that Iran had agreed to a low level of enrichment for medical purposes, as allowed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would then be moved outside the country, as it was to Russia under the JCPOA. Going far beyond the JCPOA, which contained a sunset clause, Albusaidi also confirmed that Iran had agreed to “never, ever” have enough “nuclear material that will create a bomb,” by pledging “zero accumulation, zero stockpiling, and full verification” by international inspectors.

US officials gave a different account to the Wall Street Journal, claiming that Iran insisted on being able “to enrich uranium as much as 20%—far in excess” of the JCPOA. But according to Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and an informal advisor to the Obama team during their nuclear talks with Iran, this omits critical context. “The 20% comes from the fact that one of the two reactors identified that constitute the need for enrichment is the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), which requires 19.75% enriched uranium for the production of its fuel pads,” Parsi told me. “But the Iranians would not stockpile any Low Enriched Uranium,” and instead “immediately turn it into fuel pads. Perhaps most importantly, the TRR already has fuel for another 5-7 years. Hence there would be no enrichment at all for the duration of Trump’s presidency.”

To buttress their complaints about a supposedly obdurate Iran, the Journal’s administration sources also claimed that the US “had intelligence that Iran considered attacking American targets before Trump authorized strikes... adding a sense of urgency to the president’s decision.” Yet the administration’s only urgency in this context was to feed the public a justification for its decision to bomb Iran and assassinate its leader. Pentagon briefers acknowledged to lawmakers that there was no intelligence of an imminent Iranian threat to US forces, according to Sen. Mark Warner and other Congressional sources.

Other rationales in the march to war can be just as easily dismissed.

In an interview before the Geneva talks, chief US negotiator Steve Witkoff asserted that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial grade bomb-making material.” Yet days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that the Iranians are “not enriching right now,” but only “trying to get to the point where they ultimately can.” More accurately, Robert Einhorn, a former senior State Department official for nonproliferation, observed that: “There’s a general conclusion today that there’s a de facto suspension of enrichment. There’s no enrichment taking place.”

In his State of the Union address, Trump declared that Iran is “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.” Rubio echoed this assertion the next day, though with a qualifier-laden statement that amounted to innuendo, not an assertion of fact: “clearly they are headed in the pathway to one day being able to develop weapons that could reach the continental U.S.,” Rubio said (emphasis added). Rubio insisted that he “won’t speculate how far away they are,” for good reason: his hedged statement was meant to suggest a threat that does not actually exist.

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency reported last year that, at best, “Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily-viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.” (emphasis added) Moreover, the Trump administration’s national intelligence consensus is that Iran’s military posture is primarily defensive. As the US annual threat assessment noted one year ago this month, “Iranian investment in its military has been a key plank of its efforts to confront diverse threats and try to deter and defend against an attack by the United States or Israel.”

Iran’s supposed missile threat to the United States is therefore on par with its supposed nuclear weapons program: non-existent. Yet because Iran does have ballistic missiles that can “deter and defend against an attack,” and a foreign policy that resists Israel’s denial of Palestinian self-determination and domination of the Middle East, it is deemed to be a threat to the US ally in Tel Aviv. It is for this reason that Netanyahu, on Sunday, gushed that Trump has allowed “us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” Netanyahu also yearned, and lobbied for, the US to invade Iraq 23 years ago this month. In joining the Israeli leader for yet another regime change war in West Asia, Trump has made the most radical geopolitical decision by a US president in the two decades since. With no endgame in sight, it is also the most catastrophic.