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The illegal Israel-US war on Iran now grinds on to a second month of conflict with no clear end in sight. Trump’s dream of doing a Venezuela-type operation has proved to be an illusion as Iran has shown itself to be a more formidable opponent. As this editorial is being written (April 5, 2026), Trump has issued an obscenity laced post on his Truth Social account threatening to commit bigger war crimes destroying Iran’s infrastructure of power plants and bridges unless the Strait of Hormuz is opened to shipping by Tuesday April 7. He wrote: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F**kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” This is the rant of a frustrated narcissist who considers himself as the world’s monarch. General Mark Milley, who was Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019-2023 during Trump’s first term, described Trump to author Bob Woodward in the following words: “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.”
What do Israel and the US hope to achieve in this conflict they have engineered on completely false pretenses? The charge that Iran was a “few weeks” away from acquiring nuclear weapons is ludicrous as Trump himself had boasted in the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 of “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear capacity. Secretary of State Rubio claimed that the US attacked because Israel was going to attack. In fact, the entire US leadership has been caught in a web of lies on the reasons underlying the war they have provoked and are continuing to wage in defiance of international law and the provisions of the UN charter. Adding to their despicable conduct, they attacked Iran while active negotiations were ongoing and not just once but twice, in June 2025 and again in February 2026.
Israel’s goal is clearly to become the sole hegemon of the entire Middle East and to obtain what Hitler’s Nazi regime called “lebensraum” to fulfil the alleged biblical prophecy of Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) as the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. In pursuit of this goal under its current extreme right-wing government, Israel is moving forward to annex the remaining portions of Palestinian territory, Gaza and the West Bank, as well as significant portions of Syria and Lebanon.
Iran has been the main obstacle to the Israeli plan, so Netanyahu has been itching for years to obtain US help to attack Iran as it could not do so solely on its own. Netanyahu determined to either achieve regime change in Iran, like, for example, bringing the former Shah’s son to power to replace the Islamic regime or, failing that, to make Iran a failed state on the lines of Libya and Syria that can offer no challenge to Israeli hegemony. In the bombastic style typical of fascists, Netanyahu cast the “historic struggle” against the Islamic Republic of Iran in civilizational terms: “We have to be more powerful than the barbarians, or they will…crash our gates and destroy our societies.” A truly ironic statement by the leader of a country committing genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, attacking and killing hundreds, if not thousands, in Lebanon, and grabbing significant portions of Syrian territory while assassinating much of the senior leadership of Iran along the lines of the decapitation strategy pursued against Hamas and Hezbollah. While Iran is no liberal democracy, it is not engaged in violent assaults on neighboring countries aimed at annexing portions of their territory. In fact, “barbarian” would be too mild a term to describe Israel’s fascist regime or even a large majority of the country’s population that applauds the genocide in Gaza and the mass killings of innocent civilians, including children, elsewhere.
As far as the US role is concerned, Graham Plattner, Democratic Party candidate for the US Senate in Maine, recently said it plainly: “Benjamin Netanyahu finally found a president who was stupid enough and sucker enough to launch the war with Iran that he has been pushing for 30 years. This war with Iran is illegal. The United States military is committing war crimes… Not only have thousands of innocent Iranian citizens been killed – including over 100 children at a girls’ elementary school… We have lost American soldiers whose families got the worst news any military spouse, parent, or child can get. All for nothing.”
Trump faces a disaster of his own making in Iran. He had no plan to address Iran’s predictable retaliation, including closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which almost a quarter of the world’s oil, gas and fertilizer trade passes, and Iran’s attacks on US military bases in the Gulf states like Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, and Saudi Arabia in response to the US-Israeli bombing of Iran. As could be expected, the price of crude oil has skyrocketed affecting the world economy; the availability of LPG and fertilizer has sharply reduced negatively impacting people in Asian countries as well as US farmers.
On Wednesday, April 1, Trump gave a prime-time speech, disconnected from reality in his usual style, where he insisted everything was going great and that the Hormuz Strait was not his problem as the US didn’t need any Middle Eastern oil, it was some other countries’ problem and they should take care of it. His latest post threatening grave war crimes bombing Iran’s infrastructure is a complete U-turn from what he said a few days earlier. Pivoting from “the Strait of Hormuz not being our problem to we will commit massive war crimes,” suggests columnist Paul Krugman that “Trump, for all his pretense of, ‘I’m always winning,’ is aware of how completely he screwed things up, that he’s aware that he has basically led America into an epic strategic defeat” and “it sounds like he’s unable to accept it and that he is going to try and do something truly awful in an attempt to somehow redeem himself and the situation.” Krugman emphasizes that “If we had a functioning democracy, 25th this would be Amendment time. [Impeachment of the President under the Constitution]. This guy should not have any authority at all… any authority on matters of state violence when this is the kind of mood he’s in.”
The Modi regime’s relative silence on the US-Israel war on Iran, apart from a few vacuous pronouncements by the Ministry of External Affairs, exposes the vacuum at the heart of Indian foreign policy that has consisted of little else than kowtowing to the US under Trump and promoting Hindutva’s embrace of Zionism as evidenced by Modi’s fervent embrace of the genocidal Netanyahu literally on the eve of the assault on Iran.
An incisive and insightful article in the Caravan magazine of April 3 by Sushant Singh is worth quoting at length:
“THE US-ISRAEL WAR ON Iran has exposed, across the board, the limits of state capacity and the hollowness of carefully crafted images. Amid this escalating global crisis, India finds itself navigating choppy waters, with the captain quite literally at sea. For over a decade, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political project has rested on a narrative of muscular nationalism that brooks no dissent. Once again, when India most needs quiet competence and strategic clarity, we have a leader obsessed with optics, confused about priorities and unmoored from institutional constraints. The current moment, exposed by the crisis in West Asia, marks the end of that long summer of the Modi era.
The war poses a direct assault on Indian interests. Crude and gas prices jumped sharply the moment traffic was threatened along the Strait of Hormuz, pushing up fuel, fertilizer and transport costs for hundreds of millions of Indians already living on the edge, and shredding the Modi government’s claims of stability. Shipping insurance premiums for Indian carriers spiked and key Gulf trade routes have become more volatile, choking a lifeline for exporters and importers alike. With no credible evacuation or income-protection plan from New Delhi beyond verbose press releases, families in Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who depend on remittances, have watched in fear as Gulf labor markets wobble.
Diplomatically, India has painted itself into a corner. New Delhi’s visible alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv has enraged public opinion from Tehran to Kuala Lumpur. Moreover, the Modi government has taken this position without any serious leverage over US or Israeli decision making, nor has it shown the courage to defend Iranian sovereignty. Modi has reduced this grave crisis in West Asia to another episode of telephone calls and photo opportunities. He has offered no parliamentary debate, no honest assessment of the risks to energy security and diaspora safety, and no explanation for why—as the leader of a country that depends on the Gulf for oil, jobs and remittances—he has tied India so tightly to a reckless US–Israeli war whose costs will be paid by Indians and not by those whose favor he craves.”
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