{"id":36686,"date":"2026-03-26T07:28:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T07:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/36686\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T07:28:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T07:28:06","slug":"blaming-israel-for-us-war-on-iran-lets-trump-off-the-hook-for-reckless-decision-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/36686\/","title":{"rendered":"Blaming Israel for US war on Iran lets Trump off the hook for reckless decision \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

It may be tempting to blame Israel<\/a> for Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s decision to go to war against Iran<\/a>. But it is a mistake.<\/p>\n

Apportioning blame<\/p>\n

So much about the war in Iran is obscure, including the nature and the seriousness of the negotiations that may be under way now between Washington and Tehran. Most mysterious of all is Trump\u2019s motivation for starting the war, for which he has offered a carousel of justifications, some of which contradict one another.<\/p>\n

In the absence of any clear line from the White House, many of the war\u2019s critics have concluded that Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu bounced Trump into it. But while Israel should be held accountable for its own actions in Iran and Lebanon, it is the US as the stronger partner that bears most responsibility for this war. <\/p>\n

The Trump administration has itself suggested that Israel is to blame, with secretary of state Marco Rubio saying that the US acted because it knew there would be an Israeli action against Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn\u2019t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

When Joe Kent, a far-right conspiracy theorist Trump appointed as director of the national counterterrorism centre, resigned last week in opposition to the war, he blamed Israel.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The influence of Israel\u2019s supporters in American politics is indisputable but if Netanyahu was pressing Trump to attack Iran, he was pushing at an open door. In January, the president called on demonstrators in Iran to march on government institutions, telling them that help was on the way as he ordered the largest deployment of US military assets to the region since the Iraq war in 2003.<\/p>\n

Trump may have been buoyed by the success of the special forces operation that abducted Venezuelan president Nicol\u00e1s Maduro in January and by last year\u2019s 12-day bombing campaign against Iran during which the US sustained no casualties. But his decision to go to war against Iran was also the fulfilment of an ambition cherished for decades within both parties on Capitol Hill.<\/p>\n

The US has been hostile towards the Islamic Republic since Iranian revolutionaries took American embassy staff in Tehran hostage in 1979 after the overthrow of the shah. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden each imposed sanctions on the country, subjecting generations of Iranians to economic hardship.<\/p>\n

Reagan backed Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran in the 1980s, although his administration was also secretly selling arms to Iran in return for the release of hostages. After the attacks on September 11th, 2001, neoconservatives had their sights on Iran as well as Iraq, swaggering around Washington that \u201cboys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran\u201d.<\/p>\n

When Trump withdrew in 2018 from the nuclear deal agreed under Obama, he imposed \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d sanctions that helped to drive a third of Iran\u2019s middle class into poverty. Biden left the sanctions in place and many of the Democrats who are now criticising the war fuelled the hostility towards Iran that preceded it and voted through Trump\u2019s huge increases in military spending.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s war aims in Iran are distinct from those of the US and Netanyahu almost certainly has a stronger appetite than Trump for prolonging the conflict. But they are not equal partners, Israel still depends on the US for security and its offensive will stop when Trump decides it should end, just as last year\u2019s 12-day campaign against Iran ended when he had enough.<\/p>\n

Israel is responsible for killing more than 1,000 people in Iran and Lebanon over the past three weeks, as it is for the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza over the past three years. But blaming Israel for the US action in Iran risks letting Trump and his administration off the hook for their reckless and unlawful decision to go to war.<\/p>\n

It also nourishes what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called \u201cthe myth of American innocence\u201d that creates the \u201cdeep layer of messianic consciousness\u201d that underlies US foreign policy. This belief in the essential virtuousness of American society and its intentions in the world is not only a barrier to understanding adversaries but dooms each generation to repeat the foreign policy mistakes of its predecessors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is, in short, even in a conflict with a foe with whom we have little in common the possibility and necessity of living in a dimension of meaning in which the urgencies of the struggle are subordinated to a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved; to a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom, and power available to us for the resolution of its perplexities; to a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy\u2019s demonry and our vanities; and to a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies which are promised to those who humble themselves,\u201d Niebuhr wrote in The Irony of American History.<\/p>\n

\u201cStrangely enough, none of the insights derived from this faith are finally contradictory to our purpose and duty of preserving our civilization. They are, in fact, prerequisites for saving it. For if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Please let me know what you think and send your comments, thoughts or suggestions for topics you would like to see covered to denis.globalbriefing@irishtimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It may be tempting to blame Israel for Donald Trump\u2019s decision to go to war against Iran. But…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[1022,38,16324,34,37,51],"class_list":{"0":"post-36686","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-binyamin-netanyahu","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-global-briefing","11":"tag-iran","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-united-states"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116294300770035127","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}