Why Iran Must Fall – Part 3: Seven Wars and a Legacy of Destruction
United States Army
In Why Iran Must Fall – Part I: The Villain the West Loves to Hate, we examined the grievances the West never mentions. The 1953 coup that destroyed Iran's democracy. The U.S.-backed dictatorship that followed. Washington's support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War—even as he used chemical weapons. The U.S. Navy shooting down a civilian Iranian airliner, killing 290 people. Decades of extrajudicial assassinations, cyberattacks, crippling sanctions.
In Why Iran Must Fall – Part 2: No Peace at Any Cost, we documented a systematic pattern. Every Iranian attempt at diplomacy—Khatami's outreach after 9/11, the Grand Bargain, the JCPOA—was ignored or undermined. Israel launched a war of aggression just days before the sixth round of nuclear negotiations, quickly followed by more U.S. bombs. This pattern reveals unambiguously that peace was never the objective. Regime change, subservience, or balkanization are.
But who convinced Washington that peace with Iran is to be avoided at all costs?
From 1984 to 1988, Benjamin Netanyahu served as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. While living in New York, he became a fixture on U.S. media, think tanks, universities, and policy forums, delivering a single message: violence in the Middle East is the result of an ideological war against the West itself.
This worldview came from his father, Benzion Netanyahu, a devoted ideologue of the Israeli right and Ze'ev Jabotinsky's secretary. Jabotinsky founded Betar, a militant Revisionist Zionist youth movement that rejected any political compromise with Arabs and glorified Jewish militarism, territorial maximalism, and the use of force to establish a Jewish state.
Jabotinsky's followers formed the core of the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist organization. Between late 1947 and May 1948, before Israel declared statehood, the Irgun and Lehi (the Stern Gang) bombed Palestinian markets, massacred civilians in their homes, and burned villages. The strategy was deliberate—trigger mass flight through terror. By May 1948, between 250,000 and 350,000 Palestinians had been driven from their homes.
After Ben-Gurion unilaterally declared the state of Israel, these militias were absorbed into the Israeli army. The IDF, together with the Haganah and its Palmach units, carried out systematic military operations. Another 350,000 Palestinians were expelled. Eventually, more than 750,000 Palestinians—roughly half the indigenous population—were forcibly displaced. Over 530 towns and villages destroyed. An estimated 15,000 killed. Palestinians call it the Nakba. The catastrophe.
This was the extremist legacy Benjamin Netanyahu inherited from Jabotinsky through his father. Violence as statecraft. Force as the answer to any challenge to Israeli expansion. Terror and mass murder as tools of ethnic cleansing. And in 1995, he packaged that ideology for a Western audience.
Fighting Terrorism
In 1995, Benjamin Netanyahu published Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism. The book shaped American foreign policy for decades.
Netanyahu's argument was radical. Terrorism, as he defined it, had nothing to do with occupation, dispossession, or political grievance. Palestinian resistance wasn't about ethnic cleansing or military rule. Muslim opposition to Western power wasn't nationalist or anti-colonial. It flowed from a fanatical current within Islam, sustained by the regimes that backed it.
Fighting Terrorism collapsed every form of organized Muslim opposition into a single category: militant Islamic terrorism. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan were state sponsors. The PLO, Fatah, Hezbollah, Hamas were non-state actors. All were to be confronted and crushed. Governments, liberation movements, political organizations became the same enemy. "These terrorist states and terror organizations together form a terror network," he wrote. The engine was Iran's revolution, which "created a sovereign spiritual base for fomenting a strident Islamic militancy worldwide."
History disappears. Context is erased. Resistance loses all political meaning. It becomes civilizational pathology. "The soldiers of militant Islam do not hate the West because of Israel," Netanyahu wrote. "They hate Israel because of the West—because they see it as an island of Western democratic values in a Moslem-Arab sea of despotism."
“An island of democratic values.” He really wrote that! While Israel ran a military occupation. While it expanded settlements on stolen land. While it denied millions of Palestinians citizenship, due process, freedom of movement. While it controlled their water, their borders, their movement, their lives. While it operated an apartheid state.
And what were those Western values Netanyahu praised?
By 1995, the so-called democratic West had drawn the borders that carved up the region after World War I. It had overthrown Iran's elected government. It had backed Saddam Hussein through the Iran-Iraq War—a conflict that killed hundreds of thousands. It had stationed troops in Saudi Arabia. It had supported every dictator willing to sell oil and suppress dissent. It had armed and funded Israel's occupation and wars for decades.
If this is what Netanyahu calls Western values, then he's defined them honestly: domination, dispossession, and plunder dressed up as democracy.
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
In 1996, as Netanyahu prepared to take office, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies—a Jerusalem- and Washington-based think tank—produced A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm for his new government.
The authors were American neoconservatives with deep ties to influential pro-Israel policy organizations: the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which champions free-market policies enforced through military power; the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which promotes U.S.–Israeli military integration and confrontational policies against Arab states; and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an AIPAC spin-off that promotes pro-Israel positions in Washington. These were the intellectual architects.
The paper codified Israel's decades-long practice of preemptive warfare into formal doctrine. It called for abandoning the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians. In its place, it proposed "peace for peace" and "peace through strength"—language that meant rejecting the established "land for peace" formula in favor of permanent occupation, zero concessions, and unconditional Arab capitulation enforced by military power.
The paper translated into policy language what Netanyahu had already outlined in Fighting Terrorism—and what he later openly stated. Leaked footage from a 2001 gathering in the West Bank settlement of Ofra, aired on Israeli Channel 10 News, captured Netanyahu explaining how he had deliberately sabotaged the Oslo Accords while serving as prime minister.
Oslo required Israel to transfer territories in three stages. But the agreement included an exemption for areas containing settlements or military installations. Netanyahu saw his opening. As he explained: "No one said what defined military sites. Defined military sites, I said, were security zones. As far as I'm concerned, the Jordan Valley is a defined military site."
The Project for the New American Century
The ideas first sketched for Israel did not remain in Jerusalem. Within a year of A Clean Break, several of its authors and allies regrouped in Washington. They founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997 under William Kristol and Robert Kagan. What began as a strategy for Netanyahu became a blueprint for American global dominance.
PNAC declared that the United States, as the world's lone superpower, must abandon restraint, reject compromise, and secure global hegemony by force. Its program demanded overwhelming military superiority, the ability to wage multiple, simultaneous major theater wars, and the normalization of preventive war and regime change. The only obstacle was the American public. Such an audacious project, the report admitted, would not gain acceptance "absent a catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor."
On September 11, 2001, the "catastrophic and catalyzing event" PNAC had called for arrived—right on schedule. With their pretext in hand, the wars they had mapped were swiftly set in motion.
Just days after 9/11, retired NATO commander General Wesley Clark was visiting the Pentagon. A general he had known for years pulled him aside. "I just got this down from upstairs, from the Secretary of Defense's office today," he said. "This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran." Clark asked if it was classified. "Yes, sir." "Well then don't show it to me."
The list matched what Netanyahu had written in Fighting Terrorism in 1995, what was codified by U.S.-Israeli neoconservatives in A Clean Break in 1996, and weaponized by PNAC in 2000. The Middle East had been mapped for destruction before the first plane hit Manhattan. 9/11 was the pretext that put the plan into action.
WAR 1: Iraq — The WMD Lie
We were told Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. George W. Bush warned: "We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, which could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Tony Blair assured the world Saddam’s chemical weapons were on standby for use within 45 minutes. Colin Powell stood before the UN Security Council, pointer in hand, waving grainy satellite photos and holding up a tiny vial meant to symbolize anthrax. “Every statement I make today is backed by sources—solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and assertions based on solid intelligence” he declared.
Israel’s fingerprints were all over it. In September 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu testified before the U.S. Congress. He urged the removal of Saddam Hussein. He claimed with absolute certainty: “If you take out Saddam—Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations” across the Middle East.
When France had the audacity to question any of this, Congress, in a display of statesmanship that will echo throughout history, renamed French fries “freedom fries.”
What we were not told was that in 2000, Saddam had begun selling Iraqi oil in euros instead of U.S. dollars under the UN Oil-for-Food program. Iraq sat on vast oil reserves, and the move openly challenged the dollar-denominated oil system that underpins American financial power. If other producers followed, it threatened the foundations of dollar hegemony itself.
We were not told that Iraq had opposed Israel militarily, financed Palestinian resistance, and symbolically anchored Arab rejection of Israeli regional dominance. The final communiqué of the 1978 Baghdad Arab Summit, transmitted by Iraq to the United Nations, stated: “The cause of Palestine is a cause involving the destiny of the Arabs; it is the essence of the conflict with the Zionist enemy.”
So Saddam was linked to 9/11, though he had nothing to do with it. Of the 19 hijackers, 15 were Saudi nationals, not Iraqis. While ordinary flights were grounded, about 140 Saudis, including members of the royal family and at least 13 bin Laden relatives, were flown out of the United States on chartered aircraft. Many left before the FBI completed interviews, a clear signal of the Bush administration’s deference to Saudi Arabia, America’s key oil ally.
In March 2003, the U.S. and its “Coalition of the Willing” invaded Iraq, cheered on by Western media. Saddam was dragged from a hole, paraded, and hanged. From the wreckage rose the very force Saddam had kept at bay: al-Qaeda in Iraq, later known as ISIS.
The toll: more than 4,500 U.S. soldiers dead. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. Millions displaced. The cost to American taxpayers: roughly $2.2 trillion, about $8,000 per taxpayer.
The Iraq Survey Group later confirmed there were no active WMD programs. Powell eventually admitted it was “a blot” on his record, his biggest regret. The central premise was a lie.
Yet the United States got what it wanted. Iraqi oil returned to dollar-denominated sales, reinforcing dollar hegemony. To this day, Iraqi oil revenues are held in U.S.-controlled accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, giving Washington extraordinary leverage over Iraq’s budget and sovereignty. The invasion also opened space for a long-term U.S. military presence in the region.
Defense contractors got what they wanted. Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former company, and its subsidiary KBR alone secured nearly $40 billion in Iraq-related contracts, much of it awarded without competitive bidding.
And Israel got what it wanted. The war eliminated Iraq as a strategic counterweight, fractured the Arab state system, and shifted the regional balance decisively in Israel's favor. And if there was any doubt that the United States sent its troops to die in Iraq for Israel's benefit, here's what Philip Zelikow, senior advisor to President Bush, said in 2002 according to The Inter Press Service: "Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat is and actually has been since 1990—it's the threat against Israel."
WAR 2 — Libya: From Prosperity to Slave Markets
Before 2011, Libya was the most prosperous state in Africa. It ranked highest on the continent in the UN Human Development Index. It provided free healthcare and education. Literacy rates exceeded 85 percent. Oil revenues funded large-scale public works, including the Great Man-Made River—a massive project delivering fresh water to millions across the desert.
Under Muammar Gaddafi, Libya also pursued an explicit pan-African strategy. It funded African Union institutions. It backed regional infrastructure projects. It promoted plans for African financial institutions and a gold-backed dinar—currency designed to reduce dependence on the IMF, the World Bank, and French-controlled monetary systems in West and Central Africa.
Strongly anti-colonialist, Gaddafi evicted U.S. and U.K. military installations from Libya. He envisioned a politically unified Africa with a single government, unified defense force, and unified foreign and trade policy—a continental bloc that would negotiate with the West on equal terms. The proposal threatened decades of Western access to African markets and resources.
Gaddafi also backed armed movements fighting states he viewed as extensions of Western imperialism, including the Irish Republican Army against Britain, and Palestinian factions against Israel.
In early 2011, Libya experienced civil unrest. Western leaders declared it an emergency. The UN Security Council authorized military action on March 17, 2011. Two days later, the United States, France, and the U.K. began airstrikes.
On March 28, Barack Obama justified the intervention by warning: "If we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world." Hillary Clinton framed the intervention as a humanitarian necessity.
What was sold as civilian protection became regime change. Libyan state institutions were systematically destroyed. Gaddafi was captured near Sirte, beaten, sodomized with a bayonet, and executed. When informed of his death, Hillary laughed. "We came, we saw, he died."
The aftermath was catastrophic. Between 10,000 and 25,000 people were killed. Libya's government collapsed. Infrastructure was shattered. Armed militias carved the country into competing territories. Human trafficking routes expanded across Libya into the Sahel and the Mediterranean. Open-air slave markets emerged in areas once under state control. In little more than a decade, Libya went from the most prosperous country in Africa to one of the poorest and most unstable in the world.
Only afterward did investigations by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch conclude there was no evidence of an imminent massacre in Benghazi. Claims used to justify the intervention, such as the use of Viagra for mass rape, were unsupported.
But the outcome aligned neatly with Western interests. What was never acceptable was an independent Libya operating outside the dollar-centered financial system and outside Western control of resource flows. Gaddafi's push for African financial institutions, alternatives to IMF and World Bank lending, and a gold-backed currency threatened an order built on debt, dollar settlement, and external leverage.
On April 2, 2011, Hillary Clinton's adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, sent her an email that spelled everything out. Gaddafi held 143 tons of gold and a similar amount in silver—over $7 billion—to launch a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden dinar as an alternative to the French franc. This threatened France's post-colonial monetary control over Francophone Africa.
The memo to Clinton confirmed this was "one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to commit France to the attack on Libya." Sarkozy's motives: seize Libyan oil, expand French influence in North Africa, boost his political standing, prevent Gaddafi from supplanting France in Francophone Africa.
NATO's 2011 war also destroyed Libya's capacity to support Palestinian causes and replaced centralized governance with militia rule and chronic instability.
WAR 3 — Syria: For the Children
Syria was next. A long-standing ally of Iran and Russia, Syria provided the geographic corridor linking Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon. That made it a strategic threat to Israel.
In 2011, the same year NATO destroyed Libya, an uprising began in Syria. It was part of the Arab Spring—a wave of protests that started in Tunisia in late 2010 and spread through Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, and beyond. Syrians were marching against authoritarian rule, corruption, economic hardship, and unemployment. Unlike Tunisia or Egypt, where governments eventually fell or reformed, the Syrian state responded with rapid militarization and mass repression. Syria’s uprising was quickly internationalized.
On American and European television screens, the script from Iraq and Libya repeated. First came the claim that civilians needed protection from their own government. In August 2012, Obama declared: “I have indicated repeatedly that President al-Assad has lost legitimacy and needs to step down. So far, he hasn’t gotten the message and instead has doubled down in violence against his own people.”
Then came the threat that would justify escalation: chemical weapons. At the same press conference, Obama issued his red line: “We start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That will change my calculus.”
Finally, he tied Syria directly to Israeli security. "That's an issue that doesn't just concern Syria. It includes our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us. We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons fall into the hands of the wrong people."
In August 2013, chemical attacks struck the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus. Within days, images were everywhere. Children foaming at the mouth. Lifeless bodies sprawled across hospital floors. Before any independent investigation could establish who was responsible, Western officials and media delivered their verdict: Bashar al-Assad had gassed his own people. He had to go.
The attacks were atrocious. But the condemnation came from a government that had armed and protected Saddam Hussein while he gassed Iranians throughout the 1980s—and then shielded him from international accountability at the United Nations.
This time, no U.S. tanks rolled into Damascus as they had into Baghdad. From around 2012, the CIA’s Timber Sycamore program became one of the largest U.S. covert efforts since Afghanistan, channeling billions of dollars in weapons and training to opposition forces.
Turkey opened its borders. Saudi Arabia and Qatar bankrolled sectarian militias. Britain and France provided support. Significant quantities of those weapons were captured, transferred, or leaked to the very groups Washington claimed to be fighting: Jabhat al-Nusra—al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate—and indirectly ISIS itself.
By December 2024, after more than a decade of war, crushing economic sanctions, and the U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil, Assad’s government fell. Rebel forces entered Damascus, and Assad fled to Russia, where he was granted asylum. The toll was catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed. Entire cities reduced to rubble. Ancient communities shattered. More than thirteen million Syrians displaced.
Within days of Assad’s fall, Israel launched hundreds of airstrikes and incursions into Syrian airspace, destroying much of what remained of Syria's strategic military infrastructure—bases, air defenses, supply routes—with near-total impunity. Israel also consolidated its hold over the Golan Heights—Syrian territory seized in 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1981 in violation of international law. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared it will remain part of Israel “for eternity.”
Positioned between Iran and Lebanon, Syria was the land bridge allowing Iranian weapons, funding, and personnel to reach Hezbollah. With Assad gone, supply routes collapsed. What Israel had faced for decades—a hostile but functioning state—was replaced by something far more useful: a wrecked country carved into militia zones, ruled by competing warlords and foreign patrons, incapable of mounting coherent resistance. Everything Fighting Terrorism and the “Clean Break” strategy for the Middle East had asked for.
Years later, whistleblowers from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) came forward. They alleged that senior management had distorted and excluded original findings on a 2018 chemical incident in Douma, Syria, steering the final report toward blaming Assad. Journalist Aaron Maté of The Grayzone continues to press for an independent investigation.
WAR 4 — Lebanon: Punishing the Front Line
In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, devastating Beirut and the south and killing an estimated 20,000 people. Its targets were the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), leftist factions, and nationalist movements—forces seen as obstacles to U.S.-Israeli control of the region.
During that invasion, Israeli commanders sealed the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps and allowed allied Christian Phalangist militias to enter. Israeli forces controlled access to the area, illuminated the camps at night with flares, and received reports of the killings as they were ongoing—and did nothing. Over several days, hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians were brutally killed and.
Out of these massacres, Hezbollah was born.
In 2006, Israel launched a 34-day war on Lebanon. Air and artillery strikes, many using U.S.-supplied weapons, destroyed entire neighborhoods and killed more than 1,100 people, the vast majority of them civilians. Extensive use of cluster munitions left unexploded ordnance across southern Lebanon, continuing to injure civilians long after the ceasefire and rendering large areas of farmland unsafe. Hezbollah pushed Israeli forces back—a blow to Israel's sense of invincibility.
On October 8, 2023—one day after the Gaza war began—Hezbollah began firing on Israeli positions in solidarity with Gaza. Lebanese officials declared that cross-border attacks would stop if Israel ended its campaign in Gaza. Israel did not. Instead, near-daily exchanges escalated into sustained Israeli airstrikes and, by late 2024, a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.
Since the Gaza war began, Israeli attacks have killed large numbers of civilians in Lebanon, displaced more than a million people from border areas, and destroyed villages and farmland. Reported use of white phosphorus, along with cluster munitions and wide-area explosive attacks, has added to the long-term environmental and civilian harm caused by earlier wars.
Hezbollah forced Israel's withdrawal from most of Lebanon in 2000 and remained intact after the 2006 war. Despite suffering massive losses in 2024–2025, the group is rebuilding.
WAR 5 — Sudan: Red Sea Control and Counter-Revolution
Sudan was struck in August 1998, when U.S. cruise missiles destroyed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, falsely accused of producing chemical weapons. The plant had supplied critical medicines to Sudan and neighboring countries. Its destruction, followed by years of U.S. sanctions, hollowed out the health system and economy long before the world "discovered" Sudan's humanitarian crisis.
In 2019, a nationwide popular uprising—huge, mostly non-violent protests across the country—pushed out a 30-year dictatorship and demanded genuine civilian rule. Generals from both the regular army and the main paramilitary force took charge of "managing" the transition. In April 2023, a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) exploded into full-scale civil war.
Sudan is being torn apart for four main reasons.
First: Red Sea control. Sudan sits on the Red Sea, directly across from Saudi Arabia and close to Yemen. All shipping traveling between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean must pass through the Red Sea and the narrow Bab al-Mandab strait. That route carries oil tankers, container ships, U.S. warships, and traffic to and from Israel. Control of that route serves U.S. naval access and Israeli shipping security.
Second: crushing the Axis of Resistance. Control of Sudan's ports allows the U.S. and its allies to pressure Yemen and Iranian-backed forces operating in the region. Washington has tied debt relief and sanctions policy to Khartoum's willingness to normalize with Israel.
Third: gold. Sudan is rich in it. The RSF and parts of the army move gold through networks tied to the UAE and other Gulf centers, which refine and export it. Dubai—a nation with no gold deposits of its own—has become one of the largest gold trading hubs in the world.
Ordinary Sudanese face hunger and state collapse while their gold lines Dubai's luxury markets and funds the war that is decimating them. The Emirates' gleaming shops, high-end branding, and even gold-flecked chocolate sanitize what is being extracted and who is dying for it.
Fourth: crushing a unified democratic government. The 2019 uprising threatened to produce a government that answered to ordinary Sudanese. Such outcome would be unacceptable for Gulf and Western states. The counter-revolution empowers rival warlords on both sides. The RSF paramilitary is armed and funded through networks anchored in the UAE, with reported Israeli involvement in surveillance technology, weapons, and intelligence support. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have backed the SAF national army. The U.S. applies diplomatic and economic leverage throughout. The result: no coherent democratic government can emerge.
Sudan now faces the world's largest displacement crisis. Over 11.5 million people displaced within the country. Another 3.5 million across borders. More than 24 million face acute food insecurity including famine. Entire cities gutted. Farmers driven off their land. Basic services shattered.
The country is being sacrificed to secure Red Sea control, plunder its gold, and lock in a pliant security architecture. Not to stabilize Sudan.
WAR 6 — Somalia: A Coastline Too Strategic to Be Sovereign
In 2006, Ethiopia invaded Somalia with U.S. backing. The invasion toppled the Islamic Courts Union—a homegrown authority that had brought a rough but real measure of order to the country. Washington moved against the Courts not because they were brutal, but because they were Islamist, independent of U.S. control, and potentially willing to strike their own deals with regional powers. A government that could actually govern Somalia, control key sea lanes, and say no to U.S. or Israeli security priorities was treated as a threat.
Out of that intervention, al-Shabaab emerged. Al-Shabaab is an armed Islamist movement that feeds off anger at foreign occupation, clan warlords, and the collapse of the only authority that had briefly reduced chaos.
Since then, two decades of drone strikes, special operations raids, and proxy wars have kept Somalia in permanent instability. The U.S. has carried out hundreds of airstrikes since 2007. Monitoring groups estimate these strikes have killed dozens if not hundreds of civilians, while U.S. officials acknowledge only a handful.
Somalia’s geography explains the obsession. Its coastline faces the Bab al-Mandab strait and the Red Sea. A large share of global trade and energy passes through those waters. At the height of Somali piracy, the World Bank estimated the threat was adding around $18 billion a year to global trade costs—showing how economically sensitive these routes are to Western economies, Gulf monarchies, and Israel.
Today, the same corridor is a front line in Israel’s war on Gaza. The Houthis in Yemen have repeatedly targeted ships linked to Israel, disrupting Red Sea trade routes. The group has stated they will stop their operations as soon as Israel ends its assault.
In tiny Djibouti, at the mouth of the same sea lanes, the United States, China, France, the UK, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Spain, and Italy operate military bases. They use them to police the Gulf of Aden and project power into Somalia and Yemen.
The language of “fighting terrorism” covers a strategy of regime-denial. Any Somali authority capable of independent decision-making—especially one with Islamist or nationalist aspirations—gets marked for pre-emptive destruction. Young Somalis grow up under drones, warlords, and externally designed “stabilization” projects that never stabilize anything. Somalia sits on a coastline too strategic to be allowed real sovereignty.
6 Out of 7 Wars
In September 2001, days after the towers fell, General Wesley Clark was shown a Pentagon memo: seven countries marked for destruction. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, and Iran. The list matched what Netanyahu had written in 1995 in his book Fighting Terrorism; what was codified by U.S.-Israeli neoconservatives in 1996 in A Clean Break; and weaponized by the Project for the New American Century in 2000. The Middle East had been mapped for destruction before the first plane hit Manhattan. 9/11 was the pretext that put the plan into action.
Twenty-three years later, the evidence is undeniable.
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia—five countries balkanized into militia zones and proxy battlegrounds. Lebanon, repeatedly attacked by Israel and subverted by U.S. political meddling, stands weakened, but not yet shattered.
The wars were never about American security. They were about U.S.-Israeli axis interests. All based on lies. No WMDs in Iraq. No massacre in Benghazi. The Somali Islamic Courts Union wasn't al-Qaeda. Sudan's uprising demanded democracy.
They were never humanitarian. Washington backed Pinochet while he murdered Chileans, armed Suharto through Indonesian massacres, installed the Shah and trained his torturers, supported Saddam while he gassed Iranians, and now bankrolls Gulf monarchies while funding, arming, and shielding Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity. Any dictator is acceptable if he serves U.S.-Israeli interests. Washington has a saying for this: "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
These wars served two objectives: sustaining U.S. global hegemony and advancing Israel's regional expansion. They eliminated every government capable of supporting Palestinian resistance, challenging dollar dominance, or refusing to normalize with Israel. Functional states became fractured territories incapable of coherent opposition.
The True Cost
American taxpayers funded this destruction. More than $8 trillion since 2001—roughly $24,000 per citizen—lined the pockets of defense contractors, weapons manufacturers, politicians, and lobbyists. An ecosystem built on permanent war.
Over 7,000 U.S. service members returned in flag-draped coffins. More than 28,000 veterans took their own lives after returning home. Conservative estimates put the number wounded and traumatized between 180,000 and 210,000. All for lies. Their tragic sacrifice made America less secure, not safer.
Brown University's Costs of War project estimates 4.5 to 4.7 million deaths across these countries. Not just from bombs and bullets. From collapsed healthcare systems, contaminated water, destroyed food supply chains, shattered infrastructure. Entire families erased from civil registries. More than 38 million people displaced. And when survivors arrive at Western borders, cause and effect are reversed. Refugees created by wars we financed are blamed for social strain and political instability here at home.
The United States, a country barely 250 years old, acting hand-in-hand with Israel, a state less than 80 years old, has devastated civilizations that gave the world writing, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and law. UNESCO World Heritage sites, mosques, churches, synagogues, libraries, archives, museums, cemeteries—repositories of collective memory spanning millennia—were bombed and looted.
This is the ledger of six wars already fought.
One remains: Iran.