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𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫, 𝐒𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟗: 𝐈𝐫𝐚𝐧 𝐎𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 "𝐙𝐞𝐫𝐨 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐙𝐞𝐫𝐨 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠" 𝟐 𝐃𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐁𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐬, 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲'𝐬 𝐃𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐋𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐢𝐱 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔.𝐒. 𝐖𝐚𝐬 𝐒𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐂𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐈𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐲 𝐛𝐲 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥
On February 26, 2026, Iran's Foreign Minister, through Omani mediation, offered the United States a complete end to uranium enrichment, "zero accumulation, zero stockpiling" of enriched material, and full unrestricted IAEA verification access, in what Oman's Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi described as going beyond even the Obama-era JCPOA (Al Jazeera, 2026b). Two days later, strikes that had been secretly planned since a December meeting between Benjamin Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago were executed, with Trump openly declaring their purpose to be regime change, not nonproliferation (Times of IṣɾæI, 2026a). The bombs killed children, assassinated the Supreme Leader, and accomplished nothing strategically. Within 24 hours, the U.S. was requesting a ceasefire through Italian mediation. Iran rejected it outright (Ynet News, 2026). What follows is the full documented record of how we got here, and why Canada's Prime Minister chose to endorse it.
CONDENSED TIMELINE: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
For those who don't have time for the full article, here is the core of what happened and why it matters:
𝟏𝟗𝟓𝟑: The CIA overthrows Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh and installs a pro-Western dictatorship. Iran's current government exists in direct response to that coup.
𝟏𝟗𝟕𝟗: Iran’s Islamic Revolution overthrows the US‑backed Shah after years of repression, torture, and SAVAK secret police abuses, replacing his monarchy with an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini.
𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟐 𝐨𝐧𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝: Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ claims Iran is months from a nuclear bomb before the U.S. Congress, the UN, and the Knesset. He makes this claim repeatedly for 34 consecutive years. The IAEA and every U.S. intelligence agency finds no evidence of a weapons program each time.
𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟏: A classified Pentagon memo, later described publicly by retired NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark, lists seven countries slated for regime change: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. That memo was written three weeks after 9/11.
𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟑: The U.S. invades Iraq on fabricated WMD claims. Between 654,000 and over 1 million Iraqis die. No weapons are ever found.
𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟗: The Brookings Institution's Saban Center, funded by a major AIPAC donor, publishes Which Path to Persia?, a strategic document proposing the U.S. construct diplomatic offers designed to look reasonable so that Iran's rejection justifies military action, while using IṣɾæI as a military proxy so that "backlash falls on IṣɾæI rather than the United States." This document is now being implemented verbatim.
𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟓: Iran signs the JCPOA and fully complies with it. Every IAEA report confirms this.
𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟖: Trump withdraws the U.S. from the JCPOA despite Iran's full compliance and reimposed sanctions. Food prices in Iran rise over 50%. Medicine becomes inaccessible. The UN calls this collective punishment.
𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 (𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲): Trump makes unprecedented demands on Iran, including restricting its ballistic missiles, something demanded of no other nation in modern history. Talks begin in Oman with a 60-day deadline.
𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓: Trump's own intelligence director testifies Iran has no active nuclear weapons program. Trump publicly states he doesn't care. IṣɾæI and the U.S. bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. A post-strike CIA assessment finds Iran's program was set back only "a few months." The White House suppresses the assessment and promotes IṣɾæIi military claims instead.
𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓: Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ and Trump secretly plan the February 28 strike at Mar-a-Lago. Treasury Secretary Bessent boasts publicly of having deliberately engineered a "dollar shortage" to collapse Iran's economy and trigger street unrest. The U.S. smuggles 6,000 Starlink terminals into Iran to coordinate the unrest before it begins.
𝐅𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝟐𝟔, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔: Iran, through Oman, offers zero uranium stockpiling and full IAEA access. The offer is ignored.
𝐅𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝟐𝟖, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔: Strikes begin. A girls' elementary school in Minab is hit, killing between 85 and 165 children. Ayatollah Khamenei is assassinated in a separate targeted strike. His likely successors are more hardline than he was. Within 24 hours, the U.S. asks Italy to broker a ceasefire. Iran refuses.
𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝟏, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔: Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, who six weeks earlier at Davos called the rules-based international order "partially false" and said the strongest nations "exempt themselves when convenient," issues a statement endorsing every element of the above.
𝐄𝐃𝐈𝐓: 𝐒𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐧'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐏𝐞𝐝𝐫𝐨 𝐒á𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐳, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐄𝐔 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐬, 𝐫𝐞𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐒–𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥𝐢 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐬 "𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥," 𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐔𝐍 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 "𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫" (𝐃𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐒𝐚𝐛𝐚𝐡, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔; 𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔). 𝐒𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐖𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 "𝐝𝐞-𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧" 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐰𝐤𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 — 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐔.𝐒. 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐝, 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫'𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐭 𝐏𝐀𝐂-𝟑 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐡𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐬, 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐎 𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐧-𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐲 𝐮𝐧𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 (𝐏𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐨, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔; 𝐖𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐭 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔𝐛; 𝐠𝐂𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔).
The Playbook Was Written in 2009
Before examining the events themselves, it is worth establishing that they were anticipated and planned for in remarkable detail. In June 2009, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution published Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran, authored by former senior U.S. government and intelligence officials including Kenneth Pollack, Martin Indyk, and Bruce Riedel. The document is publicly available at the Brookings Institution website. The Saban Center was established with a $13 million founding grant from IṣɾæIi-American media mogul Haim Saban, who simultaneously donated equivalent sums to the Friends of the IṣɾæI Defense Forces and AIPAC (Mondoweiss, 2011).
The document proposed, in its own language, that the United States "would be" trying "to convince, and if necessary, to entice or compel Tehran to abandon its nuclear program" while simultaneously preparing for military action should diplomacy be seen to fail. It proposed constructing diplomatic offers designed to appear so reasonable that rejection would guarantee broad public legitimacy for strikes, while ensuring the narrative of Iranian intransigence was built regardless of Iran's actual responses. It also proposed using IṣɾæI as a military proxy specifically so that, in its own words, "backlash falls on IṣɾæI rather than the United States" (Brookings Institution, 2009; Foreign Policy Journal, 2011). The provisions of this document have been implemented near-verbatim across successive U.S. administrations, Democrat and Republican alike. The plan was written in 2009. What you are watching is its execution.
This is not the only such document. In October 2001, weeks after the September 11 attacks, a Pentagon general showed retired four-star General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, a classified memo from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Clark described what he was told in a 2007 Democracy Now interview: "We're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran" (Democracy Now, 2007; TWF, 2007). That memo was written in 2001. Iraq was destroyed. Syria was destabilized. Libya was destroyed. Iran is now being bombed. These were not reactive decisions driven by circumstances. They were a pre-existing program of regional reshaping.
A Timeline of What Actually Happened
1953: THE DEMOCRACY IRAN LOST
Iran had a democracy. Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected in 1951 and moved to nationalize Iran's oil industry, then controlled by British Petroleum, for the benefit of Iranians. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence overthrew his government in a now-declassified coup operation and reinstalled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (National Security Archive, 2013). The Shah's secret police SAVAK, trained by the CIA and Mossad, tortured and executed thousands of political prisoners over 16 years. Amnesty International documented the Shah's Iran as one of the worst human rights violators in the world (Human Rights Watch, 1992). The current Iranian government, whatever its faults, exists in direct response to that Western-installed dictatorship. The U.S. is not seeking to give Iran a democracy. It is seeking to reinstall the kind of government it can control.
1979: THE REVOLUTION THE WEST MADE InevitableAfter a quarter century of US‑ and UK‑backed monarchy under the Shah, enforced through SAVAK’s torture chambers and mass repression documented by Amnesty International, a broad popular uprising toppled his regime in 1979 and brought Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic to power. The new government was not an inexplicable eruption of fanaticism; it was a direct response to the Western‑installed dictatorship that had extinguished Iran’s brief experiment with democracy.
1988: SADDAM'S CHEMICAL MASSACRE AND THE MEK
In March 1988, Saddam Hussein's regime carried out the Halabja Massacre, the largest chemical weapons attack on a civilian population in history, killing approximately 5,000 Kurdish civilians with mustard gas, sarin, and VX nerve agents (U.S. State Department, 1998). The Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Iranian opposition group that conducted assassinations and bombings inside Iran, allied itself with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. In 2012, the U.S. State Department formally removed the MEK from the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list following a high-profile Washington lobbying campaign (BBC, 2012; ABC News, 2012). The MEK remains a favored instrument of U.S. regime change policy toward Iran.
1990 AND 2003: THE TEMPLATE OF FABRICATED PRETEXTS
In 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah testified before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she had personally witnessed Iraqi soldiers remove premature babies from incubators and leave them to die on the floor. The testimony was broadcast globally and cited by six U.S. senators in the debate authorizing the Gulf War. It later emerged that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, that her testimony had been coached by the American public relations firm Hill and Knowlton hired by the Kuwaiti government, and that no such incident had occurred (HRW, 1992).
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on the stated pretext of weapons of mass destruction. No WMDs were ever found. The human cost of that fabricated justification was staggering. A peer-reviewed study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published in The Lancet estimated 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths by July 2006, of which approximately 92% were violent deaths directly attributable to the invasion and its aftermath (PMC/Lancet, 2006). The Opinion Research Business survey, conducted independently in 2008, estimated the total death toll at over 1,033,000 with a range of 946,000 to 1,120,000, the overwhelming majority civilian (ORB, 2008). Extrapolation of mortality data carried out by Just Foreign Policy placed the cumulative toll above 1.1 million by 2007 (FAIR, 2007). The pattern of fabricating public justifications for war in the Middle East is not a theory. It is a documented record, measured in bodies.
1992 ONWARD: ŃЕŢАNҮАHŲ̄̆'S 30-YEAR NUCLEAR WARNING
IṣɾæIi Prime Minister Benjamin Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ has been claiming Iran is on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon continuously since 1992. In 1992, as a member of the Knesset, he said Iran was three to five years from a bomb. In 1995, he published a book claiming Iran would have a bomb by 1999. In 1996, he told a joint session of the U.S. Congress that Iran would achieve nuclear weapons "within three to five years." In 2002, he testified before Congress that Iraq's non-existent nuclear program was "far more advanced than anybody thought" and that removing Saddam would have "enormous positive reverberations" for the region. In 2009, he claimed Iran was "one to two years" from a bomb. In 2012, at the UN General Assembly, he held up a cartoon bomb diagram with a red line drawn near the top and declared Iran was approaching the threshold. In 2013, he told the UN that Iran was "six months away." Each time, the IAEA and all U.S. intelligence agencies found no evidence of an active weapons program (CNBC TV18, 2025; Guardian, 2025b). The claim has been made for 34 consecutive years without once being validated by independent evidence. It was used anyway to justify the February 28 strikes.
2015: IRAN SIGNS THE JCPOA AND COMPLIES
Iran entered the JCPOA under the Obama administration, accepting rigorous IAEA monitoring. All subsequent IAEA reports confirmed full Iranian compliance (Arms Control Association, 2022).
2018: THE U.S. WALKS AWAY FROM A WORKING DEAL
Despite confirmed Iranian compliance, Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA and reimposed sweeping sanctions (Congressional Research Service, 2018). Iran had kept its end of the agreement. The U.S. did not. Those sanctions did not target the Iranian government in any effective way. Human Rights Watch documented that they caused critical shortages of essential medicines and chemotherapy drugs, made healthy food unaffordable for the majority of Iranians, and pushed the healthcare system toward collapse, with children and the chronically ill bearing the full burden (HRW, 2019). A peer-reviewed NIH study found that after the sanctions' reimposition, the prices of most food items increased by more than 50% and that "following an average healthy diet is nearly impossible for most of the population" (PMC, 2020). Al Jazeera concluded that "sanctions kill civilians as surely as bombs and bullets" (Al Jazeera, 2025b). The UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures has described sweeping economic sanctions of this nature as a form of collective punishment prohibited under international law (Oxford Human Rights Hub, 2019). U.S. and IṣɾæIi military operations across the region have repeatedly destroyed the economic and political conditions under which modernization and civic development become possible. It is the sustained destruction of states, not any cultural or religious predisposition toward violence, that has produced the conditions for radicalization.
2025 (EARLY): UNPRECEDENTED DEMANDS; DELIBERATE ECONOMIC WARFARE
Trump demanded Iran permanently cease uranium enrichment, dispose of all stockpiles, end support for regional proxies, and, in an unprecedented unilateral demand on any sovereign nation's conventional military capacity with no parallel in modern international law, restrict the range and quantity of its ballistic missiles (New York Times, 2026a). Talks opened April 12, 2025 in Oman with a 60-day deadline. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking at the Economic Club of New York, outlined the administration's strategy publicly: the U.S. had "intensified a sanctions initiative against Iran's export infrastructure, targeting every phase of Iran's oil supply chain," alongside active outreach to the private sector to "cut off Iran's access to the global financial system" (Al Jazeera, 2026e). The stated purpose was not compliance. It was collapse.
JUNE 2025: TRUMP OVERRIDES HIS OWN INTELLIGENCE; THE TWELVE-DAY WAR
Trump's own handpicked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that the intelligence community "continues to evaluate that Iran is not constructing a nuclear weapon" (Guardian, 2025a). When asked about this assessment, Trump responded: "I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having one," explicitly aligning himself with Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆'s position over 18 U.S. intelligence agencies (Guardian, 2025a; Al Jazeera, 2025a). At the subsequent NATO summit, Trump was directly asked by a reporter whether he was relying on IṣɾæIi intelligence over U.S. intelligence to assess the effectiveness of the strikes, a question he did not dispute (Forbes, 2025).
After the deadline expired, IṣɾæI and the U.S. struck Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025. Prior to and during the strikes, Mossad operatives were confirmed operating inside Iran, launching drones on air defence systems from within Iranian territory, assassinating military officials and nuclear scientists, and smuggling precision-guided weapons to disable missile defences ahead of the air campaign (CNN, 2025a; Times of IṣɾæI, 2026b). Both the U.S. and IṣɾæI expended the majority of their high-end interceptor stockpiles. The U.S. alone used approximately a quarter of its entire THAAD supply, with analysts warning replenishment could take three to eight years (CNN, 2025b). Trump brokered a ceasefire on June 23, 2025 through direct talks with Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ and parallel U.S. contact with Tehran (Reuters, 2025). An early post-strike U.S. intelligence assessment found the strikes had set Iran's nuclear program back by only "a few months," directly contradicting Trump's claim to have "obliterated" it. The White House then promoted IṣɾæIi military statements over its own agencies' findings to rebut the assessment (NPR, 2025; Just Security, 2025).
DECEMBER 2025 TO JANUARY 2026: THE ECONOMY IS DELIBERATELY BROKEN; UNREST IS ENGINEERED
By December 2025, the economic strategy reached what Bessent later described as its "grand culmination." The unrest that erupted in Iran beginning December 28, 2025 was triggered initially by genuine economic desperation, sparked when Tehran shopkeepers shuttered their stores after the rial hit an all-time low (Al Jazeera, 2026e). What followed was not spontaneous civic protest. The Trump administration had openly smuggled approximately 6,000 Starlink satellite terminals into Iran before any internet blackout, making it the first time Washington had directly delivered such equipment into an adversary nation, not to support protesters already in the streets but to lead and coordinate unrest before it became publicly visible (Wall Street Journal, 2026). Iranian security forces reported over 300 officers killed during what authorities described as organized armed attacks on police stations and security facilities, a level of tactical coordination inconsistent with spontaneous demonstration (Al Jazeera, 2026a). Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo publicly admitted the U.S. "directly helped" the rioters, stating "help came in many forms," and wrote publicly: "Happy New Year to every Iranian on the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them" (PressTV, 2026).
Bessent later boasted openly before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee: "What we have done at Treasury is create a dollar shortage in the country. It came to a swift and, I would say, grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. The central bank had to print money. The Iranian currency went into free fall. Inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street." By January 2026, it took 1.5 million rials to buy one U.S. dollar, compared to 700,000 a year earlier, with food inflation at 70% (PolitiFact, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026e).
The National Endowment for Democracy, which funded Western-aligned civil society organizations inside Iran during this period, was cofounded in 1983 by Allen Weinstein, who later admitted publicly: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." NED co-founder Carl Gershman was equally direct, stating that the organization does overtly what the CIA once did covertly (Le Monde Diplomatique, 2007). RAND Corporation, whose reports are routinely cited to justify U.S. military and sanctions strategy, derives the overwhelming majority of its funding from U.S. government military contracts, including over $77 million from the Office of the Secretary of Defense alone in a single year, plus tens of millions more from the U.S. Air Force and Army (U.S. House of Representatives testimony, 2024). RAND is not an independent research body. It is a publicly funded instrument of U.S. military planning whose conclusions serve the institutional interests of its financiers.
The parent organization of HRANA, the Western-based outlet whose death toll figures of 20,000 to 30,000 were amplified by Western media, received over $900,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy in 2024 alone (MintPress News, 2026). The Iranian government's own figure was approximately 3,000 deaths, and no independently verified count approaches the higher Western-sourced numbers (RFE/RL, 2026; Guardian, 2026a).
DECEMBER 2025: THE FEBRUARY STRIKE IS PLANNED AT MAR-A-LAGO
According to Axios, Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ and Trump began planning the joint February strike on Iran in late December 2025 during a meeting at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. The attack was originally given a tentative May 2026 date. After a second round of planning talks, IṣɾæI and the U.S. agreed there was an opportunity to strike on February 28, the date Khamenei would be meeting with his top aides (Times of IṣɾæI, 2026a). Trump's envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff attended the Geneva talks with Iranians in the days before the strike with, according to the report, "little expectation that a deal would take place," but their attendance served the purpose of ensuring Khamenei would attend his scheduled meeting rather than remaining in a secure location (Times of IṣɾæI, 2026a). The Geneva talks were, in the language of Which Path to Persia?, a diplomatic offer constructed precisely to produce a narrative of Iranian intransigence while serving a separate tactical purpose entirely.
FEBRUARY 26, 2026: IRAN'S OFFER
Through Omani mediation, Iran agreed to "zero accumulation, zero stockpiling" of enriched uranium and full unrestricted IAEA verification access, going beyond the original JCPOA (CBS News, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026b). It was ignored.
The February 28th Attack and What It Produced
CHILDREN KILLED IN A GIRLS' SCHOOL
On February 28, 2026, the strikes launched by IṣɾæI and the United States hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab in southern Iran's Hormozgan province, killing at least 85 children according to Iranian state media, with Al Jazeera reporting a death toll that rose to 165 (USA Today, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026c). The Sandy Hook shooting, the deadliest elementary school attack in U.S. history, killed 20 children and 6 adults. The Minab strike killed more than four times that number of children in a single missile. The same political class that invokes Sandy Hook to discuss American gun violence endorsed or stayed silent about Minab.
KHAMENEI ASSASSINATED IN A SEPARATE TARGETED STRIKE
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a separate targeted strike during the February 28 operation, distinct from the school strike and the nuclear facility strikes (Reuters, 2026a). The assassination did not produce the swift governmental collapse U.S. officials had reportedly envisioned (Ynet News, 2026). A temporary leadership council was announced by Ali Larijani, Iran's security chief, to oversee the transition (Reuters, 2026a). Among the prominent potential successors are figures described by analysts as more extreme than Khamenei himself, including Ayatollah Mohammad-Mehdi Mirbagheri, who has argued for fighting "infidels" and described hardship and martyrdom as values Iranians have "voluntarily chosen" (Fox News, 2026; CNN, 2026). The Council on Foreign Relations assessed prior to Khamenei's death that any succession transition is likely to prompt Iran's military to "lash out ruthlessly against perceived opponents" and produce intensified internal repression and heightened regional activism (CFR, 2026). Removing the 86-year-old supreme leader did not moderate the system. It removed the moderating figure within it and handed power to those who are more radical.
THE U.S. TRIED TO QUIT WITHIN 24 HOURS
On the eve of the strikes, U.S. officials had envisioned a four to five day operation that would return a weakened Tehran to the negotiating table. According to Ynet News, through a mediator described as apparently Italy, a U.S. official proposed reaching a ceasefire agreement within the first day or two of operations. Iran rejected the idea outright (Ynet News, 2026). The country that planned these strikes since December, assassinated a head of state, bombed a girls' primary school, and called it regime change was requesting an exit within 24 hours of beginning. The nuclear program was not destroyed. The government was not changed. The successor will likely be more hardline. And the children of Minab are dead.
Why Iran Specifically? The Resource and China Dimension
The popular framing of the Iran conflict as being about nuclear weapons or terrorism does not account for the scale, persistence, and strategic coordination of U.S. hostility toward Iran across 70 years, multiple administrations, and countless shifting pretexts. A more durable explanation is resource and geography. Iran holds the second largest proven natural gas reserves on earth, behind only Russia, with 1,200 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves (U.S. Energy Information Administration via World of Statistics, 2026; Global Firepower, 2026). Combined with Venezuela, which holds the world's largest oil reserves, Iran and Venezuela together represent a concentration of hydrocarbon resources that places them permanently in the crosshairs of any power seeking to control global energy supply. Both countries have faced relentless U.S. regime change operations for decades.
Iran also sits at the geographic center of China's Belt and Road Initiative, the largest infrastructure and trade connectivity project in human history. As the Diplomat has documented, Iran's participation in the BRI makes it a critical gateway for China's trade routes to Europe, with China investing heavily in Iranian railways, ports, and energy sectors under a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership signed in 2016 (The Diplomat, 2025). The Source News describes Iran as holding "a potentially integral role in the BRI" due to its economy, energy resources, and geographic position as a Eurasian hub (The Source News, 2026). RAND Corporation reports, funded overwhelmingly by U.S. Defense Department contracts, have proposed explicit strategies for blockading China's energy and commodity supply routes through maritime straits and holding Chinese overseas assets at risk as part of a broader containment strategy (WSWS citing RAND, 2013; U.S. Naval Institute, 2022). Cutting Iran off from China, and cutting China off from Iranian energy, are not incidental byproducts of U.S. Middle East policy. They are structural objectives. The nuclear file is the justification that changes. The objective does not.
Why the "Iran Funds Terrorism" Framing Does Not Survive Scrutiny
THE SAUDI RECORD
The claim that Iran is the primary source of regional instability requires ignoring the overwhelming direction of documented evidence. The 9/11 Commission Report found that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals and identified Saudi Arabia as the primary location where al-Qaeda raised money, including through charities with significant Saudi government-linked sponsorship (9/11 Commission, 2004). Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, stated publicly for years that the classified 28 pages of the inquiry contained evidence of Saudi government involvement in the attacks, a claim confirmed when the pages were declassified in 2016 and revealed FBI evidence of contacts between the hijackers and individuals connected to the Saudi government (Senate Intelligence Committee Declassified 28 Pages, 2016). A Congressional Research Service report found that Saudi Arabia had created "a permissive environment that has allowed funding to flow to terrorists and extremists" for decades, and that Arab Gulf donors "have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Syria in recent years, including to ISIS and other groups" (CRS, 2008; Washington Institute, 2014).
The U.S. State Department's own annual terrorism reports consistently identify Sunni extremist organizations, including al-Qaeda, ISIS and their affiliates, as responsible for the overwhelming majority of global terrorist attacks and fatalities. These are not Iranian-backed Shia organizations. They are groups that emerged from the same ideological tradition Saudi Arabia has spent decades funding through mosques, madrassas, and charities across the Muslim world (9/11 Commission, 2004; CRS, 2008; Mapping Militant Organizations, Stanford University; Washington Institute, 2014).
IṢɾÆI AND ISIS IN SYRIA
IṣɾæI's own Prime Minister publicly admitted before the Knesset that IṣɾæI had been providing support, including medical treatment, to Syrian rebel groups operating near the Golan Heights. An analysis published by the Middle East Policy and Economic Institute documented IṣɾæIi government admission of supporting ISIS-linked organizations in Syria, framing it as a strategic calculation (MEPEI, 2025). Iran, by contrast, is not a Sunni extremist state. The terrorism attribution requires the reader to ignore who actually created, funded, and enabled the groups that have carried out the vast majority of political violence in the region.
THE UNITED STATES AS RADICALIZER
The societies from which extremist groups have emerged are not naturally inclined toward political violence. Comparative textual analysis studies of religious scriptures have found the Old Testament contains significantly more violent content per page than the Quran (Odinero Toxicological Analysis of Religious Texts, 2016). It is prolonged foreign military invasion, the deliberate destruction of functional states, the imposition of sanctions that make ordinary life unliveable, and the arming of proxy factions for short-term geopolitical gain that has produced the conditions in which radicalization thrives. The U.S. has done all of these things, deliberately and repeatedly.
THE MAN TRUMP SHOOK HANDS WITH
The man Trump welcomed after the fall of Assad, Ahmed al-Sharaa, known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, began his career as a deputy commander for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's Islamic State of Iraq, the direct predecessor of ISIS. He then pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri before founding Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Foreign Policy, 2024). PBS Frontline documents his forces' "indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, torture and arbitrary arrests of civilians" and yet the same report acknowledges that U.S. experts credited him with "establishing a semblance of stability in Idlib province and acting as a buffer against forces hostile to the United States" (PBS Frontline, 2024). Since taking power, forces under his rule have been implicated in the massacre of over 1,000 Alawite civilians (Right of Centre, 2025). Jolani gets a handshake. Iran gets bombs. For a fuller account of the ongoing Alawite genocide in Syria, see: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Duao32EhS/
Gaza: The Standard Canada Already Abandoned
Before examining Carney's Iran statement, it is necessary to establish that the framework he is now applying to Iran is one Canada already chose to apply to Gaza, where the evidentiary record is even more unambiguous.
IṣɾæI spent over two years dismissing Gaza casualty figures as Hamas propaganda. In January 2026, the IṣɾæIi military acknowledged in a briefing to IṣɾæIi journalists that the figures were broadly accurate and that approximately 70,000 Palestinians had been killed, a figure since revised upward to at least 71,667 confirmed dead by the Health Ministry, with an independent University of London study suggesting the true total exceeded 75,000, and with the Health Ministry itself believed to be undercounting actual mortality by as much as 40% (Guardian, 2026b; Independent, 2026; Reuters, 2026b). The United Nations Human Rights Office verified that close to 70% of confirmed fatalities in Gaza were women and children, stating this represented "a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law" and "an apparent indifference to the death of civilians" (UN OHCHR, 2024; CBC, 2024). Oxfam concluded in January 2025 that more women and children had been killed in Gaza by the IṣɾæIi military than in any other recent armed conflict globally (Oxfam, 2025).
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued binding provisional measures ordering IṣɾæI to prevent the commission of acts of genocide in Gaza, passed by a vote of 15 to 2, after finding that South Africa's allegation of genocide was plausible within the meaning of the Genocide Convention (ICJ, 2024; CJPME, 2024). Canada continued to export military components to IṣɾæI after this order was issued. The Legal Centre for Palestine stated plainly that Canada bears accountability "for contributing to IṣɾæI 's commission of internationally wrongful acts by knowingly supplying it with weapons or supporting IṣɾæI politically or diplomatically" (LCPAL, 2024). Canada also maintained its $15 billion light armoured vehicle contract with Saudi Arabia throughout this same period, a country the 9/11 Commission identified as the primary source of al-Qaeda financing and whose citizens carried out the September 11 attacks (9/11 Commission, 2004; iAffairs Canada, 2025). The rules-based order Carney invokes selectively is one Canada has already demonstrated it applies selectively.
Mark Carney's Statement, Broken Down
CARNEY AT DAVOS
On January 20, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before the World Economic Forum in Davos and said: "We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. This fiction was useful but this bargain no longer works." He urged middle powers to "act consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals" (CBC, 2026a; WEF, 2026). Six weeks later, a statement left his office that did the precise opposite.
"IRAN IS THE PRIMARY CONTRIBUTOR TO INSTABILITY AND TERRORISM ACROSS THE MIDDLE EAST"
This is lifted nearly verbatim from U.S. State Department talking points. The documented record on who actually finances and produces Sunni extremist terrorism, the primary vector of global political violence, points overwhelmingly not to Iran but to Saudi Arabia and the broader ideological tradition it has exported for decades. The 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Research Service, Stanford University's Mapping Militant Organizations project, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy all document this in detail. Carney's statement accepts the State Department framework without qualification.
"DESPITE NUMEROUS DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS, IRAN HAS NEITHER FULLY DISMANTLED ITS NUCLEAR PROGRAM, HALTED ALL ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES NOR ENDED ITS SUPPORT FOR REGIONAL TERRORIST PROXY GROUPS"
This quietly assigns responsibility for diplomatic failure to Iran. It does not mention that Iran was in full documented compliance with the JCPOA until the United States unilaterally tore it up in 2018. It makes no mention of Iran's February 26 offer of zero stockpiling and full IAEA access, made two days before the strikes began (Arms Control Association, 2022; Al Jazeera, 2026b). The December planning at Mar-a-Lago, the Geneva talks attended by U.S. envoys with "little expectation that a deal would take place," and Bessent's public boasting about deliberately engineering Iran's economic collapse make clear this was not a diplomatic failure. It was a diplomatic performance (Times of IṣɾæI, 2026a; Al Jazeera, 2026e).
"CANADA SUPPORTS THE UNITED STATES ACTING TO PREVENT IRAN FROM OBTAINING A NUCLEAR WEAPON"
This frames a regime change operation as a nonproliferation action. Trump dismissed his own DNI's testimony that Iran had no active weapons program, saying "I don't care what she said," preferring Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆'s assessment, a claim Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ has been making since 1992 without once being validated by independent evidence (Guardian, 2025a). The post-strike intelligence finding that the operation set Iran back only "a few months" was suppressed in favor of IṣɾæIi military statements (NPR, 2025). Carney's statement treats 34 years of false nuclear warnings as established fact.
"CANADA REAFFIRMS IṢɾÆI'S RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF"
IṣɾæI launched an offensive coordinated military operation against a country that had not attacked it, preceded by months of assassinations, drone strikes launched from inside Iranian territory, smuggled weapons, engineered economic collapse, and covert unrest operations, all planned since December for the stated purpose of regime change. Invoking "the right to self-defence" to describe this sequence is not a legal argument. It is a branding exercise. Carney accepts it without qualification, just as Canada accepted the same language in Gaza while the ICJ was issuing binding orders to prevent genocide and the UN was documenting that 70% of confirmed victims were women and children.
"CANADA STANDS WITH THE IRANIAN PEOPLE IN THEIR LONG AND COURAGEOUS STRUGGLE AGAINST THIS OPPRESSIVE REGIME"
Carney issued this statement of solidarity with the Iranian people while those people's children were being pulled from the rubble of a girls' primary school in Minab. Iran had a democracy. The U.S. destroyed it in 1953. U.S. sanctions have made healthy food and essential medicines inaccessible for ordinary Iranians for decades (HRW, 2019; PMC, 2020). When Iraq's parliament moved to democratically elect former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in January 2026, Trump posted publicly: "Because of his insane policies and ideologies, if elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq. If we are not there to help, Iraq has ZERO chance of Success, Prosperity, or Freedom." Washington simultaneously warned senior Iraqi officials that sanctions would be imposed on the Iraqi state itself and threatened to restrict Iraq's access to its own oil revenues, held in an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under an arrangement dating from the 2003 invasion (Al Jazeera, 2026d; BBC, 2026; New York Times, 2026b). This is what U.S. democracy promotion looks like in practice. The U.S. is not seeking to free the Iranian people. It is seeking to reinstall the kind of government it can control.
THE DAVOS CONTRADICTION
At Davos, Carney said: "It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals." He also said the rules-based international order was "partially false" and that "the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient." His Iran statement and his silence on Gaza are the most precise possible illustration of the very hypocrisy he described. The rules, international law, sovereignty, the UN Charter's prohibition on aggressive war, the legal requirement of imminent threat before pre-emptive military action, the principle of diplomatic exhaustion, the sanctity of an active peace offer, and binding ICJ orders to prevent genocide, are invoked loudly when they protect NATO's interests and discarded without comment when they do not. Carney named the lie in January. In February, his statement became it.
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𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫, 𝐒𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟗: 𝐈𝐫𝐚𝐧 𝐎𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 "𝐙𝐞𝐫𝐨 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐙𝐞𝐫𝐨 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠" 𝟐 𝐃𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐁𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐬, 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲'𝐬 𝐃𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐋𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐢𝐱 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔.𝐒. 𝐖𝐚𝐬 𝐒𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐂𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐈𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐲 𝐛𝐲 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥
On February 26, 2026, Iran's Foreign Minister, through Omani mediation, offered the United States a complete end to uranium enrichment, "zero accumulation, zero stockpiling" of enriched material, and full unrestricted IAEA verification access, in what Oman's Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi described as going beyond even the Obama-era JCPOA (Al Jazeera, 2026b). Two days later, strikes that had been secretly planned since a December meeting between Benjamin Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago were executed, with Trump openly declaring their purpose to be regime change, not nonproliferation (Times of IṣɾæI, 2026a). The bombs killed children, assassinated the Supreme Leader, and accomplished nothing strategically. Within 24 hours, the U.S. was requesting a ceasefire through Italian mediation. Iran rejected it outright (Ynet News, 2026). What follows is the full documented record of how we got here, and why Canada's Prime Minister chose to endorse it.
CONDENSED TIMELINE: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
For those who don't have time for the full article, here is the core of what happened and why it matters:
𝟏𝟗𝟓𝟑: The CIA overthrows Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh and installs a pro-Western dictatorship. Iran's current government exists in direct response to that coup.
𝟏𝟗𝟕𝟗: Iran’s Islamic Revolution overthrows the US‑backed Shah after years of repression, torture, and SAVAK secret police abuses, replacing his monarchy with an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini.
𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟐 𝐨𝐧𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝: Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ claims Iran is months from a nuclear bomb before the U.S. Congress, the UN, and the Knesset. He makes this claim repeatedly for 34 consecutive years. The IAEA and every U.S. intelligence agency finds no evidence of a weapons program each time.
𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟏: A classified Pentagon memo, later described publicly by retired NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark, lists seven countries slated for regime change: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. That memo was written three weeks after 9/11.
𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟑: The U.S. invades Iraq on fabricated WMD claims. Between 654,000 and over 1 million Iraqis die. No weapons are ever found.
𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟗: The Brookings Institution's Saban Center, funded by a major AIPAC donor, publishes Which Path to Persia?, a strategic document proposing the U.S. construct diplomatic offers designed to look reasonable so that Iran's rejection justifies military action, while using IṣɾæI as a military proxy so that "backlash falls on IṣɾæI rather than the United States." This document is now being implemented verbatim.
𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟓: Iran signs the JCPOA and fully complies with it. Every IAEA report confirms this.
𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟖: Trump withdraws the U.S. from the JCPOA despite Iran's full compliance and reimposed sanctions. Food prices in Iran rise over 50%. Medicine becomes inaccessible. The UN calls this collective punishment.
𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 (𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲): Trump makes unprecedented demands on Iran, including restricting its ballistic missiles, something demanded of no other nation in modern history. Talks begin in Oman with a 60-day deadline.
𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓: Trump's own intelligence director testifies Iran has no active nuclear weapons program. Trump publicly states he doesn't care. IṣɾæI and the U.S. bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. A post-strike CIA assessment finds Iran's program was set back only "a few months." The White House suppresses the assessment and promotes IṣɾæIi military claims instead.
𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓: Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ and Trump secretly plan the February 28 strike at Mar-a-Lago. Treasury Secretary Bessent boasts publicly of having deliberately engineered a "dollar shortage" to collapse Iran's economy and trigger street unrest. The U.S. smuggles 6,000 Starlink terminals into Iran to coordinate the unrest before it begins.
𝐅𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝟐𝟔, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔: Iran, through Oman, offers zero uranium stockpiling and full IAEA access. The offer is ignored.
𝐅𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝟐𝟖, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔: Strikes begin. A girls' elementary school in Minab is hit, killing between 85 and 165 children. Ayatollah Khamenei is assassinated in a separate targeted strike. His likely successors are more hardline than he was. Within 24 hours, the U.S. asks Italy to broker a ceasefire. Iran refuses.
𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝟏, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔: Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, who six weeks earlier at Davos called the rules-based international order "partially false" and said the strongest nations "exempt themselves when convenient," issues a statement endorsing every element of the above.
𝐄𝐃𝐈𝐓: 𝐒𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐧'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐏𝐞𝐝𝐫𝐨 𝐒á𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐳, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐄𝐔 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐬, 𝐫𝐞𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐒–𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥𝐢 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐬 "𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥," 𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐔𝐍 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 "𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫" (𝐃𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐒𝐚𝐛𝐚𝐡, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔; 𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔). 𝐒𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐖𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 "𝐝𝐞-𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧" 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐰𝐤𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 — 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐔.𝐒. 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐝, 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫'𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐭 𝐏𝐀𝐂-𝟑 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐡𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐬, 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐎 𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐧-𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐲 𝐮𝐧𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 (𝐏𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐨, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔; 𝐖𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐭 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔𝐛; 𝐠𝐂𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔).
The Playbook Was Written in 2009
Before examining the events themselves, it is worth establishing that they were anticipated and planned for in remarkable detail. In June 2009, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution published Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran, authored by former senior U.S. government and intelligence officials including Kenneth Pollack, Martin Indyk, and Bruce Riedel. The document is publicly available at the Brookings Institution website. The Saban Center was established with a $13 million founding grant from IṣɾæIi-American media mogul Haim Saban, who simultaneously donated equivalent sums to the Friends of the IṣɾæI Defense Forces and AIPAC (Mondoweiss, 2011).
The document proposed, in its own language, that the United States "would be" trying "to convince, and if necessary, to entice or compel Tehran to abandon its nuclear program" while simultaneously preparing for military action should diplomacy be seen to fail. It proposed constructing diplomatic offers designed to appear so reasonable that rejection would guarantee broad public legitimacy for strikes, while ensuring the narrative of Iranian intransigence was built regardless of Iran's actual responses. It also proposed using IṣɾæI as a military proxy specifically so that, in its own words, "backlash falls on IṣɾæI rather than the United States" (Brookings Institution, 2009; Foreign Policy Journal, 2011). The provisions of this document have been implemented near-verbatim across successive U.S. administrations, Democrat and Republican alike. The plan was written in 2009. What you are watching is its execution.
This is not the only such document. In October 2001, weeks after the September 11 attacks, a Pentagon general showed retired four-star General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, a classified memo from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Clark described what he was told in a 2007 Democracy Now interview: "We're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran" (Democracy Now, 2007; TWF, 2007). That memo was written in 2001. Iraq was destroyed. Syria was destabilized. Libya was destroyed. Iran is now being bombed. These were not reactive decisions driven by circumstances. They were a pre-existing program of regional reshaping.
A Timeline of What Actually Happened
1953: THE DEMOCRACY IRAN LOST
Iran had a democracy. Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected in 1951 and moved to nationalize Iran's oil industry, then controlled by British Petroleum, for the benefit of Iranians. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence overthrew his government in a now-declassified coup operation and reinstalled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (National Security Archive, 2013). The Shah's secret police SAVAK, trained by the CIA and Mossad, tortured and executed thousands of political prisoners over 16 years. Amnesty International documented the Shah's Iran as one of the worst human rights violators in the world (Human Rights Watch, 1992). The current Iranian government, whatever its faults, exists in direct response to that Western-installed dictatorship. The U.S. is not seeking to give Iran a democracy. It is seeking to reinstall the kind of government it can control.
1979: THE REVOLUTION THE WEST MADE InevitableAfter a quarter century of US‑ and UK‑backed monarchy under the Shah, enforced through SAVAK’s torture chambers and mass repression documented by Amnesty International, a broad popular uprising toppled his regime in 1979 and brought Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic to power. The new government was not an inexplicable eruption of fanaticism; it was a direct response to the Western‑installed dictatorship that had extinguished Iran’s brief experiment with democracy.
1988: SADDAM'S CHEMICAL MASSACRE AND THE MEK
In March 1988, Saddam Hussein's regime carried out the Halabja Massacre, the largest chemical weapons attack on a civilian population in history, killing approximately 5,000 Kurdish civilians with mustard gas, sarin, and VX nerve agents (U.S. State Department, 1998). The Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Iranian opposition group that conducted assassinations and bombings inside Iran, allied itself with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. In 2012, the U.S. State Department formally removed the MEK from the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list following a high-profile Washington lobbying campaign (BBC, 2012; ABC News, 2012). The MEK remains a favored instrument of U.S. regime change policy toward Iran.
1990 AND 2003: THE TEMPLATE OF FABRICATED PRETEXTS
In 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah testified before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she had personally witnessed Iraqi soldiers remove premature babies from incubators and leave them to die on the floor. The testimony was broadcast globally and cited by six U.S. senators in the debate authorizing the Gulf War. It later emerged that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, that her testimony had been coached by the American public relations firm Hill and Knowlton hired by the Kuwaiti government, and that no such incident had occurred (HRW, 1992).
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on the stated pretext of weapons of mass destruction. No WMDs were ever found. The human cost of that fabricated justification was staggering. A peer-reviewed study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published in The Lancet estimated 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths by July 2006, of which approximately 92% were violent deaths directly attributable to the invasion and its aftermath (PMC/Lancet, 2006). The Opinion Research Business survey, conducted independently in 2008, estimated the total death toll at over 1,033,000 with a range of 946,000 to 1,120,000, the overwhelming majority civilian (ORB, 2008). Extrapolation of mortality data carried out by Just Foreign Policy placed the cumulative toll above 1.1 million by 2007 (FAIR, 2007). The pattern of fabricating public justifications for war in the Middle East is not a theory. It is a documented record, measured in bodies.
1992 ONWARD: ŃЕŢАNҮАHŲ̄̆'S 30-YEAR NUCLEAR WARNING
IṣɾæIi Prime Minister Benjamin Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ has been claiming Iran is on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon continuously since 1992. In 1992, as a member of the Knesset, he said Iran was three to five years from a bomb. In 1995, he published a book claiming Iran would have a bomb by 1999. In 1996, he told a joint session of the U.S. Congress that Iran would achieve nuclear weapons "within three to five years." In 2002, he testified before Congress that Iraq's non-existent nuclear program was "far more advanced than anybody thought" and that removing Saddam would have "enormous positive reverberations" for the region. In 2009, he claimed Iran was "one to two years" from a bomb. In 2012, at the UN General Assembly, he held up a cartoon bomb diagram with a red line drawn near the top and declared Iran was approaching the threshold. In 2013, he told the UN that Iran was "six months away." Each time, the IAEA and all U.S. intelligence agencies found no evidence of an active weapons program (CNBC TV18, 2025; Guardian, 2025b). The claim has been made for 34 consecutive years without once being validated by independent evidence. It was used anyway to justify the February 28 strikes.
2015: IRAN SIGNS THE JCPOA AND COMPLIES
Iran entered the JCPOA under the Obama administration, accepting rigorous IAEA monitoring. All subsequent IAEA reports confirmed full Iranian compliance (Arms Control Association, 2022).
2018: THE U.S. WALKS AWAY FROM A WORKING DEAL
Despite confirmed Iranian compliance, Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA and reimposed sweeping sanctions (Congressional Research Service, 2018). Iran had kept its end of the agreement. The U.S. did not. Those sanctions did not target the Iranian government in any effective way. Human Rights Watch documented that they caused critical shortages of essential medicines and chemotherapy drugs, made healthy food unaffordable for the majority of Iranians, and pushed the healthcare system toward collapse, with children and the chronically ill bearing the full burden (HRW, 2019). A peer-reviewed NIH study found that after the sanctions' reimposition, the prices of most food items increased by more than 50% and that "following an average healthy diet is nearly impossible for most of the population" (PMC, 2020). Al Jazeera concluded that "sanctions kill civilians as surely as bombs and bullets" (Al Jazeera, 2025b). The UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures has described sweeping economic sanctions of this nature as a form of collective punishment prohibited under international law (Oxford Human Rights Hub, 2019). U.S. and IṣɾæIi military operations across the region have repeatedly destroyed the economic and political conditions under which modernization and civic development become possible. It is the sustained destruction of states, not any cultural or religious predisposition toward violence, that has produced the conditions for radicalization.
2025 (EARLY): UNPRECEDENTED DEMANDS; DELIBERATE ECONOMIC WARFARE
Trump demanded Iran permanently cease uranium enrichment, dispose of all stockpiles, end support for regional proxies, and, in an unprecedented unilateral demand on any sovereign nation's conventional military capacity with no parallel in modern international law, restrict the range and quantity of its ballistic missiles (New York Times, 2026a). Talks opened April 12, 2025 in Oman with a 60-day deadline. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking at the Economic Club of New York, outlined the administration's strategy publicly: the U.S. had "intensified a sanctions initiative against Iran's export infrastructure, targeting every phase of Iran's oil supply chain," alongside active outreach to the private sector to "cut off Iran's access to the global financial system" (Al Jazeera, 2026e). The stated purpose was not compliance. It was collapse.
JUNE 2025: TRUMP OVERRIDES HIS OWN INTELLIGENCE; THE TWELVE-DAY WAR
Trump's own handpicked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that the intelligence community "continues to evaluate that Iran is not constructing a nuclear weapon" (Guardian, 2025a). When asked about this assessment, Trump responded: "I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having one," explicitly aligning himself with Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆'s position over 18 U.S. intelligence agencies (Guardian, 2025a; Al Jazeera, 2025a). At the subsequent NATO summit, Trump was directly asked by a reporter whether he was relying on IṣɾæIi intelligence over U.S. intelligence to assess the effectiveness of the strikes, a question he did not dispute (Forbes, 2025).
After the deadline expired, IṣɾæI and the U.S. struck Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025. Prior to and during the strikes, Mossad operatives were confirmed operating inside Iran, launching drones on air defence systems from within Iranian territory, assassinating military officials and nuclear scientists, and smuggling precision-guided weapons to disable missile defences ahead of the air campaign (CNN, 2025a; Times of IṣɾæI, 2026b). Both the U.S. and IṣɾæI expended the majority of their high-end interceptor stockpiles. The U.S. alone used approximately a quarter of its entire THAAD supply, with analysts warning replenishment could take three to eight years (CNN, 2025b). Trump brokered a ceasefire on June 23, 2025 through direct talks with Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ and parallel U.S. contact with Tehran (Reuters, 2025). An early post-strike U.S. intelligence assessment found the strikes had set Iran's nuclear program back by only "a few months," directly contradicting Trump's claim to have "obliterated" it. The White House then promoted IṣɾæIi military statements over its own agencies' findings to rebut the assessment (NPR, 2025; Just Security, 2025).
DECEMBER 2025 TO JANUARY 2026: THE ECONOMY IS DELIBERATELY BROKEN; UNREST IS ENGINEERED
By December 2025, the economic strategy reached what Bessent later described as its "grand culmination." The unrest that erupted in Iran beginning December 28, 2025 was triggered initially by genuine economic desperation, sparked when Tehran shopkeepers shuttered their stores after the rial hit an all-time low (Al Jazeera, 2026e). What followed was not spontaneous civic protest. The Trump administration had openly smuggled approximately 6,000 Starlink satellite terminals into Iran before any internet blackout, making it the first time Washington had directly delivered such equipment into an adversary nation, not to support protesters already in the streets but to lead and coordinate unrest before it became publicly visible (Wall Street Journal, 2026). Iranian security forces reported over 300 officers killed during what authorities described as organized armed attacks on police stations and security facilities, a level of tactical coordination inconsistent with spontaneous demonstration (Al Jazeera, 2026a). Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo publicly admitted the U.S. "directly helped" the rioters, stating "help came in many forms," and wrote publicly: "Happy New Year to every Iranian on the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them" (PressTV, 2026).
Bessent later boasted openly before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee: "What we have done at Treasury is create a dollar shortage in the country. It came to a swift and, I would say, grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. The central bank had to print money. The Iranian currency went into free fall. Inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street." By January 2026, it took 1.5 million rials to buy one U.S. dollar, compared to 700,000 a year earlier, with food inflation at 70% (PolitiFact, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026e).
The National Endowment for Democracy, which funded Western-aligned civil society organizations inside Iran during this period, was cofounded in 1983 by Allen Weinstein, who later admitted publicly: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." NED co-founder Carl Gershman was equally direct, stating that the organization does overtly what the CIA once did covertly (Le Monde Diplomatique, 2007). RAND Corporation, whose reports are routinely cited to justify U.S. military and sanctions strategy, derives the overwhelming majority of its funding from U.S. government military contracts, including over $77 million from the Office of the Secretary of Defense alone in a single year, plus tens of millions more from the U.S. Air Force and Army (U.S. House of Representatives testimony, 2024). RAND is not an independent research body. It is a publicly funded instrument of U.S. military planning whose conclusions serve the institutional interests of its financiers.
The parent organization of HRANA, the Western-based outlet whose death toll figures of 20,000 to 30,000 were amplified by Western media, received over $900,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy in 2024 alone (MintPress News, 2026). The Iranian government's own figure was approximately 3,000 deaths, and no independently verified count approaches the higher Western-sourced numbers (RFE/RL, 2026; Guardian, 2026a).
DECEMBER 2025: THE FEBRUARY STRIKE IS PLANNED AT MAR-A-LAGO
According to Axios, Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ and Trump began planning the joint February strike on Iran in late December 2025 during a meeting at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. The attack was originally given a tentative May 2026 date. After a second round of planning talks, IṣɾæI and the U.S. agreed there was an opportunity to strike on February 28, the date Khamenei would be meeting with his top aides (Times of IṣɾæI, 2026a). Trump's envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff attended the Geneva talks with Iranians in the days before the strike with, according to the report, "little expectation that a deal would take place," but their attendance served the purpose of ensuring Khamenei would attend his scheduled meeting rather than remaining in a secure location (Times of IṣɾæI, 2026a). The Geneva talks were, in the language of Which Path to Persia?, a diplomatic offer constructed precisely to produce a narrative of Iranian intransigence while serving a separate tactical purpose entirely.
FEBRUARY 26, 2026: IRAN'S OFFER
Through Omani mediation, Iran agreed to "zero accumulation, zero stockpiling" of enriched uranium and full unrestricted IAEA verification access, going beyond the original JCPOA (CBS News, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026b). It was ignored.
The February 28th Attack and What It Produced
CHILDREN KILLED IN A GIRLS' SCHOOL
On February 28, 2026, the strikes launched by IṣɾæI and the United States hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in Minab in southern Iran's Hormozgan province, killing at least 85 children according to Iranian state media, with Al Jazeera reporting a death toll that rose to 165 (USA Today, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026c). The Sandy Hook shooting, the deadliest elementary school attack in U.S. history, killed 20 children and 6 adults. The Minab strike killed more than four times that number of children in a single missile. The same political class that invokes Sandy Hook to discuss American gun violence endorsed or stayed silent about Minab.
KHAMENEI ASSASSINATED IN A SEPARATE TARGETED STRIKE
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a separate targeted strike during the February 28 operation, distinct from the school strike and the nuclear facility strikes (Reuters, 2026a). The assassination did not produce the swift governmental collapse U.S. officials had reportedly envisioned (Ynet News, 2026). A temporary leadership council was announced by Ali Larijani, Iran's security chief, to oversee the transition (Reuters, 2026a). Among the prominent potential successors are figures described by analysts as more extreme than Khamenei himself, including Ayatollah Mohammad-Mehdi Mirbagheri, who has argued for fighting "infidels" and described hardship and martyrdom as values Iranians have "voluntarily chosen" (Fox News, 2026; CNN, 2026). The Council on Foreign Relations assessed prior to Khamenei's death that any succession transition is likely to prompt Iran's military to "lash out ruthlessly against perceived opponents" and produce intensified internal repression and heightened regional activism (CFR, 2026). Removing the 86-year-old supreme leader did not moderate the system. It removed the moderating figure within it and handed power to those who are more radical.
THE U.S. TRIED TO QUIT WITHIN 24 HOURS
On the eve of the strikes, U.S. officials had envisioned a four to five day operation that would return a weakened Tehran to the negotiating table. According to Ynet News, through a mediator described as apparently Italy, a U.S. official proposed reaching a ceasefire agreement within the first day or two of operations. Iran rejected the idea outright (Ynet News, 2026). The country that planned these strikes since December, assassinated a head of state, bombed a girls' primary school, and called it regime change was requesting an exit within 24 hours of beginning. The nuclear program was not destroyed. The government was not changed. The successor will likely be more hardline. And the children of Minab are dead.
Why Iran Specifically? The Resource and China Dimension
The popular framing of the Iran conflict as being about nuclear weapons or terrorism does not account for the scale, persistence, and strategic coordination of U.S. hostility toward Iran across 70 years, multiple administrations, and countless shifting pretexts. A more durable explanation is resource and geography. Iran holds the second largest proven natural gas reserves on earth, behind only Russia, with 1,200 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves (U.S. Energy Information Administration via World of Statistics, 2026; Global Firepower, 2026). Combined with Venezuela, which holds the world's largest oil reserves, Iran and Venezuela together represent a concentration of hydrocarbon resources that places them permanently in the crosshairs of any power seeking to control global energy supply. Both countries have faced relentless U.S. regime change operations for decades.
Iran also sits at the geographic center of China's Belt and Road Initiative, the largest infrastructure and trade connectivity project in human history. As the Diplomat has documented, Iran's participation in the BRI makes it a critical gateway for China's trade routes to Europe, with China investing heavily in Iranian railways, ports, and energy sectors under a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership signed in 2016 (The Diplomat, 2025). The Source News describes Iran as holding "a potentially integral role in the BRI" due to its economy, energy resources, and geographic position as a Eurasian hub (The Source News, 2026). RAND Corporation reports, funded overwhelmingly by U.S. Defense Department contracts, have proposed explicit strategies for blockading China's energy and commodity supply routes through maritime straits and holding Chinese overseas assets at risk as part of a broader containment strategy (WSWS citing RAND, 2013; U.S. Naval Institute, 2022). Cutting Iran off from China, and cutting China off from Iranian energy, are not incidental byproducts of U.S. Middle East policy. They are structural objectives. The nuclear file is the justification that changes. The objective does not.
Why the "Iran Funds Terrorism" Framing Does Not Survive Scrutiny
THE SAUDI RECORD
The claim that Iran is the primary source of regional instability requires ignoring the overwhelming direction of documented evidence. The 9/11 Commission Report found that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals and identified Saudi Arabia as the primary location where al-Qaeda raised money, including through charities with significant Saudi government-linked sponsorship (9/11 Commission, 2004). Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, stated publicly for years that the classified 28 pages of the inquiry contained evidence of Saudi government involvement in the attacks, a claim confirmed when the pages were declassified in 2016 and revealed FBI evidence of contacts between the hijackers and individuals connected to the Saudi government (Senate Intelligence Committee Declassified 28 Pages, 2016). A Congressional Research Service report found that Saudi Arabia had created "a permissive environment that has allowed funding to flow to terrorists and extremists" for decades, and that Arab Gulf donors "have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Syria in recent years, including to ISIS and other groups" (CRS, 2008; Washington Institute, 2014).
The U.S. State Department's own annual terrorism reports consistently identify Sunni extremist organizations, including al-Qaeda, ISIS and their affiliates, as responsible for the overwhelming majority of global terrorist attacks and fatalities. These are not Iranian-backed Shia organizations. They are groups that emerged from the same ideological tradition Saudi Arabia has spent decades funding through mosques, madrassas, and charities across the Muslim world (9/11 Commission, 2004; CRS, 2008; Mapping Militant Organizations, Stanford University; Washington Institute, 2014).
IṢɾÆI AND ISIS IN SYRIA
IṣɾæI's own Prime Minister publicly admitted before the Knesset that IṣɾæI had been providing support, including medical treatment, to Syrian rebel groups operating near the Golan Heights. An analysis published by the Middle East Policy and Economic Institute documented IṣɾæIi government admission of supporting ISIS-linked organizations in Syria, framing it as a strategic calculation (MEPEI, 2025). Iran, by contrast, is not a Sunni extremist state. The terrorism attribution requires the reader to ignore who actually created, funded, and enabled the groups that have carried out the vast majority of political violence in the region.
THE UNITED STATES AS RADICALIZER
The societies from which extremist groups have emerged are not naturally inclined toward political violence. Comparative textual analysis studies of religious scriptures have found the Old Testament contains significantly more violent content per page than the Quran (Odinero Toxicological Analysis of Religious Texts, 2016). It is prolonged foreign military invasion, the deliberate destruction of functional states, the imposition of sanctions that make ordinary life unliveable, and the arming of proxy factions for short-term geopolitical gain that has produced the conditions in which radicalization thrives. The U.S. has done all of these things, deliberately and repeatedly.
THE MAN TRUMP SHOOK HANDS WITH
The man Trump welcomed after the fall of Assad, Ahmed al-Sharaa, known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, began his career as a deputy commander for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's Islamic State of Iraq, the direct predecessor of ISIS. He then pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri before founding Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Foreign Policy, 2024). PBS Frontline documents his forces' "indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, torture and arbitrary arrests of civilians" and yet the same report acknowledges that U.S. experts credited him with "establishing a semblance of stability in Idlib province and acting as a buffer against forces hostile to the United States" (PBS Frontline, 2024). Since taking power, forces under his rule have been implicated in the massacre of over 1,000 Alawite civilians (Right of Centre, 2025). Jolani gets a handshake. Iran gets bombs. For a fuller account of the ongoing Alawite genocide in Syria, see: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Duao32EhS/
Gaza: The Standard Canada Already Abandoned
Before examining Carney's Iran statement, it is necessary to establish that the framework he is now applying to Iran is one Canada already chose to apply to Gaza, where the evidentiary record is even more unambiguous.
IṣɾæI spent over two years dismissing Gaza casualty figures as Hamas propaganda. In January 2026, the IṣɾæIi military acknowledged in a briefing to IṣɾæIi journalists that the figures were broadly accurate and that approximately 70,000 Palestinians had been killed, a figure since revised upward to at least 71,667 confirmed dead by the Health Ministry, with an independent University of London study suggesting the true total exceeded 75,000, and with the Health Ministry itself believed to be undercounting actual mortality by as much as 40% (Guardian, 2026b; Independent, 2026; Reuters, 2026b). The United Nations Human Rights Office verified that close to 70% of confirmed fatalities in Gaza were women and children, stating this represented "a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law" and "an apparent indifference to the death of civilians" (UN OHCHR, 2024; CBC, 2024). Oxfam concluded in January 2025 that more women and children had been killed in Gaza by the IṣɾæIi military than in any other recent armed conflict globally (Oxfam, 2025).
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued binding provisional measures ordering IṣɾæI to prevent the commission of acts of genocide in Gaza, passed by a vote of 15 to 2, after finding that South Africa's allegation of genocide was plausible within the meaning of the Genocide Convention (ICJ, 2024; CJPME, 2024). Canada continued to export military components to IṣɾæI after this order was issued. The Legal Centre for Palestine stated plainly that Canada bears accountability "for contributing to IṣɾæI 's commission of internationally wrongful acts by knowingly supplying it with weapons or supporting IṣɾæI politically or diplomatically" (LCPAL, 2024). Canada also maintained its $15 billion light armoured vehicle contract with Saudi Arabia throughout this same period, a country the 9/11 Commission identified as the primary source of al-Qaeda financing and whose citizens carried out the September 11 attacks (9/11 Commission, 2004; iAffairs Canada, 2025). The rules-based order Carney invokes selectively is one Canada has already demonstrated it applies selectively.
Mark Carney's Statement, Broken Down
CARNEY AT DAVOS
On January 20, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before the World Economic Forum in Davos and said: "We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. This fiction was useful but this bargain no longer works." He urged middle powers to "act consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals" (CBC, 2026a; WEF, 2026). Six weeks later, a statement left his office that did the precise opposite.
"IRAN IS THE PRIMARY CONTRIBUTOR TO INSTABILITY AND TERRORISM ACROSS THE MIDDLE EAST"
This is lifted nearly verbatim from U.S. State Department talking points. The documented record on who actually finances and produces Sunni extremist terrorism, the primary vector of global political violence, points overwhelmingly not to Iran but to Saudi Arabia and the broader ideological tradition it has exported for decades. The 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Research Service, Stanford University's Mapping Militant Organizations project, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy all document this in detail. Carney's statement accepts the State Department framework without qualification.
"DESPITE NUMEROUS DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS, IRAN HAS NEITHER FULLY DISMANTLED ITS NUCLEAR PROGRAM, HALTED ALL ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES NOR ENDED ITS SUPPORT FOR REGIONAL TERRORIST PROXY GROUPS"
This quietly assigns responsibility for diplomatic failure to Iran. It does not mention that Iran was in full documented compliance with the JCPOA until the United States unilaterally tore it up in 2018. It makes no mention of Iran's February 26 offer of zero stockpiling and full IAEA access, made two days before the strikes began (Arms Control Association, 2022; Al Jazeera, 2026b). The December planning at Mar-a-Lago, the Geneva talks attended by U.S. envoys with "little expectation that a deal would take place," and Bessent's public boasting about deliberately engineering Iran's economic collapse make clear this was not a diplomatic failure. It was a diplomatic performance (Times of IṣɾæI, 2026a; Al Jazeera, 2026e).
"CANADA SUPPORTS THE UNITED STATES ACTING TO PREVENT IRAN FROM OBTAINING A NUCLEAR WEAPON"
This frames a regime change operation as a nonproliferation action. Trump dismissed his own DNI's testimony that Iran had no active weapons program, saying "I don't care what she said," preferring Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆'s assessment, a claim Ńеţаnүаhų̄̆ has been making since 1992 without once being validated by independent evidence (Guardian, 2025a). The post-strike intelligence finding that the operation set Iran back only "a few months" was suppressed in favor of IṣɾæIi military statements (NPR, 2025). Carney's statement treats 34 years of false nuclear warnings as established fact.
"CANADA REAFFIRMS IṢɾÆI'S RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF"
IṣɾæI launched an offensive coordinated military operation against a country that had not attacked it, preceded by months of assassinations, drone strikes launched from inside Iranian territory, smuggled weapons, engineered economic collapse, and covert unrest operations, all planned since December for the stated purpose of regime change. Invoking "the right to self-defence" to describe this sequence is not a legal argument. It is a branding exercise. Carney accepts it without qualification, just as Canada accepted the same language in Gaza while the ICJ was issuing binding orders to prevent genocide and the UN was documenting that 70% of confirmed victims were women and children.
"CANADA STANDS WITH THE IRANIAN PEOPLE IN THEIR LONG AND COURAGEOUS STRUGGLE AGAINST THIS OPPRESSIVE REGIME"
Carney issued this statement of solidarity with the Iranian people while those people's children were being pulled from the rubble of a girls' primary school in Minab. Iran had a democracy. The U.S. destroyed it in 1953. U.S. sanctions have made healthy food and essential medicines inaccessible for ordinary Iranians for decades (HRW, 2019; PMC, 2020). When Iraq's parliament moved to democratically elect former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in January 2026, Trump posted publicly: "Because of his insane policies and ideologies, if elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq. If we are not there to help, Iraq has ZERO chance of Success, Prosperity, or Freedom." Washington simultaneously warned senior Iraqi officials that sanctions would be imposed on the Iraqi state itself and threatened to restrict Iraq's access to its own oil revenues, held in an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under an arrangement dating from the 2003 invasion (Al Jazeera, 2026d; BBC, 2026; New York Times, 2026b). This is what U.S. democracy promotion looks like in practice. The U.S. is not seeking to free the Iranian people. It is seeking to reinstall the kind of government it can control.
THE DAVOS CONTRADICTION
At Davos, Carney said: "It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals." He also said the rules-based international order was "partially false" and that "the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient." His Iran statement and his silence on Gaza are the most precise possible illustration of the very hypocrisy he described. The rules, international law, sovereignty, the UN Charter's prohibition on aggressive war, the legal requirement of imminent threat before pre-emptive military action, the principle of diplomatic exhaustion, the sanctity of an active peace offer, and binding ICJ orders to prevent genocide, are invoked loudly when they protect NATO's interests and discarded without comment when they do not. Carney named the lie in January. In February, his statement became it.
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