US Bombs & US Lies

ByLa Jornada Editorial Board

This editorial by La Jornada‘s editorial board originally appeared in the March 3, 2026 edition of Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of Mexico Solidarity Media or the Mexico Solidarity Project.

In the first three days of the israeli-American offensive against Iran, lies traveled faster than missiles. In fact, the aggression is based on nearly a century of Western falsehoods against the Persian nation, which began when it attempted to throw off the British colonial yoke. Currently, Iran is one of the countries most demonized by the propaganda of Washington and its allies, which criticizes the “authoritarian excesses” of the theocratic regime but deliberately omits the Western role in the rise and consolidation of the ayatollahs’ rule.

Politicians, media outlets, academics, and the quasi-business groups that call themselves representatives of “civil society” claim to want a secular, democratic, modernizing, and moderate regime for Iranians, but they conveniently forget to mention that Iran had already given itself a government with all those characteristics: that of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh (1951–1953). When Mosaddegh attempted to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (predecessor of today’s British Petroleum), the British Empire reacted with a script that the United States would repeat time and again when it assumed the reins of global imperialism: it accused Mosaddegh of being a “communist,” sabotaged the country’s economy, prevented it from trading its own oil, and finally, with Washington’s help, deposed Mosaddegh and installed a puppet government headed by an invented monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Reza plunged Iran into a perpetual bloodbath perpetrated by assassins trained by the CIA and Mossad. The Shah’s political police, Savak, tortured and murdered all politicians and supporters of democracy, in addition to squandering oil wealth on a life of luxury and excess, shamelessly flaunted before an impoverished population.

The elimination of all modernizing leadership explains why, when Iran finally erupted against oppression, the only institution capable of channeling and coordinating popular anger was the hierarchy of Shiism, the majority branch of Islam in the country. After the 1979 revolution, the West encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade his neighbor, even though by then the Iraqi President’s despotic nature and the massacres he perpetrated against his own population were already well known. Hussein received media coverage, intelligence support, and unlimited weaponry, including chemical weapons supplied by [West] Germany, during the eight years of his failed attempt to destroy his neighbor. By the end of the war, one million Iranians had died and more than two million were wounded, many with devastating injuries from inhaling mustard and sarin gases.

This brief summary does not account for all the suffering caused by the West to the Iranian people, but it is enough to show the hypocrisy of Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz, as well as virtually all of the media, in justifying their aggressions against Iran in the name of “self-defense”.

The US government itself has debunked this blatant manipulation: initially, the White House claimed it carried out a “preemptive strike” in response to an “imminent threat” from Tehran, but later Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that the “imminent threat was that we knew if Iran were attacked (by israel)—and we believed they were going to be attacked—then they would come after us immediately, and we weren’t going to sit back and wait to be hit before we responded.” In other words, Tel Aviv had already decided to attack, and Washington didn’t lead the offensive operation but rather followed suit, as The New York Times argues. If this is the case, Trump allowed his complicity with Zionism to drag him into a war from which he now sees no way out, as evidenced by his extending the conflict from “two or three days” to “four or five weeks” and an indefinite “it will take time.” The fire at the US embassy in Riyadh and the riots in Bahrain starkly illustrate the speed with which the tycoon is losing control over his latest military adventure.