An enormous crime against Iran
Rights and Accountability 1 March 2026
People gather to mourn Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran’s Enghelab Square on 1 March, after it was confirmed that Israel and the United States had killed the Iranian leader a day earlier.
Anadolu ImagesHours before Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death was confirmed, I told the Drop Site News livestream that the assassination of Iran’s leader would be an enormous crime.
By early Sunday, Iran announced that the United States and Israel had killed Khamenei as well as several members of his family.
They join hundreds of Iranians already slain in the American-Israeli war, including scores of schoolgirls massacred in an unspeakable atrocity at an elementary school in Minab, southern Iran.
You can watch the discussion in this video, hosted by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim, and joined by Hooman Majd, an Iranian-American commentator.
Killing Khamenei, the leader of a sovereign state, in an unprovoked war of aggression is a flagrant act of international terrorism.Right away, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the perpetrators of this crime, got what they asked for: Iranians poured into the streets.
They were not there to protest their government and overthrow it – as the warmongers had demanded – but to mourn their martyred leader and demand revenge.
Arab and Western complicity
Before the murder of Khamenei was confirmed, Arab and Western regimes lined up behind the Trump-Netanyahu war.
With a few notable exceptions such as Spain in Europe, and Oman among Arab states, governments failed to criticize the attack on Iran – yet denounced Iran for acting in self-defense against the countries from which the Americans launched their aggression.
In a particularly perverse twist, many – including France, Germany and Britain – called for Iran to resume “negotiations” – as if it was Iran, not the United States and Israel, that had used ongoing talks as a cover to prepare another surprise attack, just as they did last June.
Canada and Australia went even further, offering open support for the aggression.So much for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s big speech in Davos a few weeks ago challenging Trump and defending a world order based on rules that apply to all.
All these countries – and their loyalist media, including their liberal wings – have for decades demonized Iran and portrayed it as an aggressor. But as I told Drop Site News, this is a reversal of reality.It is Iran that has faced decades of aggression from them.
Iran under attack for decades
In 1980, as Iran was consolidating its post-revolutionary order after overthrowing the brutal US-backed Shah dictatorship, Iraq invaded.
But that war was not merely Saddam Hussein’s project. It was supported and armed by the United States and European powers, and funded by the same Arab regimes that are now backing the US-Israeli aggression.
West Germany – of all countries – was instrumental in Iraq’s production of chemical weapons that were used to attack Iranians.
Iran’s formidable ballistic missile force also has its roots in this period: Iraq’s indiscriminate Scud missile attacks on Iran’s population centers during the “war of the cities,” killing thousands of civilians, convinced the country’s leaders of the need for an effective, defensive deterrent.
An enormous crowd fills Enghelab Square in Tehran on 1 March, after Iran’s government confirmed that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, had been killed a day earlier in the ongoing US-Israeli aggression.
Anadolu ImagesIran has not invaded its neighbors. It has not waged wars of conquest.
Its missile strikes have come only after direct attacks, whether the US assassination of General Qasem Soleimani or Israeli strikes on Iranian territory last June.
Iran survived eight years of devastation as a result of the Western- and Arab-regime-backed Iraqi invasion.
Since then, it has faced wave after wave of assassinations and sanctions calculated to immiserate its population, from denying them cancer treatments to causing plane crashes by banning Iran’s import of new aircraft and spare parts.
Despite Arab-regime hostility, Iran has supported Palestinian and Lebanese resistance against Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide.
This is undoubtedly its main transgression in the eyes of pro-Israel Arabs and their Western sponsors, and is spun as “interference” and support for “proxies” rather than solidarity with peoples waging just struggles for liberation.
US officials boast that sanctions have collapsed Iran’s currency, created economic hardship and – along with covert Israeli and American destabilization efforts – fomented violence.
This cruelty is so normalized that even a so-called liberal, such as former Democratic House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, can call for more suffering with barely a murmur of protest:
Rogue power
It’s the same strategy that was used against the people of Iraq in the 1990s – once Saddam was no longer useful to his Western patrons.
Notoriously, President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did not deny the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children from sanctions, but rather confirmed that “we think the price is worth it.”
Sanctions targeting ordinary Syrians were used in preparation for regime change, just as they have been unleashed against people in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and Palestinians in Gaza.
Invariably, these nations’ unforgivable crime is demanding or defending their own sovereignty and independence.
In the past, the United States would go to some trouble to fabricate pretexts for its imperialist wars – think of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident for Vietnam or “weapons of mass destruction” for Iraq.
When it comes to Iran, the effort has appeared half-hearted, truncated and scattershot – as Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News noted in the discussion.
Trump claims to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear resources while simultaneously portraying it as an imminent threat.
He has threatened military intervention to save Iranian lives, supposedly from their own government, while having no qualms about the United States and Israel killing and injuring thousands of Iranians in the June 2025 war and this one.
But whatever propaganda the US and Israel have deployed has not worked: As of a week ago, only a quarterof Americans supported a war against Iran.
US imperialism’s ultimate targets
Externally, the US feels no need to sell its aggression: Why should it, when Israel’s genocide has swept away the last pretenses that there is any international law and order?
The US regime-change wars in Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 – and its ongoing targeting of Venezuela and Cuba, presage a new world order in which the US can plunder nations without restraint.
Russia and China are the only nations with the potential to balance this rogue superpower. Iran’s strategic location and vast resources make it vital to both Moscow and Beijing, which is precisely why it is in the sights of the United States and Israel.
Destroying Iran may be the immediate goal, but Russia and China are the real targets of US imperial ambition. Whether they grasp the scale of the threat is unclear, given their muted response to the assault on Iran so far.
Their failure to veto the “Board of Peace” resolution at the UN Security Council in November – allowing Trump to crown himself a would-be world monarch – is not a promising sign either.
While the United States and Israel are fighting a war of aggression and choice, Iran is in an existential battle for survival.
Iran’s future belongs to Iranians. But if their country is wrecked, or subjected to the tyranny of Washington and Tel Aviv – like so many of its neighbors – that future will be stolen from them for generations.
If this American and Israeli aggression succeeds, no country or people will have sovereignty or any control over their lives.
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