8 Mar 2026

Have America And Her Masters 'The Jews' Misjudged Iran?

“If we have disagreements, it is better for us to sit together and resolve them ourselves, but do not become the plaything of Israel and America,” -Pezeshkian 

By Ali Abunimah: One week after the United States and Israel launched their war of aggression, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian delivered a message of defiance to the attackers and conciliation to Iran’s US-allied neighbors.

“The idea that we might surrender unconditionally is a wish they should take with them to the grave,” Pezeshkian said in a video address on Saturday.

A day earlier, US President Donald Trump had demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”

But the Iranian leader expressed regret that Iran’s armed forces had to attack neighboring Arab states as part of its self-defense.

He said Iran’s leadership council had decided a day earlier there would be no further military action against neighbors unless their territory is used to attack Iran.

“We have no intention of aggression against neighboring countries, just as we have said time and again that they are our brothers,” Pezeshkian said, reiterating a message that Tehran has expressed consistently.

“If we have disagreements, it is better for us to sit together and resolve them ourselves, but do not become the plaything of Israel and America,” Pezeshkian warned.

Iran is signaling to populations in neighboring countries that they are not its enemies, but that their leaders have put them in the firing line – militarily and economically.

Pezeshkian may also be aiming to sharpen reported rifts among Gulf regimes aligned with Washington but fearful of the impact of a prolonged war.

Gulf officials are already signaling that they could pull back on massive investments in Western countries.

I spoke about the global repercussions of the war – and the historical background of Western hostility towards Iran – in a segment for The Electronic Intifada Livestream this week.

The impact has been immediate. Qatar has declared force majeure on liquefied natural gas shipments, European gas prices have surged and global logistics companies are suspending operations across the Gulf region.

The flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz – one fifth of the global supply – has ground to a halt.

Supply chains are already being disrupted just days into the conflict. You can watch here:

Massive miscalculation

The strategy behind the US-Israeli assault appears to rest on a familiar fantasy: that murdering Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and launching a shock-and-awe bombing campaign would trigger the collapse of the Iranian state or spark a popular uprising against the government. It didn’t happen.

Instead, cities across Iran have seen massive demonstrations mourning Khamenei and demanding retaliation.

Videos circulating across the country show crowds chanting in support of the armed forces – even as more than 1,200 people have been killed and thousands injured in US-Israeli attacks, according to Iran’s health ministry.

Trump launched the war without US public support, and opposition is only likely to grow as human and economic costs mount. His attack on Iran is provoking unprecedented opposition – especially on the right – to Israeli influence over US policy.

It is also unraveling other elements of his policies.

On Friday, Indonesia announced it was suspending its participation in Trump’s so-called Board of Peace because of the US-Israeli war against Iran.

The world’s most populous Muslim-majority country had been expected to contribute troops to an “International Stabilization Force” that Trump hopes will help assert control over Gaza. But public anger about the war is forcing Indonesian leaders to reconsider.

Although it will be costly for all, Iran appears better prepared for a long war than the United States or Israel.

Iran also has strategic reasons not to stop until it exacts a high enough price from the countries that launched the aggression, ensuring real deterrence against future attacks.

For Iran, long-term security may mean driving the US military out of the region once and for all – the strategic objective behind its response.

Iran takes out radar systems

In a social media post, Trump claimed that Pezeshkian’s speech meant that Iran had “surrendered to its Middle East neighbors, and promised that it will not shoot at them anymore,” attributing this development to the effect of “the relentless US and Israeli attack.”

Following Pezeshkian’s remarks and Trump’s response, Iran launched fresh missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates – all countries where the United States maintains military and diplomatic assets.

Iran’s pledge not to attack neighboring countries – unless it is attacked from their territory – may not be much of a concession. The United States continues to operate from those countries, and Iran may already have achieved key early military goals.

Iran’s strikes have reportedly caused severe damage to US and Israeli radar systems across the region.

Observers suggest the damage to long-range radars is why the Israeli military issued much shorter than usual warnings to the Israeli public of incoming missiles on Friday.

I also observed that on Friday evening in Amman, the Jordanian capital, sirens were not sounded as usual during three Iranian missile strikes directed towards Israel. The sirens were working again on Saturday.

However, on Saturday, the Israeli military said it could no longer guarantee the advance warnings that it sends to Israelis’ mobile phones.

Underestimating Iran

US and Israeli military officials may well have underestimated Iran’s capabilities, according to MIT professor Theodore Postol.

Postol says videos of missile launches released by Iran indicate it may have undetectable buried launchers spread across its vast deserts – making nonsense of US and Israeli claims to have hampered Iran’s capabilities by allegedly destroying mobile launchers.

US and Israeli anti-missile systems are far less effective than advertised, according to Postol, and in any case munitions for these systems are reported to be perilously low.

The Electronic Intifada’s Jon Elmer makes similar observations in his analysis of the first days of the war.

If the war tilts decisively in Iran’s favor, a terrifying prospect is that Israel, or even the United States, could use a nuclear weapon against Iran. CIA analyst Ray McGovern has suggested that Israel could do this “in extremis.”

Israeli massacre in Lebanon

In my Livestream analysis, I argued that Hizballah’s entry into the war was all but inevitable.

For Iran, this is an existential fight. After decades of sanctions, sabotage, assassinations and covert destabilization, Tehran now faces the culmination of a long campaign of regime change pursued by Washington and its allies since the 1979 revolution.

That also makes it an existential fight for Hizballah – an indigenous Lebanese resistance group that draws crucial support from Iran.

Hizballah has likely calculated that if it does not join the fight now, it risks losing everything. If Iran were to be defeated, Israel and even the United States would almost certainly launch a war to finish off Hizballah.

Hizballah leaders may have felt taking the initiative was the less risky course.

Israel, as usual, is reacting by punishing civilians. By Thursday, at least 83,000 people had been displaced as Israel bombarded southern Lebanon.

At least 41 people were killed during an overnight Israeli commando raid on Nabi Chit, a village in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley.

Resistance fighters reportedly engaged the attackers. Hizballah also said it confronted Israeli forces attempting to infiltrate into Lebanon from Syria.

More than 200 people have been killed in Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.

No end in sight

One week into this war, the Trump administration is vowing that fighting has “only just begun” and is even threatening to introduce ground troops.

But what is often called the “deep state” may be less enthusiastic about an open-ended war with ill-defined aims that the United States appears ill-prepared to fight.

A classified National Intelligence Council report completed in late February “found that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic Republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment,” The Washington Post revealed on Saturday, citing three individuals familiar with its content.

“Today Iran will be hit very hard!” Trump wrote in his latest blood-curdling post. “Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time.”

For now, there’s no end in sight.

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