by APOORVANAND

Will there be any campaign within Hindu society to awaken consciousness against dowry and domestic violence?

Twisha Sharma, Nikki Bhati, Manisha. These are the names of three young women who were killed because they were married into Hindu families. They were Hindu women. I write that they were killed due to marriage because, had they not married, they would very likely still be alive. Their marriage led them to their death. And I must write not simply “women” but “Hindu women” because had they not been married into Hindu households, their chances of survival might have been slightly higher.

Even as I write this, I am aware that many readers will accuse me of simplification. Some will say that out of a special hatred or hostility towards Hindus, or as they say, because of my self-hatred, I am placing excessive emphasis on the Hindu identity of these murdered women and their families. But there is a reason for doing so. For the last twelve or thirteen years, the government, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party have, in one form or another, been telling the Hindu society that they should be chosen by them as their masters to for the sake of the “safety” of their girls and women.

Hindu girls are under threat from Muslims, is what they tell us. Slogans constantly exhort Hindus to save their daughters, sisters and wives from Muslims. Ordinary Hindus have been made to believe this propaganda: if a Hindu girl forms a relationship with or marries a Muslim man, violence against her is almost inevitable. But the statistics tell another story. The greater likelihood is that Hindu women will be killed or continue to suffer violence after marrying Hindu men.

Yet, for the media, the murders or deaths of Twisha, Nikki and Manisha are not the kind of stories that would generate excitement or spread hatred against the Muslims. Therefore, they are barely discussed. They compel self-reflection, and self-reflection is painful. Blaming others for one’s plight always gives pleasure; examining oneself is deeply uncomfortable.

Twisha, Nikki and Manisha are merely three names among the nearly 6,000 women who are killed every year inside their husbands’ homes because of dowry demands or because they did or did not bear children or a male child or because of some other form of domestic violence. In India, nearly 16 women are killed in this manner every single day. Experts repeatedly caution us that these figures represent only a tiny fraction of domestic violence and dowry-related violence, because most such cases are never reported. The police often refuse to register complaints and instead try to dismiss such incidents as “domestic matters”. Twisha’s brother himself has stated how difficult it was for them to even get an FIR registered.

Among these murdered women, around 85% to 88% are killed within Hindu families, while roughly 11% to 12% die in Muslim households. One may argue that this distribution broadly reflects India’s demographic composition. That does not necessarily prove Hindus are more violent than Muslims in this regard. But should that really be a matter of comfort for Hindus?

The Wire for more

by HAN FEIZI

Against strong powers, the US Empire wields economic sanctions, media slander and buck-passing military alliances – which work only on the weak

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

Tell me lies

Tell me, tell me lies

Oh no-no, you can’t disguise

– Fleetwood Mac

Perfidy. There is no other word to describe the assassination of Iran’s leadership while negotiations were ongoing. It does not matter how evil they were, nor how juicy the window of opportunity was, nor how free the Iranian people will become – killing adversaries during negotiations is perfidy.

Perfidy, the war crime, has a specific definition under the Geneva Conventions. An act constitutes perfidy when two conditions are met:

1.       Deception: Feigning protected status to gain an enemy’s trust.

2.       Hostile act: Using the established trust to kill, injure or capture the adversary.

False surrender, faking wounds, dishonest use of protected emblems (e.g. Red Cross, Red Crescent, United Nations etc.) and feigning civilian status all constitute deception to gain an enemy’s trust. Deception, however, does not become perfidy unless it is used to commit a hostile act. Iran was negotiating in good faith when the United States and Israel launched attacks that killed a coterie of leaders including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Deception and hostile act. Both conditions met.  

One can interpret wartime rules against perfidy as the last vestiges of honor remaining while humans are slaughtering each other. Or one can be coldly rational, refraining from perfidy because to not do so would invite treachery from current and future adversaries.

Proscriptions against perfidy, however, do not survive cold rationalization. At some point, someone will do a ruthless cost benefit analysis and determine that strategic gains from an act of perfidy outweigh potential blowback. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Let us not over-moralize this choice. The United States (and Israel) did the cost benefit analysis and must now deal with the consequences. The Geneva Conventions were always naive. As if there can be rules in love and war. What is more interesting is why the United States of America commits perfidy and what that says about future American conflicts.

Perfidious Albion (Great Britain) was famously despised and begrudgingly respected for its skilled treachery. The island nation had an uncanny ability to best lesser states through betrayal and skullduggery in lieu of armed conflict.

The pejorative dates back to the Middle Ages, achieving high purchase in the 18^th century. French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet delivered a 17^th century sermon containing these lines:

‘L’Angleterre, ah, la perfide Angleterre,

que le rempart de ses mers rendoit

inaccessible aux Romains,

la foi du Sauveur y est abordée.

Translation:

England, oh perfidious England,

whose sea ramparts made her

unreachable to the Romans,

now receives the true faith.

Asia Times for more

TRICONTINENTAL

Style is a specification, not a preference. A seven-layer stylistics framework turns “write like this” into a repeatable engineering process.

Style is not a preference. It is a specification. Without one, the machine writes in a single voice.

Every large language model (LLM) produces prose with the same tells. The contrast rhetoric (‘X isn’t just Y, it’s Z’), the deluge of dashes, the rule of three, the smooth pivot to a generic profundity — once a reader knows the pattern, it is unmistakable. Last year, Forbes’ ‘Seven Tells of AI Writing’ catalogued them; the Field Guide to AI Slop arrived at the same diagnosis from a different angle. And the prose is now everywhere. A report by Graphite found that since November 2024, AI-generated articles on the internet have outnumbered human-written ones. A single, machine-uniform voice has become the majority voice of the written web.

The cost of that uniformity is not visible in any single sentence. It becomes visible when the default register is applied to writing whose distinctness was the analytical content. Consider a passage from Tricontinental dossier no. 69, How the International Monetary Fund is Squeezing Pakistan (2022):

Pakistan’s balance of payments problems have long been managed by the country’s main ‘export’ — its geostrategic value to Washington. When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, it needed Pakistan’s support, and so it removed its economic sanctions against the country and provided it with economic, security, and military aid. In the same period, owing to Pakistan’s strategic importance in the ‘War on Terror’, the Paris Club rescheduled $12.5 billion out of the total of $13.5 billion of the debt that Pakistan owed to it.

Ask a large language model to produce a paragraph on the same material — Pakistan, the IMF, US strategic interest after 2001 — and the output, however fluent, will be of a different kind. A representative run, produced by ChatGPT in May 2026, returned:

Following the 2001 United States-led invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan became a central strategic ally in the so-called “War on Terror,” a shift that significantly reshaped its external economic relations. In return for military cooperation and logistical support, Pakistan received renewed financial assistance, debt relief, and diplomatic backing from Western powers and international financial institutions. In December 2001, the Paris Club agreed to reschedule approximately US$12.5 billion of Pakistan’s bilateral debt, including substantial concessional terms and extended repayment periods. This restructuring eased immediate fiscal pressures and helped stabilize Pakistan’s foreign reserves, but it also deepened the country’s long-term dependence on external creditors and geopolitical alignment with the United States. The post-2001 period thus illustrated the close relationship between strategic security cooperation and international debt governance in the contemporary global order.

The factual material is the same. Some critical markers survive — the scare-quoted ‘so-called “War on Terror”‘, the $12.5 billion figure, the named consequences of ‘dependence’ and ‘alignment’. But the analytical core has dissolved. The dossier’s signature move — treating Pakistan’s geostrategic value as the country’s main ‘export’, a critical redeployment of commercial vocabulary that exposes the commodification of sovereignty — has no counterpart. The proportionality of the rescheduling ($12.5 billion out of $13.5 billion, almost the entire bilateral debt) is reduced to a single figure that no longer carries the political weight. The dossier’s grammar, which positions Pakistan’s economic situation as structurally managed by Washington before naming the relation as such, is replaced with active prose in which Pakistan ‘became a central strategic ally’ — an actor entering an exchange, not a country pinned by one. And the paragraph closes with the AI register’s signature move: a balanced ‘but also’ formulation that absorbs the political critique into a wider perspective, followed by a pivot to a generic claim about ‘the contemporary global order’. The model is not unable to be critical. It is unable to make the conceptual moves that turn critical vocabulary into a structural argument.

Tricontinental for more

by CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT

The question arises because of the Adani group’s growing investments out of India and the fact that, after 2014, Adani accompanied the prime minister on most of his trips abroad for some time.

Narendra Modi will visit Norway next week, 43 years after an Indian prime minister went to this small European country. Close observers of the scene argue that this visit may be linked to the fact that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has excluded Adani Green Energy from its investment universe in February this year because of corruption charges – which the prime minister of India may be in a position to neutralise now that corruption charges against the Adani group have been lifted in the US. This episode offers a good opportunity to review the way this group and the Indian state have helped each other internationally – or not.

Who is the dalal of whom?

In the US in the 1950s, when the CEO of General Motors, Charles Wilson, was appointed secretary of defense, he said there was no conflict of interest in this nomination because he “thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa”. This quote, that was subsequently applied to Exxon too, has now become the symbol of the embeddedness of business and politics in the US. 

In India, this process has gained momentum after 1991 and, subsequently, has taken a more personalised turn with the rise of oligarchs. The most successful of them all is undoubtedly Gautam Adani, who has cultivated a close relationship with Modi for at least 25 years.

But has it helped India abroad? 

The question arises because of the Adani group’s growing investments out of India and the fact that, after 2014, Adani accompanied the prime minister on most of his trips abroad for some time. This is further complicated by allegations that during his official visits to foreign countries, Modi laid the groundwork for negotiations that the Adani Group then pursued, often with a view to massive investments.

The group naturally benefited from these projects, but so did the Modi government, as these initiatives created a special (dependent) relationship between the recipient countries and India. This pattern was implemented with particular diligence toward India’s neighbours – who sometimes saw these contracts as a good way to counterbalance China’s presence on their soil and, of course, as vehicles for economic development. 

In Bangladesh, such a scenario unfolded as early as 2015. In June, during an official visit, Modi pledged to help Sheikh Hasina’s government overcome the country’s difficulties in securing electricity supplies. Two months later, the Adani Group and the Bangladesh Power Development Board signed an agreement under which a thermal power plant in Jharkhand would supply Bangladesh with electricity. The project’s implementation was formalised during Hasina’s visit to India in 2017. 

The Wire for more

by RINA CHANDRAN & JOHN POPKO

The Samsung labor showdown in South Korea reflects global concerns about who benefits from the AI industry, and how the wealth being created should be shared.

• Samsung’s labor deal highlights a global movement of workers demanding a fair share of record AI-driven profits.
• From Kenyan data annotators to Hollywood actors, laborers across the supply chain are challenging the surge in “AI billionaires” as automation continues to drive widespread job cuts.
• The conflict has sparked broader debates on “citizen’s dividends” to ensure the wealth created by AI is distributed more equitably.

Samsung Electronics narrowly averted a walkout by nearly 48,000 workers this week, after executives agreed to a tentative deal over bonus payments. But the labor union’s demand for a bigger share of profits from the company’s semiconductor business has sparked questions — in South Korea and elsewhere — about who benefits from the AI industry, and whether its rewards should be shared more equitably. 

Samsung, the world’s biggest memory chip maker, has reported record profits in recent months amid a global shortage of memory chips. The labor union had demanded the company allocate 15% of operating profit to bonuses for all workers, not just those at the memory chip division that supplies Tesla, Nvidia, and other big tech companies.

“As the AI industry drives record operating profits, union members are in a structure where they cannot receive the performance-based rewards they deserve,” Choi Seung-ho, head of Samsung’s union, told Rest of World. “We want to change that.”

Their demand struck a chord in the country, with a top policymaker proposing a “citizen’s dividend,” or a portion of the excess profits from the AI boom to be distributed among its 52 million people. That would ensure social stability, and help mitigate the cost of the economic transition being brought about by AI, Kim Yong-beom said in a Facebook post before the deal was reached.

Profits “border on the unthinkable”

For economists, labor analysts, and policymakers studying AI’s effects on the economy, the Samsung dispute is not a conventional wage negotiation, but “one of the most significant labor actions we have seen,” Adrian Brown, chief executive of Windfall Trust think tank which aims to develop responses to AI’s disruption, told Rest of World.

Globally, workers are beginning to make the same claim: a rightful share, grounded in contribution.”Adrian Brown, chief executive of Windfall Trust

The workers “know their labor is part of the AI value chain, and they are asking a straightforward question: If this technology is generating record profits, who has a legitimate claim on a share of them?” Brown said.

The sums of money that the AI boom has created for a select few “border on unthinkable,” according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Last year, 29 founders minted fortunes worth a collective $71 billion, it showed. Over the past year, U.S. startups alone have created 19 billionaires worth a combined $59 billion, the report said. The new AI rich “are proliferating at a mind-boggling pace.”

Rest of world for more

by RACHEL FELTMAN, BETHANY BROOKSHIRE, FONDA MWANGI & ALEX SUGIURA

Are we really falling short on protein—or is the high-protein craze overblown?

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

Go into any grocery store these days and you’ll see plenty of food-related fads, both new and old, being used to hawk products: You’ve got your paleo ketchups, gut-microbe-friendly sodas, and, my personal favorite, plant-based chips that are none-too-subtly billed as mimicking the singular taste of a Cool Ranch Dorito. But one of today’s biggest nutritional buzzwords is actually kind of basic: protein.

Influencers say we’re not getting enough, food marketers want us to know they’ve got it, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., seems to think more meat could do us all some good. But what does the science actually say about this buzzy macronutrient?

Here to tell us more is science journalist Bethany Brookshire, the author of a recent story on SciAm about this wave of protein enthusiasm.

Bethany, thanks so much for coming on to chat with us today.

Bethany Brookshire: Thank you for having me.

Feltman: So we’re here to talk about protein.

Brookshire: [Laughs.]

Feltman: Why, why are we talking about protein so much? Why is it everywhere? Are we getting enough? What’s happening? Could you just start us with, with your—a brief overview of your thoughts? [Laughs.]

Brookshire: [Laughs.] Having, having just written a carefully reported piece on protein, when people are, like, asking me, “What’s up with protein?,” my honest answer is, “I wish I knew.” I really do.

Feltman: [Laughs.]

Brookshire: There is a recent—and when I say recent, past 10, 15 years, it’s kind of been building—this idea that we need to get more protein …

Feltman: Mm-hmm.

Brookshire: That we’re not getting enough protein, that somehow we desperately need this and we could be our absolute best selves if we just hit the meat harder. And [Laughs] …

Feltman: Oh, what a phrase, but please do go on. [Laughs.]

Brookshire: [Laughs.] I do my best.

SA for more

by JONATHAN COOK

The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy

For decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel. 

On the one side, an official western narrative portrays a plucky, besieged “Jewish” state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbours. Even to this day, that story dominates the political, media and academic landscape. 

Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to “the Arabs”, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed. 

A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection of a vulnerable minority.

A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic “blood libel”.

It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state – armed by the US and Europe – bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft.

On this view, the West implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost, there to subdue the native Palestinian population, and terrorise neighbouring states into submission through relentless and overwhelming displays of force. 

Palestinians cannot make peace, or reach any kind of accommodation, because Israel pursues only conquest, domination and erasure. No middle ground is possible. 

The proof, note Palestinians, is Israel’s long-standing refusal to define its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, ever more extreme political agendas have surfaced, demanding not just Israel’s takeover of the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies but expansion into neighbouring states like Lebanon and Syria.

Drunk on power

Here are two conflicting narratives in which each side presents itself as the victim of the other.

Two and a half years into a series of Israeli wars against the peoples of Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, how are these two perspectives holding up? 

Does Israel look like the frustrated peacemaker facing off with barbaric opponents, or a rogue state whose decades-long aggression has provoked the very retaliatory violence exploited to excuse its constant war-making? 

MEE for more

WAR ON WANT

The Saharawi people of Western Sahara have lived under illegal Moroccan occupation for 50 years – and now the UK is backing Morocco’s plan to cement its control of Western Sahara.

Morocco has occupied Western Sahara since invading the territory in 1975. With the occupation reaching its 50th anniversary on 31 October 2025, the Saharawi people – an Indigenous group of the Western Sahara – continue to suffer human rights abuses under Morocco’s rule. The Saharawi people suffer discrimination in access to housing and land while around 400,000 Moroccan settlers benefit from state subsidies. More than 170,000 Saharawi live in refugee camps in south-west Algeria, dependent on aid, and endure a deepening humanitarian and climate crisis.

Now, the UK government has stated that it endorses Morocco’s plan which would side-line Saharawi hopes for self-determination[1]. Self-determination is the right of a people to choose how they govern themselves. It is an inalienable right – one that can never be taken away. The UK backs the Moroccan “autonomy plan” for Western Sahara, under which the Saharawi would only have authority over certain local matters including housing, education and cultural affairs; but crucially sovereignty – the authority of a state to govern itself – plus external affairs and defence, would be under the rule of Morocco. 

Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara 

During European powers’ colonial rule of much of Africa, the Spanish controlled Western Sahara for almost one hundred years, until 1975. Morocco and Mauritania then both claimed the area, but in October 1975 the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the world’s highest court, ruled that their claims had no legitimacy – and the Saharawi people should be allowed to express their right to self-determination. Within weeks of the ICJ ruling, Morocco and Mauritania invaded Western Sahara. Much of the local population fled into the desert. 

In 1978, Mauritania withdrew its claim to Western Sahara, but Morocco intensified its occupation. Only one-fifth of the territory was left unoccupied, controlled by the Saharawi people and called the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic. Under the leadership of the Polisario Front, the national liberation movement of the Saharawi people, armed struggle for self-determination continued. 

In 1991, the UN Settlement Plan outlined a free and fair referendum for the Saharawi people – whereby they could vote for independence, or integration with Morocco. But due to obstructions from Morocco and a lack of political will elsewhere, this has never taken place. 

Despite the ICJ formally rejecting Morocco’s territorial claims to Saharawi land, and the United Nations regarding Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory – pending decolonisation – Morocco’s occupation continues. 

In June 2025, the then-UK Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, endorsed the Moroccan plan to place Western Sahara – unjustly – under Moroccan sovereignty. 

Human Rights in Occupied Western Sahara

The Saharawi people living under Moroccan occupation suffer human rights violations by the Moroccan authorities. Morocco systematically prevents gatherings in Western Sahara supporting Saharawi self-determination, has obstructed the work of local human rights organisations, and beaten and detained activists and journalists. 

In June 2025, UN experts criticised Morocco’s demolition of Saharawi homes, forced evictions, racial discrimination, and violence against Saharawi human rights defenders and journalists. While there is a dedicated United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) – established in 1991, it lacks the legal mandate to monitor and report on human rights in Western Sahara.  It is the only modern UN peacekeeping mission without a legal mandate, leaving the Saharawi people at greater risk of abuse.   

Stolen Natural Resources

As documented by Western Sahara Resource Watch, Morocco pillages the natural resources of the Saharawi, including their phosphates (a key component in fertiliser), fisheries, sand, and renewable energy. This deprives the Saharawi people of the economic and cultural benefits of their own resources.  Morocco exploits these resources and trades them internationally, normalising Morocco’s illegal occupation of the Western Sahara.

For half a century, Morocco has exploited huge phosphate reserves in the Bou Craa region in the north of Western Sahara, exporting the resource overseas. In 2024 alone, Morocco extracted and exported approximately 1.45 million tonnes of phosphate rock – worth over £10 million. 

Morocco exploits the marine resources off Western Sahara’s coastline, extracting fish stocks as well as benefiting from fishing licences sold to Russia, Japan and elsewhere – all to the loss of the Saharawi people. 

Morocco positions itself as a global leader in renewable energy and in meeting climate commitments – but does so by developing green infrastructure on occupied land.

Morocco also benefits from the extraction and export of sand from Western Sahara – to Spain and beyond, boosting Spain’s tourism sector, for example, while depriving the Saharawi of potential benefits themselves. Between 2020 and 2024, Morocco exported over 900,000 tonnes of sand from the territory, with the majority destined for the Canary Islands. 

War on want for more

by BHIM BHURTEL

Iran is teaching Israel and the United States the lessons of the Nepalese board game Bath-chal

Somewhere in the foothills of Nepal, old men still gather around a wooden board carved into a five-by-five grid, moving carved tigers and goats across its intersections with quiet concentration. The game is called Bagh-chal — literally, ‘Tiger Move’ — and it has been played here for a thousand years. Most young Nepalis have never heard of it and that is a shame. Right now, in the deserts and mountain ranges of West Asia, Bagh-chal is being played on a very large scale.

The US-Israeli-Iran war is, for the moment, frozen. Washington rejected Tehran’s proposal. Tehran rejected Washington’s. After months of air strikes, proxy battles, and nervous watching of oil prices, the conflict has settled into something neither side wanted — a stalemate. To understand how that happened, forget the think-tank reports for a moment. Pull out a Bagh-chal board instead.

A game of asymmetric opponents

Bagh-chal is not a fair game, and that is precisely the point. This game is between two opponents, whom we call “Tiger” and “Goat.” Four tigers face twenty goats across a grid of twenty-five intersections.

The tigers are fast, aggressive, and dangerous — they can jump over goats and remove them from the board. Win the game by capturing five goats, and the tigers have done their job. The goats, slow and individually weak, have a different task entirely: surround the tigers, block every possible move and grind the game to a halt.

This is not a trivial math problem but a strategic equilibrium. As noted by researchers Lim Yew Jin and Jurg Nievergelt, Bagh-chal always ends in a draw when both players play optimally. Defeat for either side is typically associated with sub-optimal performance. The size of the game tree for Bagh-chal can reach 10?¹, similar to that for chess; however, the result will generally be a win, a loss or a draw. The tigers are simply too powerful to beat but they may face a defeat or a draw.

What the game knows but the modern military strategist forgets all too easily is that might does not equal victory. The tiger may eat four goats and yet not win the game. Might without position is mere bluster.

The tigers’ strike

Operation Epic Fury was initiated by the US and Israel on February 28, 2026. It was a huge undertaking that involved attacks on Iranian nuclear infrastructure, the manufacture of its missiles, its military generals, and even the residence of the supreme leader. Bases and support from the Gulf Cooperation Council nations were made available. For a few weeks, it seemed that the tigers were really enjoying their game.

Asia Times for more

by VINOD MUBAYI

Analysts of the US-Israeli unprovoked and blatantly illegal attack on Iran on Feb 28, while US-Iranian negotiations brokered by Oman were ongoing, have concluded that the assault has failed to achieve any of its objectives. Iran, despite suffering significant losses, is now acknowledged to be in a stronger position compared to the assailants as its closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatens to tank the world economy. The refusal of the narcissist Trump to admit defeat is compounded by the efforts of the genocidal villain Netanyahu to prolong the conflict while nations from Asia to Africa and even Europe suffer the consequences.

It has become painfully obvious now that Trump was bamboozled by Netanyahu and the Israeli Mossad into attacking Iran, something that previous US presidents from George Bush to Obama to Biden had refused to do despite Israeli pleas and entreaties. Trump’s election campaign boasts to his followers that he would keep the country out of wars and his anxiety to win the Nobel Peace Prize sound particularly ironic considering his invasion of Venezuela, and threats to “take over” Greenland, Panama, and maybe Cuba, along with his musings on making Canada the 51st state and sending the US military into Mexico to erase the drug cartels.

At the outset, it needs to be acknowledged that the US attack on Iran on February 28, like the earlier one in June 2025, was highly deplorable as it was carried out while the US and Iran were officially negotiating. A set of outrightly false reasons were trotted out by members of the Trump team following the initial bombings and missile strikes; Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that the US learnt that Israel was going to attack so the US joined them to preempt an Iranian response. This was shown to be a fabrication when it was revealed that Trump had been persuaded to join the assault a few days earlier by Netanyahu and the Mossad chief David Barnea who convinced Trump that Iran’s regime would crumble in a few days after its top leadership was decapitated; they fantasized that the “Iranian people” would rise up to install a US friendly government.

The US-Israel attack appears to have had four objectives: destruction of Iran’s uranium enrichment capability and the possible capture and removal of the amount of uranium that had been 60% enriched; destruction of Iran’s existing long-range missiles and drones and its industrial capacity to produce them; elimination of Iran’s ability to support Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen; and, most important of all, regime change, i.e., removal of the current Shiite religious regime and its replacement by something acceptable to the US, or, failing that, making Iran a failed state on the lines of Libya or Syria. The last objective seems to have been, and likely still is, the goal of the Israelis who wish to eliminate any possible opponent of their plan to emerge as a hegemonic Eretz Israel in the entire West Asia region.

Several weeks after the assault, as Trump proclaimed a ceasefire, the perpetrators of the criminal and deceitful attack on Iran seem to have failed on all four objectives. No doubt, the top leadership of the Iranian regime, including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, was executed on the first day of the attack itself. Attacks on subsequent days killed more of the civilian and military leadership but the core of the regime remained and stabilized. It was not only able to repel the attacks but mount highly successful counterattacks on US bases in the Gulf Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, and on infrastructure and buildings in Israel.

Alternative International for more