The US further demanded Iran turn over its entire existing stock of fissionable uranium. Iran agreed to do so for all its excess material except for what was needed to run its civilian nuclear power plants. It offered to turn over all its excess stock of uranium to be managed by a third party, in this case Russia.
The US responded Iran must turn over all its uranium stock, including that needed to run its civilian nuclear generating plants. In other words, Iran had to shut down its civilian nuclear power plants.
As negotiations proceeded last week, Trump publicly declared the US and Iran was close to a deal. He added the situation looked promising and a deal was likely on Sunday, June 15, when US and Iranian teams were scheduled to meet again. Within 48 hours of Trump saying a deal was imminent, Israel launched its surprise attack on Iran. It is naïve to believe Trump had no knowledge of Israel’s surprise attack launched in Friday, June 13. He as much indicated he knew. And he knew such an attack would lead to a cancelling of June 15 negotiations. He knew no deal was imminent. Negotiations had served their purpose to lull Iran into thinking a deal was possible, even imminent.
Whether this tactic resulted in Iran leaving its guard down on June 13 cannot be known for certain. What is certain is that Israel’s June 13 attack wiped out much of Iran’s air defense system and giving Israel aircraft more or less free entry into Iran air space to bomb not only military facilities but power plants throughout the country, including nuclear, as well.
It was the Israeli version of Colin Powell’s ‘shock and awe’ prediction of the prior US air war launch on Iraq.
Israel’s surprise attack not only neutralized many of Iran’s air defense facilities but Israel simultaneously carried out assassinations of high ranking Iranian military, government officials as well as civilian Iranian scientists. Israel thus included a ‘decapitation’ strategy, which had previously proved successful with Hamas in GAZA and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Purposely targeting and decapitating civilians is considered a war crime.
So is targeting civilian nuclear facilities. In the initial attack Israel bombed several, with reported nuclear radiation fallout occurring in several locations in the country.
To sum up: the US Iran war playbook has followed much of that employed by the USA in Iraq: engage in negotiations to lull the opponent into thinking a deal is possible. Keep moving the demands goalpost as the opponent makes concessions. Use a pretext like WMDs (Iraq) or nuclear bomb in weeks (Iran) to maneuver public opinion in support of the war. And as in the case of Iraq, the actual goal is regime change. Military action is designed to achieve political objectives. Launching a surprise massive air campaign is to inflict as much damage on the economy and disable the government in order to spark political uprisings to depose the regime and its leaders.
Neither WMDs or a nuclear bomb are ever the real issue or objectives. They are the excuse to launch a massive military air strike to wreck the economy and create political instability and engineer regime change. And negotiations in the run up to war are a tactic, not a step in a process to reach a compromise and a deal to avert war. Their purpose is to lull the opponent into thinking a deal is possible when it isn’t.
When the US playbook believes pretexts and excuses like WMDs or nuclear bombs are not sufficient to invade, it adds a ‘false flag’ operation to the playbook. Some notable false flags from earlier US wars include the alleged ‘Tonkin Gulf’ attack by North Vietnam boats on US destroyers that was used to justify US expanding its war in Vietnam; the claim the Cuban army had invaded Grenada and seized US medical students as hostage; the charge that Panama president Noriega was running a drug operation transporting Colombia cocaine to American cities as justification for the US invasion of that country in 1989; the claim that Assad, president of Syria, was using chemical weapons; Iraqis in 1990 were killing Kuwaiti babies in incubators. Every US war playbook engineers a pretext and/or a false flag operation leading up to initiating military action.
The Case of Ukraine
The case of Ukraine is a variation on these themes. In 2014 following the US financed and CIA directed coup in that country, Russia occupied Crimea to prevent NATO from seizing its naval base there, which would have led to NATO occupying the entire Black Sea. There were brief military conflicts in eastern Ukraine, followed by negotiations and a cease fire in a Minsk Agreement between Russia, Ukraine and Europe. Germany’s then Chancellor, Merkle, and France’s president, Holland, served as guarantors of the Minsk agreement. Later in 2022 they would both admit publicly the purpose of the Minsk negotiations and deal was to lull Russia into thinking the military conflict as over. Ukraine was not militarily prepared to go to war yet. It would require 8 more years to prepare massive fortifications and weapons development and training of troops before it was.
The US/NATO decision to go to war with Russia in Ukraine was made by US president Biden around June 2021 when he met with Putin for the first, and last time. The US plans for the Ukraine war date back to 2015. They were shelved when Trump won in 2016 and thereafter quickly dusted off by Biden when he took office in January 2021. Biden in August 2021 ‘cleared the decks’ in Afghanistan by pulling out. US advisors and weapons thereafter began pouring into Ukraine. Putin attempted to ‘negotiate’ with the US from afar during the rest of 2021 without any progress. The US-Ukraine plan called for a major Ukraine offensive in February 2022 to defeat what remained of the local Russian ethnic resistance in Ukraine’s two eastern provinces, Lughansk and Donetsk. But the Russians pre-empted that and invaded first in late February.
Russian advances were swift even though it invaded with barely 90,000 troops across a combat line of 1500 kilometers from Kiev to south Donetsk. That limited force was no where near sufficient to occupy Kiev or conquer Ukraine. Its purpose was intimidation to force Ukraine into a compromise deal which was tentatively reached in Istanbul, Turkey. As discussions in Istanbul were occurring, Russia was asked to show good faith by withdrawing its forces from Kiev which it did. A tentative deal was then reached between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul in April 2022 which was quite favorable to Ukraine. However, NATO convinced Ukraine president Zelensky to reject the deal and to continue the war. The Istanbul negotiations collapsed.
Twice Russia was lulled into negotiations to ‘buy time’, as Merkle and Holland admitted in 2015 with the Minsk deal and Ukraine did again in April 2022. US/NATO rushed in weaponry and advisers after Istanbul and Ukraine launched a major offensive that threw Russian forces back from Kiev and other locations to limited positions in Lughansk and Donetsk. Thus Russia was out-maneuvered twice by negotiations with US/Ukraine that were never intended to conclude with a compromise deal to end the war in Ukraine.
As in the cases of Iraq and now Iran, from the outset the US playbook in Ukraine proxy sought the ultimate objective of regime change in Russia. The admitted strategy was a military conflict in Ukraine, financed and provided with weapons by NATO, which the plan envisioned would lead to a collapse of the Russian economy, political instability, and the deposing of Putin by Russian oligarchs and military.
The US neocon and CIA analysis was Russia’s economy was weak and the Putin government even weaker. A military conflict, supported by extensive sanctions on Russia’s economy was argued in US war planning to lead to Russian implosion and NATO/Ukraine victory. Regime change was again the objective.
Negotiations at Minsk in 2015 or Istanbul in 2022 were never meant to reach a deal but to lull Russia into thinking one was possible. In 2025 the US and EU again tried to lure Russia into a negotiation that demanded as a precondition to negotiations that Russia agree to a ceasefire first. The preconditions in turn allowed Ukraine to rearm and mobilize and train more troops during negotiations.
It was clear the US/NATO 2024 proposal was another example of negotiations employed as a tactic to ‘buy time’ to prepare for another military offensive—after which the pretext of negotiations would be dropped. This time, however, Russia did not agree to ceasefire first and then negotiations. Nor will it again agree to negotiations as a delaying tactic after twice being manipulated and out-maneuvered in 2015 and 2022.
Unlike in the cases of Iraq in 2003 and Iran today, in the case of Russia the US playbook’s negotiations tactic as well as its strategic objective of regime change have both conclusively failed.
What’s Next in the US-Israel Proxy War On Iran?
The official position of the USA is that it isn’t involved in Israel’s war with Iran. Few believe that given the US provision of weapons to Israel, likely planning the operation for months, and obvious US satellite surveillance and targeting assistance. As US official spokespersons deny US involvement, Trump himself publicly refers to the Israel attack as “we”, calls on Iran to ‘unconditionally surrender’ and says the US knows where Iranian leader Khamenei is located and could ‘take him out’ any time. All of which hardly suggests no USA involvement. Will the US then overtly escalate its involvement by bombing suspected Iranian nuclear weapons development sites deep inside several mountains. No one yet knows for certain but it is very likely Trump will do so.
But what if the US GBU 43 ‘bunker busting’ bombs do not achieve their objective and destroy Iranian deep mountain sites? The only further weapon that can is a tactical nuclear US bomb. Will it risk that?
Jack Rasmus is author of ’The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump, Clarity Press, January 2020.
Source: CouterPunch
