US Media Mostly Care for Iranians When They Can Be Used to Justify Bombing

FAIR

The United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on February 28, propelling the entire region into a predictable cataclysm of unprecedented proportions.

This puts paid to the alleged “peacemaking” project of US President Donald Trump, who was supposed to be keeping the country out of international wars rather than actively seeking to expedite the end of the world.

The attacks put an abrupt end to the negotiations underway between the US and Iran—to the delight of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has always viewed as anathema anything remotely resembling diplomacy or the pursuit of peace.

Three days before the joint strikes, a Politico exclusive (2/25/26) reported that “senior advisers” to Trump “would prefer Israel strike Iran before the United States launches an assault on the country.” As per the report, administration officials were “privately arguing that an Israeli attack would trigger Iran to retaliate, helping muster support from American voters for a US strike.”

So much for subsequent US/Israeli attempts to cast the assault as “preemptive” in nature. Indeed, there is nothing at all “preemptive” about forcing Iran to retaliate; this is instead what you would call a deliberate provocation. READ MORE AT FAIR.

How the New York Times paved the way for apocalyptic war

 Middle East Eye

Shortly after the United States and Israel launched unprecedented strikes on Iran this weekend, blithely propelling the entire region into unfathomable chaos, the editorial board of the New York Times published its two cents’ worth in an editorial directed towards US sociopath-in-chief Donald Trump: “Why Have You Started This War, Mr. President?”

It’s a valid question, to be sure - particularly given Trump’s previous promise that he wouldn’t entangle the country in unnecessary conflicts abroad.

And yet it is a question that would be far less hypocritically posed by, say, a newspaper that had not once run an opinion piece by John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran”.

A few paragraphs into their ostensible antiwar intervention - which was subsequently retitled “Trump’s Attack on Iran Is Reckless” - the Times editorial board contended that the president’s “goals are ill-defined”, while he has “failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

El Mencho’s killing won’t solve Mexico’s cartel problem – or anything else

 Al Jazeera English

On Sunday, Mexican security forces killed 59-year-old Nemesio Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho”, the leader of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), based in western Mexico’s Jalisco state.

The Mexican defence ministry acknowledged that the lethal operation had been conducted with “complementary information” from the United States, whose “peacemaker” president, Donald Trump, has repeatedly threatened to attack Mexico to combat the drug cartels.

Mind you, these are organisations that owe their very existence to US policy and drug consumption in the first place.  . . . As anyone who has ever paid remote attention to global affairs might have predicted, violence has broken out across several Mexican states in the aftermath of the killing – which is generally what happens when you take out a cartel kingpin. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The USS Honduras sets sail again

 Al Jazeera English

It’s smooth sailing these days for the United States and Honduras, the diminutive Central American nation and original “banana republic” that has just elected a new right-wing president, Nasry Asfura, to the delight of US sociopath-in-chief Donald Trump.

The gringo leader has even taken credit for Asfura’s victory, having threatened to cut off US aid to Honduras in the event that the electoral outcome was not to his liking.

Call it democracy at its finest. 

This past weekend, Trump hosted his “friend” and fellow businessman Asfura at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where the two committed to jointly combatting drug trafficking and irregular migration.

The pact might have been a tad less hypocritical had Trump not just pardoned former right-wing Honduran President and Asfura ally Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US for – what else? – drug trafficking.

Then, of course, there is the fact that the US has played an outsize role in creating the violent conditions that cause mass migration from Honduras in the first place. But surely it’s nothing that can’t be solved by more business as usual. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

US Media Keen on Iranian Unrest—Less So on US and Israel’s Role in It

FAIR

When protests against high inflation swept Iran in late December, the usual international suspects wasted little time in endeavoring to hijack the unrest—which prompted a violent government crackdown—for their own purposes.

On January 10, Donald Trump—fresh off his abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—took to his preferred social media platform to showcase his signature manic reliance on random capitalization and exclamation points: “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP.” A few days later, another encouraging message: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”   

The protests have since dissipated, without any successful “help” thus far in the form of regime change or US/Israeli military attack, although Trump has dispatched a “massive fleet” to the Middle East “just in case.”  READ MORE AT FAIR.

If Cuba falls, the Global South is to blame, too

Al Jazeera English

On Tuesday, United States President Donald Trump had a good laugh with members of the press in the US state of Iowa as he issued a rather serious decree regarding the short-term future of Cuba: “Cuba will be failing pretty soon. Cuba is really a nation that’s very close to failing.” 

To be sure, this is not the first time that Trump has predicted the downfall of the Caribbean island nation, which the US has effectively been trying to destroy for no fewer than 67 years – ever since the triumph in 1959 of Cuba’s communist revolution that overthrew the brutal right-wing dictator and US buddy Fulgencio Batista. 

This time around, however, the threat carries a bit more weight in light of the Trump administration’s abduction earlier this month of Nicolas Maduro, the leftist president of Venezuela. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

No Me Importa

 The Baffler

on january 7, Colombian President Gustavo Petro and Donald Trump shared an amicable phone call, after which Trump declared that he would “look forward to meeting him in the near future” in Washington. 

Somebody less demented than the U.S. president might perceive an obstacle to his offer: in September, the Department of State announced on X that it would be revoking Petro’s visa “due to his reckless and incendiary actions,” which entailed denouncing the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip while in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly meeting. 

Objectively speaking, the campaign to flatten Gaza would seem rather more “incendiary”: an action that has officially produced seventy-one thousand dead, although some experts believe the toll to be as much as ten times higher. Among other remarks, Petro had taken it upon himself to critique the U.S. leader’s participation in the carnage: “If Mr. Trump continues to be complicit in genocide as he has been to date, he deserves nothing more than prison, and his army should not obey him.” READ MORE AT THE BAFFLER.

Europe cannot condemn colonialism à la carte

 Al Jazeera English

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – the annual Alpine gathering of the global elite – to declare that now is “not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism”.

This, of course, was a reference to the current ambitions of Macron’s counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, who, in addition to recently kidnapping the president of Venezuela and repeatedly threatening to seize the Panama Canal, has made a great deal of noise about taking over the self-governing Danish territory of Greenland. . . .

Indeed, Trump’s designs on the island have got Europe’s panties in a bunch, and the European Parliament has announced its unequivocal condemnation of “the statements made by the Trump administration regarding Greenland, which constitute a blatant challenge to international law, to the principles of the United Nations Charter and to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a NATO ally”. . . .

Now, it goes without saying that the categorically demented Trump should by no means be encouraged in his predatory international endeavours. But it bears pointing out that, when it comes to colonialism and imperialism, Europe is hardly one to talk. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump’s neo-con turn on Iran

 Al Jazeera English

On Saturday, just under two weeks into the protests that are now sweeping Iran, United States President Donald Trump took to his social media platform of choice to post a message of support: “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

As usual, Trump’s random capitalisation scheme and excessive use of exclamation points would better befit an elementary schoolchild than the leader of the global superpower. But the promise of American help is also problematic in far more significant ways. 

For starters, “help” is not exactly a specialty of the US – and particularly not under the guidance of the man who bombed Iran just last summer, right after returning to power on a pledge to keep the US out of foreign wars. . . .

With his recent promises of assistance, one can’t help but wonder if Trump isn’t taking a page from the old playbook of former US President George W Bush, the ex-“war on terror” chief and the face of an administration that was dedicated to propagating the very neo-conservative ideology to which Trump has long ostensibly been so vehemently opposed. READ MORE AT AL JAZZERA ENGLISH.

Thomas Pain: Thirty years of Thomas Friedman

The Baffler

It is a sign of the extent to which Thomas Friedman has become simply another fact of life that 2025 passed with hardly any acknowledgement that it was his thirtieth anniversary as foreign affairs columnist at the New York Times. In his 2005 bestselling ode to corporate globalization, The World Is Flat, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner boasted with uncharacteristic prescience and characteristic incoherence of his own immunity from the disruptive effects of the economic system he devoted his career to championing: “There will be no outsourcing for me—even if some of my readers wish my column could be shipped off to North Korea.”

Now, twenty years after the publication of Friedman’s defining tome and three decades into his star columnist position, the United States’ newspaper of record has not yet found it necessary to replace him with someone who makes sense on a regular basis. Indeed, it seems Friedman’s devoted service as a mouthpiece for empire and capital has ensured his institutionalization at the paper, despite his relentless self-contradictions, failed prophecies, and inescapable cascade of gibberish.  READ MORE AT THE BAFFLER.