After decades of US-backed regime-change wars across the Middle East, Iran now stands alone. A new conflict would deepen regional instability and test Australia’s willingness to say no.

Iran is the last standing of the nations in seven middle eastern states listed by the Pentagon in 1997 for destabilisation or overthrow. Having devastated Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, and Syria, only Iran eludes the United States militarists.

A US/Israeli aggressive war against Iran could begin this month. If Israel has its way, the Ayatollah’s government will be over within days.

For decades, Benjamin Netanyahu pressed successive US presidents to eliminate Iran, Israel’s last rival for power in the region. George W Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ gave expression, in effect, to the Zionist plan for Greater Israel. President Biden’s promise in October 2023 that the US would “stand with Israel” was nothing new: the special US/Israel relationship began in 1948, when President Truman became the first world leader to recognise the Jewish state, moments after its creation.

With Netanyahu as Prime Minister, Israel consistently gets its way with the US Congress and with presidents, sooner or later. Netanyahu has had seven meetings in Washington with President Trump since his second inauguration. The result has been one short war on Iran, and anther to come, which will likely be longer. The chance of war against Iran is 90 per cent, unnamed US military now tell the media.

The accumulation of US military force in the region is the largest since the US – with its coalition partners Australia and Poland – invaded Iraq in 2003. One third of the US naval fleet is there or soon will be, including two aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. Withdrawing it and retreating without a fight will be un-Trumpian.

But lacking international, Congressional, and popular backing for an aggressive war against Iran, Trump will need to devise a casus belli, by either fabricating or provoking an Iranian attack, or by claiming that Iran is at fault for having rejected his “deal”. His Jewish-American backers will go into full propaganda mode for that.

Anticipating the attack, how many Iranians are fleeing from the south? Since the government in Tehran shut down the Internet during the recent mass demonstrations there and in several other cities, details are scarce. But the people’s discontent was fomented by authoritarianism, together with rising inflation and cost of living pressures, themselves the intended result of years of US “starvation” sanctions.

How Iranians respond to the coming attack by the US and Israel will depend on which is greater: their patriotism or their desire for ‘regime change’. But change to what? That’s a question typically ignored by successive US administrations which overthrow leaders and then walk away. Tension between the young progressives in Iranian cities and their rural, religious compatriots was what led to the Islamist Revolution of 1997, and it will resurface during or after the coming war. US campaigns for regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are salutary warnings.

Iran will be different because it will not throw away its investment in nuclear technology, for medical or defence purposes. Like North Korea, it needs nuclear weapons to fend off US aggression.

Trump, the shape-shifter who claims to deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, has achieved no peace anywhere and has waged warlike acts on Venezuela, while threatening them against Panama, Canada, Greenland, and Cuba. He now demands control of Diego Garcia, which Britain retains on a lease-back agreement with Mauritius, and allows the US to rent as a highly strategic base. It is a stopover site for US forces on the way to the Middle East via East Asia – and Australia.

So Trump, who loves to be the centre of attention, has the world holding its breath over Iran. He is popularly accused of narcissism, idiocy, and infantilism – particularly after his latest tirade against the US Supreme Court. But those very qualities make him adept at focusing all eyes on himself. He uses daily threats of tariffs, sanctions, or war, to distract us all from damaging revelations about his fun and games with Jeffrey Epstein. The UK can arrest a former prince: but will the US arrest King Donald?

As Emma Shortis has said, Trump’s assertion of American power means reasserting his own power: “The president unilaterally declaring a war on Iran without the ascent of Congress would  defy the law. This is all part of a broader pattern of the Trump administration’s attacks on rule of law and the institutions charged with implementing it”.

Attacking Iran will be illegal aggression, but Trump cares not at all for international law, nor for prohibitions on the use of nuclear weapons. Israel has them and can use them as blackmail to prevent Iran from developing its own. Trump has just allowed the last agreement against nuclear testing to expire. Fixated as he and his relatives are on acquiring real estate in Gaza, and insouciant about Israel doing the same there and in the West Bank, the only remaining concern for them must be MAD – the mutually assured nuclear destruction of which the world was once afraid, but some Americans seem now to have forgotten.

Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, has publicly repeated that Iran has no intention of developing nuclear weapons and is willing to  allow inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But both Trump and Netanyahu argue that Iran should not be able to enrich uranium at all and should dismantle its ballistic missile system.

Meanwhile, concerned Australians have rallied in their thousands in state capitals and county towns to protest the build-up of US forces and bases in Australia, their purpose of war against China, and their use in support of Israel.  Without consulting the Australian public about its housing, health, and education priorities, Labor has already spent over A$11 billion on the undeliverable AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines. Polls show a majority oppose this military expenditure in a cost-of-living and housing crisis.

Will Australia blow the whistle against AUKUS and war in Iran too? Will Albanese emulate Canada’s Prime Minister and defy Trump? When will Australians realise that the US doesn’t protect us but endangers us? Will our government join the UK in denying the US use of air bases in Britain for pre-emptive war on Iran by doing the same in Australia? If not, why not?