The Inversion of Blame: The USA, Israel, and Iran
How the West wields violence and calls it peace
On June 13th, Israel bombed Iranian military sites, describing the strikes as “pre-emptive” in nature, citing the same claim it has made since at least 1979 – that Iran is just “months away” from developing nuclear weapons. And then, on June 21st, the United States followed suit, launching airstrikes on three targets in Iran in support of Israel.
And now, as the threat of a regional or even global war looms large, both Washington and Tel Aviv point the finger squarely at Iran and declare: this is your fault.
But the truth is so different to that lie, it is actually diametrically opposed. This crisis, like so many before it, was not instigated by Iran. It is the product of a long-standing pattern in which Western powers and their allies commit acts of aggression, and then, through sheer force of narrative and global influence, blame the victims of that violence for responding at all.
This is some of the best work of propaganda, the same propaganda that enabled much of the West to build empires. It is a deliberate and sustained campaign of inversion – where the world’s most militarised and violent states cloak themselves in the language of “security” while setting fire to nations and then calling the flames defensive.
In modern history there are five nations that have consistently destabilised the world over the past 125 years through their military aggression: The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and Israel. Each one of them has engaged in war, military operations, or violent interventions for more than 92% of the past 125 years.
• The United States has launched over 200 foreign military operations since 1900, almost none of them defensive. From Vietnam to Iraq, Honduras to Libya, Nicaragua to Yemen, it has left behind a legacy of collapsed states, mass death, and enduring chaos.
• The UK and France, former empires, never left the battlefield. From Suez to Mali, from Kenya to Afghanistan, their fingerprints are on decades of post-colonial violence and exploitation.
• Russia continues the Soviet tradition of brute-force intervention, from Afghanistan to Ukraine.
• And Israel, since its founding in 1948, has not known a single year of peace, nor has it ever stopped expanding, bombing, or repressing.
But unlike the others, Israel’s violence is not just exported across borders – it is imposed day and night on the land it illegally occupies.
Let us be absolutely clear: all of historic Palestine is occupied. This is not a question of Gaza or the West Bank alone. It is not a conflict over two territories on a map. It is a conflict over the theft of an entire land, a people’s homeland stolen and militarised under the guise of national security.
But the violence did not begin with Israel. It began with the West – with Britain, which under the British Mandate for Palestine claimed the authority to promise away a land it was occupying. With no mandate from the indigenous population, Britain laid the groundwork for catastrophe by endorsing a colonial project that was never theirs to approve. That betrayal was later ratified by the United Nations – an institution dominated by Western powers – which pushed through the partition plan not for justice, but out of guilt and shame over the horrors of the Second World War. In doing so, they legitimised the dispossession of one people to atone for the crimes committed against another.
From the river to the sea, the land has been systematically taken, its population ethnically cleansed, fragmented, besieged, surveilled, and bombed. The displacement of Palestinians did not begin in 1967 – it began in 1948 and continues today.
The Israeli state has:
• Wiped out entire villages
• Confiscated millions of acres of Palestinian land
• Imprisoned generations without trial
• Carried out massacres that are then buried beneath narratives of self-defence
To reduce Palestine to Gaza and the West Bank is to accept the framework of occupation as status quo, and to treat the colonial partition of a people’s land as legitimate. It is not.
Israel’s very foundation involved the violent removal of the Palestinian people - a process that never ended. Today’s “strikes on Gaza” or “operations in the West Bank” are merely the continuation of that original project by other means.
So, the history is clear about who the biggest aggressors in the last 125 years have been. Now, let us be clear on another point. Iran is not a saintly or passive actor in the region. It plays the geopolitical game like every regional power does – funding proxies, leveraging influence, and asserting its own interests where possible.
It backs groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq and Syria, and more recently, the Houthis in Yemen. It has no love for liberal democracy, it jails dissenters, and it seeks to project regional power through asymmetric warfare, not open diplomacy.
But the key distinction is this: Iran’s actions are consistently reactive, shaped by a strategic doctrine of deterrence, not expansion. When Iraq invaded in 1980, Iran defended itself. When Israel bombs Iranian targets in Syria – or inside Iran itself – Tehran responds, often indirectly. It doesn’t start wars with distant countries. It doesn’t invade and occupy others. It doesn’t launch first strikes across oceans.
In fact, in over 300 years, Iran has not initiated a conventional war. That restraint – whether strategic, moral, or practical – is remarkable in a region beset by the military ambitions of global and regional hegemons.
So no, Iran is not innocent. But it is not the threat that the West has spent decades pretending it is. And it isn’t the threat that Israel and the USA are trying to make out they are now. And it certainly does not belong in the same breath as the states that have rained fire across continents for generations.
As Israel and the United States ramp up their attacks on Iran, the justification remains the same: nuclear weapons. Iran, they claim, is an existential threat, a rogue actor, a danger to world peace.
Yet this claim collapses under even the lightest scrutiny.
• The United States holds the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in history and is the only country to ever use them in war, killing hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Israel possesses dozens of nuclear warheads, developed secretly, never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and refuses any international inspections.
• Iran, on the other hand, has no nuclear weapons, has allowed IAEA oversight for years, and has never started a conventional war in over three centuries.
So now I must ask the strikingly obvious:
Why is it acceptable for the most violent and aggressive countries on Earth to possess nuclear weapons, but not a country that has largely exercised restraint in the face of continuous provocation?
This is not about nuclear weapons. My stance on that is that really no one should have nuclear weapons. Because pause for 30 seconds and actually think about that, and it’s quite literally insanity that anyone should have them. I’m not advocating that Iran should be allowed them if everyone else is because I’m a big fan of nuclear weapons. No. It’s because this isn’t about the weapons.
It is about control. It is about who is allowed to have power and who is not.
It is about who gets to define peace and who is told to stay silent under the boot of an occupier. And, ultimately, it is about white supremacy.
Because when the dominant global powers - overwhelmingly white, Western nations or their allies - decide who is civilised and who is dangerous, who can be trusted with power and who must be policed, punished or bombed, we are not looking at a neutral system of rules. We are looking at a deeply racialised hierarchy that has, for centuries, justified domination in the name of “security”, “freedom”, or “democracy”.
Strip it all back and you’re left with this: some lives are seen as worth more than others, and some nations are punished simply for refusing to bow their heads.
When Israel bombs Iran or slaughters Palestinians, it is called self-defence.
When the United States drops bombs from drones or invades sovereign nations, it is called stabilisation.
When Iran funds allies or resists encroachment, it is labelled terrorism.
This inversion of morality has one purpose: to ensure that violence carried out by the West and its allies is always justified, and that resistance to that violence is always condemned.
It allows those with the greatest stockpiles of weapons, the most advanced killing machines, and the most blood-stained histories to hold the megaphone while the victims are left without voice, without recourse, without justice.
If we are to speak truthfully, we must look beyond the polished press releases that paint them as saviours, and protectors. We have to name the greatest threats to global peace by the decades of death and destruction they leave in their wake.
It is not Iran that has destabilised the Middle East.
It is not Palestine that is perpetuating violence.
It is not the people under bombs who are a threat to world peace – it is the ones dropping the bombs, year after year, decade after decade.
We have to stop treating the arsonists like firefighters simply because they wear uniforms with flags we recognise.
This is not about supporting Iran’s government. It is not about denying complexity. It is about rejecting a global lie that permits some nations to act with impunity, and others to be crushed for daring to survive.
Peace will not come from airstrikes.Peace will not come from nuclear hypocrisy. Peace will never come while colonisers are allowed to call themselves victims, and those resisting occupation are called aggressors.
Until we name the violence of empire for what it is - and that’s what the West has become, the Western Empire - we will continue to live in a world where truth is inverted, and peace is postponed with every missile launched.