In a news conference on Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the White House’s latest strikes on Iranian nuclear sites “highly successful.” But longtime anti-war activists see the strikes as a horrific decision by the Trump administration to attack a country that had not attacked the United States.
ANN WRIGHT; [email protected]
Wright is an anti-war activist, a retired Army colonel, and a former U.S. diplomat. In 2003, she was one of three State Department officials to publicly resign in protest of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Wright told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “I resigned from the Army in 2003 because the government was telling lies. Trump is spewing the same old lies. Don’t believe what your government is saying [about these strikes]; they’re lying through their teeth. And don’t believe that Trump is a ‘peace president,’ because he’s far from it. He has specific people in his cabinet that are warmongers up the wazoo. It’s hard to get that point across, because the people we want to influence are Trump supporters who still think Trump is a peace president. We need to influence these folks who will make a difference in the next election.
“The anti-war response was pretty fast and strong, but it didn’t deter Trump from doing what he did. It’s hard to tell who was actually making the decisions. Trump’s advisers have no strategic or military sense. They have a sense of what Trump may want for the moment, rather than the strategic implications.
“The mainstream media refuses to emphasize that the government of Iran continues to say that it will never have a nuclear weapon. That has been the statement from Iranian leaders forever: that it is against Islamic principles to possess a nuclear weapon. Even U.S. intelligence has stated that Iran was not on the road to a nuclear weapon… Yet Trump went along with the state of Israel’s bombing campaign. The decision came quickly and decisively to use these ‘bunker buster’ bombs, which are the biggest bombs the U.S. has and can supposedly go through many layers of concrete. The U.S. dropped 14 of these bombs. This is a major confrontation with Iran that Iran, and agents of Iran, will not forget about. They are perfectly capable of wreaking vengeance on the U.S. They are being polite about their responses to U.S. aggression, but at a certain point, they won’t be polite. At the time of their choosing, they will decide how they want to respond to U.S. aggression.”