Hamid Dabashi: Trump-Netanyahu war aims to entrap Iranians into unconditional submission

On Saturday, as President Donald Trump announced that the United States had launched a major attack on Iran, the Israeli military declared that the joint US-Israeli attack had targeted "dozens of military targets" in Iran.

Trump said the operation was intended to devastate Iran's military, eliminate its nuclear programme and bring about a change in its government.

Meanwhile, massive explosions were reported in Tehran, while residents said they were seeing smoke rising from districts believed to house senior Iranian officials.

As the world wakes up to this news and sits at the receiving end of multiple propaganda outlets trying to spin the news in one way or another, here are the four militant factors at work with the fate of more than 90 million human beings at stake. 

The first factor is the unleashed power of the US military with Trump, an unhinged commander-in-chief eager and willing to distract attention from his domestic (Epstein files), regional (adventurism in Venezuela, Cuba and Greenland) and global (China and Russia) fiascos. 

He habitually lied when he staged a false negotiation with the Iranians to buy time to have enough military buildup to strike Iran effectively.

In the US, this is a widely unpopular war waged on Iran. The singular task of the corporate media, led by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, is now to sell this war as "preemptive". 

They will fool no one. [MORE]