Trump's confession on Iran war proves Israel is merely a US military outpost in West Asia

 By Roya Pourbagher

In a candid confession, US President Donald Trump on November 5 said he was “very much in charge” of the Israeli military aggression against Iran on June 13, which led to the martyrdom of many top military commanders and nuclear scientists, as well as ordinary people.

“Israel attacked first. That attack was very, very powerful. I was very much in charge of that,” the megalomaniac, war-mongering US president told media persons at the White House.

“When Israel attacked Iran first, that was a great day for Israel because that attack did more damage than the rest of them put together,” he hastened to add.

Israel had earlier framed the aggression as “pre-emptive,” claiming without evidence that Iran was planning an attack on the Zionist entity. If so, doesn’t this confession drive a hole through that justification, since the order appears to have come from Washington?

Also, don’t Trump’s remarks make it clear, once again, that it was a pre-planned aggression engineered by the war hawks in Tel Aviv and Washington?

Let us leave these questions for the legal play at the international community stage, as Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei hinted at during his weekly presser on Monday. He called it “the newest and clearest evidence of America's definitive participation in the military aggression.”

“This explicit confession to the commission of an international crime entails the full responsibility of the US government, and we immediately, in extension of this issue, registered it as a document in the UN Security Council and the United Nations,” he asserted.

The facts are plain and crystal clear for the world to see – glaring at us like the genocide live-streamed over the past two years. US seeks to maintain its dominance in West Asia, and any entity that dares to defy its hegemonic and destabilizing policies becomes a target of Washington’s aggression.

This explains the aggression on Hezbollah and Yemen after they began supporting the Palestinian resistance against America’s “military outpost.”  

Make no mistake, all the crimes carried out by Israel in the region, from the genocide in Gaza to the devastating war on Lebanon, the attacks on Yemen, and the aggression on Iran, were at the behest of Washington because the existence of Israel in the first place was the project of the same powers that rule the US as well.

But, of course, we are dealing with the land of Hollywood, and that means the US political-military-industrial complex will get away with its acts of aggression through blatant lies, selective media framing, and theatrics.

Trump’s admission proved that the US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, lied following the June 13 Israeli strikes on Iran by saying that it was not involved in the attacks.

“Tonight, Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran, and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region,” Rubio said at the time.

US has a long tradition of using false pretenses for fanning the flames of war, and it’s hardly the first time a US Secretary of State has peddled lies to advance Washington’s interests. Colin Powell’s infamous presentation in February 2003 before the UN, claiming Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion, was later exposed as a fabrication.

Let us not forget that the US did not merely enable the initial strike; it later directly joined the war by striking Iran’s peaceful nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan using B-2 stealth bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs.

Trump subsequently celebrated the unprovoked and illegal aggression in a television address, claiming that the nuclear facilities were “completely and totally obliterated.”

However, Iran maintained that its nuclear program cannot be destroyed as it is rooted in knowledge and indigenous innovation. In response to the American aggression, Iranian missiles successfully struck the largest US military base in the region, Al-Udeid in Qatar.

Israeli regime claims to be the strongest military power in West Asia because of the hefty military aid it receives from the US, which has provided at least $16.3 billion in direct military aid to the regime since October 7, 2023.

The regime also reported that, during this period, the US supplied 90,000 tons of arms and equipment via hundreds of transport planes and over a hundred ships, including tank and artillery ammunition, rockets, and bombs, which were used in Israeli aggressions across the region.

Furthermore, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 69 percent of the regime’s arms imports came from the US between 2019 and 2023 and 30 percent from Germany – interestingly, the same countries from which the two main confessions were made.

To put it simply, if Washington pulls the plug of arms exports to Israel, all Israeli attacks would immediately halt. Thus, the US is very much capable of ending the wars it claims it didn’t start and is against, yet arms are flowing into the occupied Palestinian territories and American weapons continue to kill innocent people across the region, from Gaza to Lebanon and beyond.

The Israeli war on the Islamic Republic of Iran was no exception. The regime used the same weapons and equipment it received from the US, but still failed to achieve its objective of so-called “regime change” in Tehran. The Islamic Republic is stronger than ever and the Iranian people are more determined to confront the illegitimate offspring of the West.

Trump’s words are more than a mere confession. They are, in fact, a “criminal confession,” as described by Iran’s envoy to the UN, Amir Saeed Iravani, proving that the US and Israel have both violated the UN Charter and international humanitarian law.

Iravani stressed in a letter to the UN Secretary General and the President of the UN Security Council that Tehran has the right to pursue accountability through international legal avenues to ensure that both the US and the Zionist entity are held fully accountable and seek full reparation for the lives lost, damages caused, and losses inflicted upon the country.

It is worth noting that Trump’s confession regarding the Israeli war on Iran was not the first. German Chancellor Merz made a similar statement during an interview with the German broadcaster ZDFheute on 18 June 2025. He described Israel’s illegal attack on Iran as “dirty work for us all” and praised the Israeli army and the regime for its actions back then. In other words, Merz implied that the Israeli war on Iran was conducted on behalf of the Western world.

This is the American strategy to advance its imperialism. It will not involve itself directly, but will rather have its proxies carry out its “dirty work” (to quote the German Chancellor), intervene when necessary, withdraw when it needs to reconsider its strategies, and then re-intervene.

This pattern can be seen in nearly all American interventions and plots across the world throughout history, including the Contra war in Nicaragua, where the US funded and directed rebels to overthrow the government and a more recent example being the war on Yemen, where the US provided critical support to the Saudi-led coalition.

As for the dramatics, Trump aggressively promoted himself as the peacemaker candidate during the presidential elections. For months, Trump’s team jumped from state to state to assure American citizens that America will come first if Trump is elected and that there will be no wars with other countries. He even lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was eventually denied to him and given to another war-monger from Venezuela.

Since Trump took office, the US has launched hundreds of strikes on Yemen, killing hundreds of civilians; enabled the Israeli war on Lebanon that killed at least 4,000 people; ordered the Israeli aggression on Iran that killed over a thousand, and continued to aid and abet the genocide in Gaza that continues to claim innocent lives despite the fragile ceasefire.

Under Trump, Israel has gotten away with over five thousand ceasefire violations in Lebanon, killing over 300, as well as violations in Gaza that killed over 200 since October 10.

That’s the legacy he will leave behind – as someone who started wars himself and engaged American proxies in the region to keep the flames burning, because destabilization is what feeds the American war machine. And that’s exactly what the Israeli regime, America’s biggest military outpost in the region, has been doing on its behalf.  

Roya Pour Bagher is a Tehran-based writer.