by James Corbett
March 22, 2026
from TheCorbettReport Website


 

 

 

 

The Spanish-American War had "Remember the Maine!"

 

WWI had babies on bayonets.

 

WWII had Pearl Harbor.

 

Vietnam had the Gulf of Tonkin.

 

Gulf War I had babies thrown from incubators.

 

Gulf War II had weapons of mass destruction.

 

Libya had a "spontaneous people's uprising" against Gaddafi's viagra-fueled rape squads.

 

Syria had madman Assad gassing his own people...

 

Every single one of these casus belli was a deception, of course - a false flag or a provoked incident or a completely fictitious non-event designed to whip up the masses' lust for blood and desire for revenge.

 

But note that in each and every one of these cases, the puppeteers of the American Empire had to at least try to deceive the public in order to win their support for war in some faraway land.

 

So,

What justification have we been given for the Iran war?

 

Why did the US and Israel pull the trigger on this war now?

As usual, there are three answers:

  • the slop given to the masses

  • the slop given to the middlebrow who believe themselves to be better than the masses

  • the truth

Today, let's dig through the lies and find the kernel of truth at the bottom of the smoking crater hole left by the Iran war.

 

 

 

 

WHY DID AMERICA ATTACK?

 

 

 

 

Let me get this straight:

we're expected to believe that Donald Trump became so fearful of the "imminent threat" of an attack by Iran (whose nuclear program he COMPLETELY OBLITERATED last year) that he had to suddenly start bombing them in the midst of peace negotiations - negotiations that even insiders admit Iran was approaching in good faith?

 

And he is WINNING this war so thoroughly that he has to beg his NATO allies for help in securing the Strait of Hormuz and then lambaste those self-same allies as unnecessary when they refuse?

 

And the same room temperature IQ statists who insisted Trump would be the "Peace President" and who bleated that he'd be "better than Kamala" are now telling us that this is all part of some 16D backgammon maneuver to undermine the deep state or reverse judo flip Netanyahu or set the Iranian people free or whatever else the QAnonsense crazies and Trump voters are consoling themselves with these days?

But wait....

 

If all of this were really about annihilating the Big Bad Ayatollah Bogeymen and securing a free and democratic Iran, then,

Why is it that the Iranian government is now set to financially benefit from these attacks?

 

And why was it the Western insurance companies - not the Iranians - who closed the Strait of Hormuz?

 

And how is the Strait actually closed anyway?

Hmmm...

 

If I didn't know better, I'd say we're being lied to about this "war." What do you think?

 

Yes, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this war is definitely not about Iran's nuclear program or about thwarting any perceived Iranian threat.

 

In fact, we don't even have to go out on a limb to come to that conclusion.

 

We can take it from UK National Security Advisor Jonathan Powell, who was at the US/Iran talks in Geneva in February and who reports he was "surprised by what the Iranians put on the table" and by how close they were to a peace deal.

 

Then there's US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who testified at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that,

"Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated" as a result of last year's strike and that they have made "no efforts to try to rebuild their enrichment capability."

And, lest there be any doubt about the matter, Joe Kent resigned his post as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center this past week, stating that Iran posed "no imminent threat" to the US.

 

So, why did the US go to war?

 

Powell didn't mince words about what he saw during the negotiations in Geneva:

"We regarded [US negotiators] Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of."

Nor did Kent mince words about his own read on the situation:

"The Israelis drove the decision to take this action, which we knew would set off a series of events because the Iranians would retaliate."

And if all that isn't enough for you, how about this:

as Stephen McIntyre points out, the White House's March 2 press release on "The Iranian Regime's Decades of Terrorism Against American Citizens" was plagiarized nearly word-for-word from a June 2025 document produced by a former AIPAC employee working for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Zionist-funded, pro-war, anti-Iran lobby group founded to "enhance Israel's image in North America."

But we don't have to take it from those well-known, high-ranking conspiracy wackadoodles.

 

Why don't we take it from arch-neocon (and Larry Ellison-vetted) deep state stooge Marco Rubio?

 

He caused a brouhaha earlier this month when he said the quiet part out loud:

It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone - the United States or Israel or anyone - they [the Iranians] were going to respond, and respond against the United States.

 

We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.

 

We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.

In other words:

Israel was going to attack Iran, which would cause Iran to retaliate against US targets in the region.

 

Thus, the US had to preemptively strike Iran before the Iranians could retaliate against the attacks that hadn't occurred yet.

Sounds like perfect Alice-in-Wonderland logic to me...!

 

At any rate, it seems we found the answer:

the US attacked because Israel decided to attack.

So, now we've arrived at the next question:

why did Israel attack Iran...?

 

 

 

WHY DID ISRAEL ATTACK?

 

 

 

 

Once we get past the crude, cartoon-level propaganda that's doled out for the Fox News viewers and Trump voters and other assorted rubes, we get to the second level of this propaganda pyramid: Israel did it!

 

And, once we acknowledge the Israeli puppeteer pulling the strings of the American Empire, we can start examining the motivations of that puppeteer.

 

What reason does Israel have for steering the US into another war in the Middle East?

 

Once again, we can examine (and promptly dismiss) the propaganda being proffered by the Israeli government to explain these strikes to the masses.

 

In fact, we need only ask Israeli Prime Minister (and unconvicted war criminal) Benjamin Netanyahu why he's so intent on bombing Iran, and he'll be more than happy to tell you.

 

The only question is which decade of Netanyahu's never-ending Iran warmongering rhetoric we should listen to.

 

There was 2025 Netanyahu:

"If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time."

And 2010s Netanyahu:

"By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates, they [the Iranians] will have finished the medium enrichment and moved on to the final stage.

 

From there, it's only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb."

And 2000s Netanyahu:

"I believe the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, just found traces of plutonium and uranium for the production of atomic bombs.

 

These bombs are in the first instance aimed at Israel. Make no mistake about it.

 

But they don't intend to just hit Israel. Iran is gearing up to have - to produce 25 bombs - atomic bombs - a year. 250 bombs in a decade."

And who could forget 1990s Netanyahu:

"Iran will be capable of producing alone - without importing anything - nuclear bombs within three to five years."

You heard it here first, folks!

The Ayatollahs have been weeks away from nuking the entire world for the past 30 years!

 

Thus, Israel had to launch a war against Iran (through their US proxy, of course).

Naturally, fears over Iran's non-existent nuclear program are and always have been pro wrestling theatrics, complete with Looney Tunes-level cartoon bombs and other cheap gimmicks to gain attention and bamboozle the easily misled.

 

In reality, Israel's geopolitical position on Iran has been evolving since the Israeli-Iranian alliance that held sway under the Pahlavi dynasty, which ruled Iran from 1925 until the Shah's ouster in 1979.

 

Iran was in fact the second Muslim-majority country to recognize the State of Israel.

 

The two nations enjoyed a close alliance during this period, with Israel's Mossad helping to train the Shah's fearsome SAVAK secret police. The countries even exchanged ambassadors in the 1970s.

 

With the Islamic revolution in 1979, however, Israel's position on Iran turned. Israel did act as middleman for the US in the Iran-Contra Affair, passing arms to Iran on behalf of Uncle Sam, but there was an ulterior motive for this action.

 

As former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens later admitted, Israel's real objective in forwarding arms to Iran,

"was to see if we could not find some areas of contact with the Iranian military, to bring down the Khomeini regime."

By 1996, Israel's Iran strategy had shifted again.

 

That was the year proto-neocons Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser helped draft "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," a foreign policy planning document for then-incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

 

In this document, Israeli planning focused on destabilizing Iranian allies in the region, including Syria and Lebanon, as a way of reducing Iranian influence over the Middle East.

 

By the 2000s, Israel - empowered by its success steering the US into a war in Iraq - became emboldened in its secret war on Iran.

 

In his 2007 article, "The Redirection," journalist Seymour Hersh outlined how the Bush Administration, guided by Israeli intelligence, was shifting its Middle East policy in order to undermine Iran.

 

Hersh followed up in 2012 with "Our Men in Iran," a report detailing,

how the US Joint Special Operations Command was working with Israel's Mossad to train the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a "dissident Iranian opposition group" that enjoyed the twin privilege of being on the US State Department's foreign terrorist organization list and serving as the Zionist neocons' favourite terror cult.

But the USrael deep state's machinations in Iran during this period did not end there.

 

This is the same time frame in which the CIA was confirmed to be working with Jundullah, a Sunni Salafi militant organization in southeastern Iran that the agency considered employing,

"as a piece in a covert-action campaign against Iran" before allegedly deciding that the group was "uncontrollable and too close to al-Qaeda."

This was also the time that US and Israeli cyber warriors were developing Stuxnet - the first offensive cyberweapon designed to spy on and subvert industrial systems - as part of an even more widespread cyberattack against Iran.

 

And this was also the period when Israel was assassinating Iranian scientists with impunity.

 

It wasn't until Trump moved back into the Oval Office in January 2025, however, that Netanyahu and his fellow Zionist warmongers realized they were finally going to achieve their decades-long dream: getting the US to bomb Iran.

 

We know the machinations that led to the bombings of Iran's nuclear sites last June, the so-called "twelve-day war" that supposedly "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program.

 

We know, for instance, that Palantir had a role in kicking off the strange set of events that led to the IAEA suddenly voting to censure Iran over its noncompliance with inspectors, reversing its long-standing position that Iran had not diverted its nuclear material to a weapons program.

 

And we know that it was Israel who initiated that war by launching its "Operation Rising Lion," a wave of attacks against Iran that Netanyahu called a,

"targeted military operation to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel's very survival",

...and that ended with the US using bunker buster bombs on Iran's heavily fortified Fordow nuclear site.

 

After that, it was only a question of when Netanyahu would once again bid his faithful servant Trump to go back and finish the job with an all-out invasion of Iran.

 

Along the way, we've experienced some truly remarkable Israeli war crimes:

not only the ongoing, unfolding Gaza genocide - which Trump has attempted to lend legitimacy with his laughably named "Board of Peace" - but the bombing of Qatar, a neutral third party that was hosting ongoing negotiations between Hamas and Israel.

And now the pieces on the chessboard have all lined up to Israel's satisfaction.

 

The order has been given, and, according to Rubio, Kent and other knowledgeable sources, Israel has decided to launch the US war on Iran.

 

So, there you have it:

Israel attacked Iran through its US proxy.

 

Case closed!

And this is where those who have managed to see through the first level of deception:

the "they were going to attack us!" canard - will be content to stop.

 

Israel did it.

 

There's nothing more to say.

But there are other pieces of this puzzle that point to something even grander at play in these events.

 

 

 

 

WHAT'S THE 3D REALITY?

 

 

 

 

Alright, then. It all seems pretty clear now:

Netanyahu used his leverage over Trump to get the US to join his war against Iran in order to secure Israel's regional dominance.

But if that is the narrative, then we have to hold off a minute here.

 

There are some pieces of this puzzle that don't quite seem to fit.

 

You see, rather than displaying the irresistible, awesome, unstoppable power of the USrael juggernaut, this conflict is instead demonstrating the opposite:

USrael can't even secure the Strait of Hormuz, let alone topple the Iranian government.

In fact, Iran is not only in a position to declare that they are the ones who are in fact "winning" this conflict, they're revealing that their military hardware is more advanced than previously known.

 

And the resulting oil crisis has led the US to actually lift sanctions on Iranian oil, directly enabling the very "regime" Washington is so intent on changing.

 

As Kit Knightly points out over at Off Guardian, perhaps the most telling part of this stage-managed war narrative is the very strange tug-of-war over the Strait of Hormuz.

 

As Knightly correctly observes, the clearly manipulated stage play of the closing of the Strait,

...has led to the next narrative being propounded by the establishment press:

the squabble over the Strait will lead to a never-ending state of perma-war between the West and whoever is in control of Iran.

It is not in Trump's power to reopen this vital sea passage by declaring victory and walking away.

 

Instead his war with Iran - and the particular issue of the Strait of Hormuz - will define the rest of his presidency and may haunt his successors.

 

That is because the strait's closure creates both an immediate crisis and a long-term strategic quandary.

 

The current problem is that the longer it is closed, the greater the threat of a global recession. The future dilemma is that Iran now knows that control of the Strait of Hormuz gives it a stranglehold over the world economy.

 

Even if it relaxes its grip in the short term, it can tighten it again in future.

Oh, goodie...

 

So, even in the absolute best-case scenario - if Trump were to TACO his way out of this, declare victory, pack up the troops and come home - the Deep State has already assured that the war will never truly be over.

 

At any time they like, they can use their anonymous sources to plant another scare story about non-existent sea mines (or whatever other fictitious threat they choose to gin up) and the world economy will be on its knees again.

 

No,

this war is not about "freeing the people of Iran" or "stopping the Iranian nuclear program."

But anyone with two brain cells to rub together already knew that.

 

Neither is this war taking place because after thirty years of trying to get the US to bomb Iran, Israel simply decided it was time.

 

Rather,

like every other event of world-historical significance, this event is taking place because it checks the boxes for a number of players in the global power structure.

Ultimately,

this battle isn't about fulfilling the geopolitical interests of an individual nation-state.

 

It's about progressing the narrative of the same banking interests that puppeteer all of the players on the global chessboard.

Yes, my readers will not be surprised to discover that this conflict is part of the 3D chess match that defines our global conspiracy reality.

 

Nor will they be surprised to discover that, in broad terms, the Iran war is being waged in fulfillment of The Great (Global) Reset™ to Build Back Better™ with a shinier, happier, newer New World Order...!

 

But they may be surprised to learn what specific part of the Great Reset agenda is being advanced here.

 

And what part is that, precisely?

You'll have to stay tuned for the next episode of to find out the answer to that question...!

In the meantime, I'll just leave with you this hint:

a headline that floated through the news wires recently and that was largely lost amid the heady tumult of war news.

"Iran mulls allowing tankers through Strait of Hormuz if trade conducted in yuan."