Aletho News

“Smart War” and State Terrorism

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | July 1, 2025

On June 16, 2025, President Donald Trump threatened the 10 million inhabitants of Tehran, Iran, with death, for their government’s alleged nuclear aspirations.

The message was posted to the president’s Truth Social account, shared on X/Twitter, and then picked up by all major mass media outlets, making it common knowledge to everyone on the planet that Trump was preparing to join Israel’s war on Iran.

On June 17, 2025, President Trump directly threatened Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei with assassination.

Sometimes crazy people issue vague threats which they have no power to follow through on. Such persons are best avoided and ignored. In order to be effective, death threats must be credible, otherwise there is no fear generated in the persons being addressed, for they recognize that they are dealing with no more and no less than a feckless buffoon. Whatever one may think of President Trump, his menacing social media posts are credible threats, given his official role as commander-in-chief with the power to unleash formidable military might on the people of the world. In case anyone did not already know this, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reminded the press corps on June 20, 2025, that “Iran and the entire world should know that the United States military is the strongest and most lethal fighting force in the world, and we have capabilities that no other country on this planet possesses.”

Trump’s warning to the entire population of Tehran that they should all evacuate the city was a fortiori a credible threat, given the U.S. government’s wide-ranging “War on Terror,” during which both Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded and occupied. Several other countries were subjected to thousands of missile strikes “outside areas of active hostilities,” that is, where there were no U.S. troops present and thus no force-protection pretext for the use of state-inflicted homicide.

Verbal threats of the use of deadly force by a president often culminate in military action because the commander may be easily persuaded by his advisors to believe that he (and the nation) will lose credibility if he fails to follow through on his words, which, he is told, would be a sign of weakness. Predictably enough, then, on June 22, 2025, President Trump delivered on his threat to bomb Iran, although he claimed to have struck only three specific sites: Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz. It was at these sites where nuclear enrichment and the development of nuclear arms were allegedly underway. The Trump administration’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reported to members of congress in March 2025: “The [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

On June 17, 2025, when a journalist reminded Trump of Director Gabbard’s assessment, the president bluntly blurted out, “I don’t care what she said.” It has become increasingly obvious that Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East is primarily informed not by his own cabinet but by the intelligence services of Israel, above all, Mossad.

For anyone unfamiliar with the modus operandi and general demeanor of Mossad, I recommend the films Munich (2005), The Gatekeepers (2012), and The Operative (2020).

That Trump has been decisively influenced by the government of Israel was further evidenced by his direct threat against Supreme Leader Khamenei and the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been calling for regime change in Iran for decades.

On June 20, 2025, two days before Trump’s missile strikes on Iran, Director Gabbard did an about-face, insisting that her earlier testimony before congress had been misrepresented and ignored her finding that Iran had been enriching uranium:

Gabbard’s retraction, or creative reinterpretation, of her former testimony bears similarities to the case of Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell, who initially opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then for reasons which remain unclear suddenly became one of the mission’s most ardent supporters. In Powell’s case, he went even so far as to present the case for war to a less-than-enthusiastic United Nations Security Council. After a colorful Powerpoint presentation featuring an array of ersatz evidence—ranging from speculation about Iraq’s aluminum test tubes, to a receipt for “yellow cake” purchase, to photos of what were claimed to be mobile chemical labs—Powell recognized that he did not have the votes needed to secure U.N. approval and so abruptly withdrew the war resolution. The United States then proceeded to invade Iraq unimpeded, claiming, among other things, that the 2003 military intervention was legal because of previous U.N. resolutions violated by President Saddam Hussein. In other words, after having sought U.N. approval, the U.S. government suddenly denied that it needed such approval before invading Iraq anyway.

Unlike George W. Bush, when Donald Trump bombed Iran “at a time of his choosing,” as they say, he did not have the support of the U.S. congress. Presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump all depended on the Bush-era AUMFs as they continued to lob missiles on several countries beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, et al. But the carte blanche AUMFs granted to Bush in 2001 and 2002 had nothing whatsoever to do with the conflict between Israel and Iran. Neocons naturally devise all manner of interpretive epicyclic curlicues to arrive at the conclusion that Iran is in fact “fair game” for bombing. As stated and ratified, however, the AUMFs granted by congress to George W. Bush were intended to facilitate the U.S. president’s quest to bring justice to the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 crimes.

Lest anyone forget, President Trump was not unique among twenty-first century presidents in bombing countries whose residents had nothing to do with the shocking demolition of the World Trade Center. President Obama effected a regime change in Libya without securing the support of congress because, he claimed, it was not really a war, since he was not deploying any ground troops. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did her part to persuade Obama that “Gaddafi must go!” She later characterized the Libya intervention as a shining example of “smart power at its best,” even though a few U.S. State Department officials, including the ambassador to Libya, Christopher Steele, were killed in the post-bombing mêlée. Today, Libya is essentially a failed state. Obama himself has confessed that the biggest regret and worst mistake of his presidency (reported in The Guardian) was not having a plan for the aftermath of his supposedly “humanitarian” intervention, which he enlisted NATO to carry out.

In the immediate aftermath of the June 22, 2025 missile strikes, Trump officials followed the Obama administration’s Libya playbook in insisting that his attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was not the beginning of a long, protracted engagement in Iran. This was meant to draw contrast with the unpopular multi-decade wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ignoring Trump’s threat to the residents of Tehran, Vice President J.D. Vance and others recited the Obama administration refrain that the mission was “not a war” with Iran. As Vance explained, the limited missile strikes were carried out only in order to dismantle Iran’s nuclear facilities. According to the government of Iran, a total of 610 people were killed and thousands more injured by the bombs of the U.S. and Israeli governments. However, none of the persons who perished were Americans.

Availing himself of the Obama-era “smart war” trope, Vice President Vance also observed that Trump’s preemptive military strikes differed from those of his predecessors because, unlike Trump, the previous presidents were “dumb”. Oliver Stone produced a film, W (2008), which persuasively portrays Bush as a half-wit, but no one ever suggested that Vice President Dick Cheney or the cadre of other war profiteers and neocons who coaxed Bush into preemptively attacking Iraq were stupid.

In any case, by now, the U.S. government has directly massacred so many thousands of people (and millions indirectly) in so many different countries, often located outside areas of active hostility (war zones or lands under occupation), that the citizenry has become largely inured to it all. Tragically, over the course of the twenty-first century, we have witnessed an apparently permanent paradigm shift to the profligate state use of homicide to terrorize and kill anyone anywhere deemed dangerous or even suspicious by U.S. officials or their contracted analysts. This radical paradigm shift was made possible by a new technology: the weaponized drone, which began to be used by the Bush administration first under a pretext of force protection in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush team effectively initiated the Drone Age by firing a missile on a group of terrorist suspects driving down a road in Yemen on November 3, 2002.

As the Global War on Terror stretched on and angry jihadists began to proliferate and spread throughout the region, President Obama assumed the drone warrior mantel with alacrity, opting to kill rather than capture thousands of suspected terrorists outside areas of active hostilities. In his enthusiasm for drone killing, Obama went even so far as to intentionally and premeditatedly hunt down and kill U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki (located in Yemen at the time, in 2011), without indicting him, much less allowing him to stand trial, for his alleged crimes.

Following the Obama precedent, in 2015, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron opted to execute British nationals Ruhul Amin and Reyaad Khan, who were suspected of complicity in terrorism, after they had fled from the U.K. to Syria, and despite the fact that the parliament had rejected Cameron’s call for war on Syria. Cameron’s missile strikes against British citizens located abroad was all the more surprising because capital punishment is illegal in the U.K. as well as the European Union, of which Britain was a member at that time.

One state-perpetrated assassination leads to another, and on January 3, 2020, President Trump authorized the targeted killing via drone strike of a top Iranian commander, Qassem Soleimani, who was in Baghdad on a diplomatic mission at the time. Trump openly proclaimed, and indeed bragged, that the homicide, which he authorized, was intentional and premeditated. According to the president, Soleimani was responsible for past and future attacks against both Israel and the United States. The summary execution of a specific, named individual would have been considered an illegal act of assassination in centuries past but today is accepted by many as an “act of war” for the sophomoric reason that it is carried out by a military strike rather than undercover spies armed with poisons or garrottes.

In view of Trump’s unabashed, vaunted, assassination of Soleimani, and his full-throated support of Netanyahu, the threat to liquidate Supreme Leader Khamenei was just as credible as the “evacuation order” to the entire population of Tehran. Leaders today exult over their use of cutting-edge technology to eliminate specific, named individuals, as though summarily executing the victims were obviously permissible, given that targeted killing is now regarded by governments the world over as one of the military’s standard operating procedures. Such unlawful actions were fully normalized as a tool of “smart war” during the eight-year Obama presidency.

Shortly after Trump officials went out on the media circuit to insist that the bombing of Iran’s alleged nuclear production facilities was not the initiation of a U.S.-Iran war, Trump took to social media again, this time to suggest that his administration’s ultimate goal might really be regime change:

Less than one day later, the new official narrative became that Trump had masterfully brought the “twelve-day war” to a miraculous close, thanks to his superlative deal-making capabilities.

All of this would be risible, if not for the fact that many millions of persons in Iran continue to live under a persistent threat of death, given the wildly unpredictable comportment of President Trump, seemingly exacerbated by his longstanding commitment to stand by Israel, regardless of how outrageously Netanyahu behaves. The more and more daring acts of assassination perpetrated by the government of Israel clearly illustrate where state-perpetrated homicide and its attendant terrorist effects under a specious guise of “smart war” eventually lead.

Targeting named terrorist suspects allegedly responsible for previous crimes swiftly expanded to include signature strikes against groups of unarmed persons designated potentially dangerous and located anywhere in the world—in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, or anywhere else they please. The Israeli government has even deployed exploding cellphones and car bombs, the latter of which was once a tactic primarily deployed by dissident anti-government groups and crime syndicates. The repeated use by the Israeli government of car bombs to kill research scientists illuminates the slippery slope from missile strikes outside areas of active hostilities to what are empirically indistinguishable from Mafia hits. Car bombs have long been used by the Mafia and other nongovernmental organized crime groups, but the Israeli government openly perpetrates the very same acts under cover of “national self defense”.

Washington’s normalization of assassinations has emboldened leaders such as Netanyahu, who today conducts himself according to the principle “everything is permitted” in the name of the sacrosanct State. Witness what has been going on in Gaza since October 7, 2023: terrorism, torture, starvation, and summary execution. All of this is being condoned by every leader in the world who continues to voice support for, or even aids and abets, Netanyahu’s mass slaughter. This support for mass slaughter is provided ostensibly under the assumption that the perpetrators are doing no more and no less than defending the State of Israel.

Following the examples of U.S. Presidents Trump and Obama, and UK Prime Minister Cameron, all of whom publicly vaunted their assassination prowess, Prime Minister Netanyahu, having apparently recognized that the implement of homicide is in fact morally irrelevant, openly and brazenly executes persons determined by Mossad to be dangerous, with no concern for the thousands of innocent persons’ lives ruined along the way. In Operation Red Wedding, the Israeli government claimed to have dispatched, in a matter of minutes, thirty senior officials associated with the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) including military chiefs and top commanders located throughout Iran at the opening of the June 2025 “Twelve-Day War.” The operation was praised by the pro-Israel media as featuring “bespoke” acts of targeted killing made possible by “pattern of life” intelligence.

Drone assassination, successfully marketed by the Obama team as “smart war,” smoothed the way to the uncritical acceptance by many citizens of the reprobate expansion of state killing to include acts historically committed by members of nongovernmental organized crime. Looking back, the rebranding by U.S. officials of political assassination as an act of war, provided only that the implement of death is a missile, was a slick and largely successful way of persuading U.S. citizens to believe that extrajudicial, state-inflicted homicide abroad is an acceptable means to conflict resolution. Even though it bypasses all of the republican procedures forged over millennia, including judicial means, for reconciling the rival claims of adversaries.

In the maelstrom of the twenty-first-century wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, assassination was labeled targeted killing and successfully sold to politicians as “smart war,” a surgically precise way to defeat the enemy without sacrificing combatant troops. Whichever label is used, assassination or targeted killing, acts of summary execution by governments involve the intentional, premeditated elimination of persons suspected to be possibly dangerous, a criterion so vague as to permit the targeting of virtually any able-bodied person who happens to be located in a place where terrorists are thought to reside.

There are three differences between “targeted killing” carried out by drone warriors and assassination. First, the weapon being used is a missile. Second, drone operators wear uniforms, while undercover assassins and hitmen do not. Third, far from being “surgically precise,” drone warfare increases the slaughter of innocent bystanders in their own civil societies, which is facilely dismissed as the “collateral damage” of war. In this way, the advent of lethal drones and their use outside areas of active hostility has served to terrorize entire populations forced to endure the hovering above their heads of machines which may—or may not—emit missiles at any given time on any given day.

Credible death threats to heads of state and evacuation orders issued to millions of people not only terrorize the persons being addressed, but also undermine the security of the citizens of the United States. The populace will bear the brunt of the blowback caused by such reckless behavior on the part of officials who operate with effective impunity and are ignorant of or oblivious to the nation’s republican origins. By launching preemptive missile strikes, the Pentagon does not protect but sabotages the interests and well-being of not only U.S. citizens but also the citizens of the world.

Nonetheless, many U.S. politicians and members of the populace, along with heads of state such as Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, et al., having been thoroughly seduced by the “smart war” marketing line, appear to have no problem whatsoever with the tyrannical and arguably deranged death threats of the U.S. president. They have become altogether habituated to the assassination of persons now regarded as a standard operating procedure of war. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen effectively condoned Trump’s behavior by issuing this statement in the aftermath of the June 22, 2025 U.S. missile strikes against Iran: “Iran must never acquire the bomb.”

If terrorism is the arbitrary killing of or threat of death against innocent persons, then there can be no further doubt that the largest state sponsor and perpetrator of terrorism in the twenty-first century is in fact the U.S. government. President Trump inherited from President Obama and his mentor, drone-killing czar John Brennan (appointed by Obama as CIA director in 2013), the capacity to terrorize entire civilian populations and execute individuals at his caprice. No less than every drone strike launched in the vicinity of civilian populations beyond war zones, Trump’s completely unhinged threat to a group of people with nowhere to seek refuge, and no way of knowing whether the U.S. president is issuing a serious warning or simply bluffing, attempting some sort of perverse ploy to bring Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei back to the negotiation table (where he was, before Israel began bombing Iran), was an act of terrorism.

It is not “smart” to terrorize millions of human beings in the name of preventing terrorism. It is a contradiction, pure and simple.

Laurie Calhoun is a Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times,We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique. In 2015, she began traveling around the world while writing. In 2020, she returned to the United States, where she remained until 2023 as a result of the COVID-19 travel restrictions imposed by governments nearly everywhere.

July 1, 2025 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Obama, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment