The world is on the brink of disaster if Donald Trump follows through on his crazed threat to destroy the region’s economic base and commit possible genocide against Iran, writes Joe Lauria.
Monday, April 6 to Tuesday, April 7
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Donald Trump has threatened genocide against the sovereign state of Iran.
At 8:06 a.m. EDT Tuesday, he wrote on social media:
The post came 12 hours before the expiration of Trump’s deadline to Iran tonight to open the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping or else he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages where they belong,” as he vowed in an address to the world last week.
Saying a “whole civilization will die … never to be brought back again” can not be seen as an idle threat when made by someone who commands the lethal power to follow through with genocide. Trump has already been complicit with Israel in carrying out genocide in Gaza — as did his predecessor in the White House.
Now he has threatened to do the same against a nation that has not threatened the United States and is incapable of harming the United States beyond its military and economic assets in the region. Iran has only struck those assets in retaliation for being attacked in an unprovoked war of aggression by the United States 39 days ago.
Iran has vowed to strike civilian infrastructure in Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, such as power plants, energy installations and desalination facilities, if Trump strikes those in Iran. The widespread destruction of oil and gas facilities in the Middle East would have a devastating and long-lasting impact on the world economy.
This is what Trump is threatening.
Iran has so far been striking U.S. military bases, Israel and U.S. Gulf Arab allies, firstly in an effort to cause enough pain to stop the aggression, and secondly to cause significant changes to the Middle East that would preclude the U.S. and Israel from attacking Iran again.
These changes were outlined in a counter-proposal Iran made to the United States on Monday. According to The Palestine Chronicle:
“Iran’s response lays out a detailed set of conditions linking the end of the war to broader political, military, and economic arrangements:
- Tehran calls for an immediate and comprehensive termination of all wars across the region, including Gaza and Lebanon, accompanied by guarantees preventing any renewed escalation.
- The response rejects phased ceasefires, insisting that any agreement must directly result in a permanent end to hostilities.
- Iran also demands the full removal of economic sanctions, linking sanctions relief to both the feasibility of an agreement and post-war recovery.
- A structured protocol governing secure transit through the Strait of Hormuz is also included, placing the strategic waterway at the center of negotiations and tying it to wider regional security guarantees.
- The framework further calls for a comprehensive reconstruction process addressing infrastructure damage and humanitarian impact caused by the war.
- Tehran reiterates its position on the recognition of its right to peaceful uranium enrichment under international law.
- The response also includes demands for war reparations and broader regional security arrangements aimed at preventing future escalation, including issues related to foreign military presence in the region.”
According to this report, the Iranian proposals, which were transmitted to the U.S. via Pakistan, did not include a previous demand by Iran that United States military forces leave the Middle East. Iran has already caused considerable damage to the 13 U.S. bases in the region.
The Arab states were not protected by their presence from Iran’s retaliation and should reconsider the value of the Americans remaining. Tehran feels it can make such a history-altering demand because it has the upperhand in the fighting.
It takes a major war, like this one, to allow the redrawing of borders and rebalancing of power, such as what happened in the Middle East after the First World War, which saw the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement in the region by the British and French.
That dominance ended in 1956 with the Suez crisis after which regional power passed to the United States. Now, 70 years later comes the prospect of the end of American dominance in the Middle East.
Of course the U.S. has ridiculed Iran’s demands and sticks to its own: namely no enrichment, sharp reduction of missiles and drones and an end to Iran’s relations with regional allies. The last two are non-starters for Iran.
It is Trump’s desperation in realizing impending defeat — and the prospect of U.S. retreat from the region — that has informed his genocidal rant this morning.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
Trump threatening genocide? If Western leaders had any guts, they’d take the issue to the UN for a censure motion and a resolution stating the war is illegal and a crime against humanity.
What is wrong with these leaders that they are too weak and ineffectual to hold tyranny and major abuses of power to account?
Genocide…
This is what they do!
This is a Zionist-Iran war. From the Zionist Empire’s perspective, they have already captured Europe and America. Now they are going after West Asia. This is why Israel is attacking Lebanon even though it is being hit by Iran. Their big vassal America is to take down Iran while Israel takes down Lebanon.
Trump is in full Zionist mode, exhibiting all Zionism’s arrogance, cruelty, and insanity. Trump’s personality is not the central issue. The Zionist Empire’s quest to rule the world from Jerusalem is the central problem.
The Samson Option means if they cannot dominate the world they will destroy it. This insane cult must be destroyed decisively.
Not even Hitler talked like that.
Tick-tock its 6 o’clock
The doomsday clock , hands near in tune .
Does it almost say
Midnight or high noon ?
Will theTimes Square Jumbotron cuckoo clock drop the ball ?
If the US and Israel escalate their criminal war, hundreds of thousands of people, probably millions, are going to die of starvation in famines because the world will have lost a major part of its capacity to produce fertilizers. [See the CN article by Vijay Prashad]
The US and Israel are expanding the Gaza genocide to Iran. They will not stop there. They have a history of this. Do you not remember the 8 year long humanitarian crisis in Yemen?
There are but a few brave states still standing against genocide: Iran, Yemen, Palestine, and Lebanon (Hizbollah). They are quietly support by Russia and China who recognized the imperial violence being visited on the world (e.g Cuba, Venezuela, Ukraine, Somalia, and all of the coups …).
The lack of an international coalition vociferously condemning the illegal behaviour of the US and Israel means the local political cost for doing so is greater than the silence of failing to act.
The US and Israeli genocide in Gaza is still active. The silent states of the world are appeasing the expansion of that genocide to more genocides and soon famines.
The US is at the heart of this sociopathy. The US is condemning itself to one of the blackest stains in its history.
Its political leaders would benefit from a consultation with Lady Macbeth.
I heard LtCol Karen Kwiatkowski mention a panel discussion over weekend in which Ben-Givr was asked ISMW: Why not use the neutron bombs?
I tend to give that a high probability of being disinfo/propaganda. All sources I’ve been through tend to agree with Wikipedia that the last such bomb was dismantled in 1996. But, if something else has been the case, it’s a story on an Epstein scale…bigger. For me for sure I’d need more corroboration, and right now I don’t think it’s out there.
The panel. hxxps://www.youtube.com/shorts/CFI-PBJvwbw
Kwiatkowski speaking here hxxps://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=2410334852761958
If Tehran didn’t have the ability to send the Gulf satrapies back to the “Stone Age!” it’s likely Washington would’ve inflicted much greater damage on Iran up to this point. If push really comes to shove, Israel will jettison all the Arab states in its paranoid and hegemonic quest to obliterate Iran. The Sauds etc will rue the day they ever hitched their wagon to the psychopathological freaks.
Trying to scare people into buying into Albanian bomb shelters?
“Jared Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, plans a $1.4 billion luxury resort on Albania’s Sazan Island, a former Cold War military base featuring thousands of communist-era bunkers and tunnels. The project, which received preliminary approval in 2024–2025, intends to integrate some of these bunkers, which formerly stored weapons, into the resort’s design”
Cause and effect it also could give the Iranians reasons to hobble together a makeshift civilization ending devive of their own?
Or we could play nice?
‘….a whole civilisation’ to die.
What ? Including those Iranians who took to the street a few weeks ago and many of whom got gunned down for protesting against the same regime that Washington hates ?
Trump wants to kill them too ?
Who was ‘begging’ who for a deal ?
This violent bigot has bitten off more than his military can chew, this time.
The United States of Perpetual Violence needs a bent and bloodied nose to realise that it simply cannot shape the entire world to its own self-serving preferences.
“A sickness unto death” (Soren Kierkegaard), it is to fear
that genocide is the American Way.
Sounds right.
It is the way of the Western Europeans and all their descendants.