TEHRAN – “Help is on the way,” is what U.S. President Donald Trump stated back in January, as he urged the Iranian people to seize government buildings, police stations, and military bases, to take up arms, and to kill their authorities and security forces.
The “help” he referred to was not the lifting of the sanctions he imposed against Iran in 2018, sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy and squeezed the pockets of every Iranian citizen. That aid arrived weeks later, on February 28th, in the form of an airstrike on an elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minaab.
The school was full of students when the attack occurred. They were in their classrooms, listening to their teachers. Some were learning multiplication, some were learning to read for the first time in their lives, and others were exploring the world of science. Perhaps some students were hoping the school bell would ring soon so they could leave for the playground, maybe share some snacks with friends, and wish the next class period wouldn’t start.
None of those students imagined that in the blink of an eye, 168 of them would be lying lifeless in the rubble, with the remaining children waiting for help alongside their dead friends and mutilated limbs.
Yet, this was the nature of Trump’s “help,” which he continued to market as a favor to the Iranian people. In a statement delivered shortly after the war began, Trump said he had launched the aggression for the “freedom” of Iranians.
“To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand… when are finished, take over your government,” he stated. His secretary of war, Pete Hegseth later said that the U.S. did not plan affect a “democratic” transition in Iran and refused to establish a clear timeline for how long the deadly strikes against the Iranian nations will continue.
In his statement, Trump also said that Iranians must understand “no other American president” has done what he has. He was, of course, mistaken. Several American presidents bear the blood of the Iranian people on their hands. This includes the 8-year war Saddam Hussein’s Iraq launched against Iran at the behest and with the support of Washington, as well as over four decades of U.S. sanctions that have deprived Iranians of medicine, food, or certain technologies. Way before that, there was the 1953 Iranian coup, orchestrated by the U.S. and U.K., which overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
When addressing his own people, Trump again speaks as if he is doing them a favor by using their taxpayers’ money and endangering American soldiers to attack Iran. At least five U.S. forces are dead already. But Trump tells his people that they died eliminating a “threat”. That threat was apparently present in an elementary school located hundreds of kilometres away from the dead soldiers’ home country.
Children are also deemed threats in Gaza, where tens of thousands of them have been brutally killed over the past two years. When Trump speaks of that region, which he helped Israel raze to the ground, he once again makes no mention of the tragic casualties. Instead, he speaks about the luxury resorts and the industrial complexes he wishes to build on the bones of these children.
But despite all this, Trump made clear during Monday remarks to U.S. media that the dozens of schoolgirls he has killed, the several hospitals and medical facilities he has damaged, and the residential buildings he has destroyed in Iran are not “big” enough for him.
“We haven’t even started hitting them hard. The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon,” he stated.
Reference :www.tehrantimes.com
