WashPo: Netanyahu Decided on Iran War Last Year, Then Moved to Recruit Trump

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
Jun. 26, 2025

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided on launching a war with Iran last year and just made up some phony intelligence to justify an attack and encourage President Donald Trump to join in.



From The Washington Post, "Netanyahu decided on Iran war last year, then sought to recruit Trump" (Archive):
In the fall, long before President Donald Trump embarked on an effort to resolve concerns over Iran's nuclear program through negotiations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already set Israel on the road to war, according to current and former Israeli officials.

After Israel decimated Iran's air defenses in a missile skirmish and crippled its main ally, Hezbollah, in October, Netanyahu issued a general order to prepare for a strike, the current and former officials said. Israeli intelligence officials began huddling to compile lists of dozens of Iranian nuclear scientists and military leaders who could be targeted for assassination. Israel's air force began to systematically take out air defenses in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq to clear the skies for future bombing runs against Iran.

Meanwhile, Israeli officials were pursuing another track in their preparations -- to sway Washington. Israeli officials have long believed that military action with U.S. participation to target the Iranian nuclear program would be more effective than Israel going alone. On Saturday, Trump indeed joined the conflict, ordering U.S. forces, including B-2 strategic bombers, to strike three Iranian nuclear sites.

Throughout the fall, the Israelis had met with their Biden administration counterparts to discuss intelligence collected by both countries in the summer that showed Iranian nuclear scientists were gathering to resume theoretical research on weaponization, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. But U.S. intelligence analysts did not conclude that the Iranian leadership had made such a decision -- an assessment U.S. spy agencies revisited and maintained throughout the spring under the new Trump administration and up until the time Israel launched strikes, said five people familiar with the conclusions.

In private conversations, however, senior Israeli government officials said they had already decided by March, weeks before Netanyahu met Trump in the Oval Office on April 7, to strike Iran with or without U.S. participation by June at the latest, said two people with knowledge of the matter. The reasoning was that Iran would have rebuilt its air defenses by the latter half of the year, one of the people said.

Ultimately, when Netanyahu finally launched his surprise attack on Iran in the early hours of June 13 while Trump's negotiations were still underway, the decision was not so much driven by new intelligence indicating an Iranian sprint for a nuclear weapon or any imminent threat to Israel. Rather, Israel seized on what it saw as a unique opportunity to execute plans, carefully laid months and years in advance, to heavily damage a weakened Iran that had long waged a bloody proxy conflict with Israel and to set back Iranian nuclear and missile programs, Israeli and U.S. officials and advisers to both governments say.

[...] "It is true there was no better time: Israelis have never been more well-practiced, and Iran and their proxies have never been weaker," said the Israeli official. "But that's not enough for us to operate. The reason we operated is necessity and understanding there is no alternative. What if they break out [toward a nuclear weapon] and there is no way for us to notice? There is no safety zone left."
None of this is particularly surprising, though it is funny considering Trump's floundering comments about how Israel "doesn't know what the f--k they're doing."

The Israelis had plans to overthrow Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran going back decades and they used the US to do it all.



It's taken them a lot more time than they imagined and they're having trouble with Iran but they're going to try again soon as their window of opportunity is closing due to public opinion dramatically turning against them in America.

Zohran Mamdani's stunning upset win in the Democratic New York City mayoral primary -- which was entirely a referendum on US support for Israel -- is a harbinger of things to come.

This was the moment that won Mamdani the primary:


The Israelis are going to use America for all its worth until the moment comes when we get real leaders who represent the will of the American people and throw them off our back.

If there's one sliver of hope from Donald Trump's actions over the last few days, it's that he's insisting his (likely failed) strikes were a huge success which merits the US moving on from the conflict.


Just as a reminder, I said on April 9 after Trump caved on his "retaliatory tariffs" that "if Trump handles war with Iran like he's handled tariffs, he will start the war and then surrender and claim victory once he realizes he doesn't actually 'have the cards.'"

He went on to do just that with his failed war on the Houthis and now he is following the same pattern with his war on Iran.

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