US attack on Iran
Donald Trump, the president who returned to the White House in January promising to be a "peacemaker", has taken a dramatic step to insert the US into the fraught conflict between Iran and Israel.
Far from bringing peace to the Middle East since taking office, Trump is now presiding over a region on the precipice of even greater warfare - a fight in which America is an active participant.
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Trump's rhetoric earlier this week that Iran had to "unconditionally surrender" had put the president in a position where it would be difficult for him to back down. Iran, with its own threats, had backed itself into a similar corner.
This is how wars start - and how they can expand beyond the control, and imaginations, of those involved.
On Thursday, Donald Trump gave the Iranians a two-week deadline but that turned out to be much shorter than expected - just two days. On Saturday night, the US president announced he had acted.
www.bbc.com - Trump takes huge gamble putting US at heart of Iran-Israel conflict
Trump did the exact opposite of why he was elected.
What the president of the United States did was profoundly unconstitutional, absolutely unlawful. Was an impeachable offense and a war crime. Under our Constitution only the Congress can declare war not the president and Congress can only declare war on a country that poses an immediate and grave military threat to the United States of America. President Trump has started a war with Iran which poses no threat, let alone immediate or grave whatsoever, to the national security of the United States of America.
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The United States is a rogue nation right now that we are operating outside the framework of international law.
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Israel initiated this by carrying out an unlawful illegal uh surprise attack with no justification.
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We [The US] have crossed the Rubicon. This is a very dangerous path that we are undertaking and we don't have good leaders. We don't have good leaders making sound decisions and the proof of that is the decision they make to support this act of insanity.
It's a very clear and worrying new development that the west having lost the conventional war is now turning to to this sort of extreme um type of asymmetrical warfare.
Did we [the US] get authorization from the UN Security Council? No. Did we [the US] get authorization from the US Congress? No. Were we [the US] attacked? No. There's there's no justification for it.
Iran, up to this point, has not needed a nuke. Now it may very well have the the opposite effect of reinforcing the views of hardliners who long have insisted that Iran should build one, but the ayat has resisted it and said that it is against the tenants of Islam.
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The message it sends is that here is Iran a country which is a signatory to the non-prololiferation treaty. It allows International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors at all of its nuclear facilities. They're the one that's attacked and they're attacked by a country [the US] that's supporting Israel, who refuses to sign the non-prololiferation treaty and who refuses to allow any outside inspectors of its nuclear sites. So the message that's now being sent to the world is that these international agreements are of no value. They are of no substance if anything. If you sign on and to allow IAEA inspections, it's going to be used by the CIA MI6 and MSAD to collect intelligence on you so that at some point down the road they can use that intelligence to attack you.
