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When Imperial America Offers Help, It Just Might Get You Killed
Patrick Strickland for Tom Dispatch
After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” On February 28th, the U.S. and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes began dropping bombs on a country of some 93 million people. Trump soon put out a video address, telling Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Around the time that video appeared, Iranians in the city of Minab were sorting through the corpses of more than 165 people killed in an airstrike on an elementary school for girls.
That same day, an airstrike killed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an 86-year-old who was supposedly already in poor health. Throughout the ensuing days, American and Israeli attacks struck hospitals, historic sites, and more schools. In response, Iran aimed its drones and missiles at American military bases and allies across the Gulf region.
What kind of help, exactly, did Trump mean?
What Washington calls help is often disastrous and the U.S. has a long history of offering (and refusing) to help Iran. During the Abadan Crisis of 1951 to 1954, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized the country’s oil industry, which had been under near-complete British control for decades. The United Kingdom responded with a crushing economic embargo, legal challenges, and a naval buildup off the Iranian coast. Mosaddegh repeatedly appealed to Dwight D. Eisenhower for help, but the American president declined to step in.
Some two weeks later, the CIA toppled Mosaddegh’s government with the backing of the British intelligence agency MI6. In effect, that coup d’état — one of at least 72 the U.S. facilitated or attempted to facilitate globally in the Cold War years — opened the path for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, to reinstall his monarchical autocracy. In his private diary, Eisenhower reflected that “we helped bring about … the restoration of the Shah to power in Iran and the elimination of Mossadegh… The things we did were ‘covert.’ If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear.”
The CIA wouldn’t publicly acknowledge its role in the coup until several decades later, but Iranians had little doubt. During his quarter-century reign, the Shah outlawed most political parties, jailed dissidents, and made liberal use of torture. In 1979, a revolution unseated the Shah, but the Islamic Republic that followed only continued his practice of mass repression, torture, and extrajudicial killings. Later, when Iran and Iraq went to war in 1980, the U.S. clandestinely gave each side enough support to ensure neither could win. Worse yet, at the tail end of that conflict, American intelligence officials provided the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with the positions of Iranian soldiers, despite Washington’s knowledge that Hussein intended to use chemical weapons on them.
Donald Trump has long styled himself as distinctly anti-war, but both of his administrations have kept Tehran squarely in their crosshairs. An American president, after all, is still an American president. Since returning to office in January 2025, he has relaunched the long, lethal American tradition of military intervention abroad. “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” he said during his inaugural speech. Over the next year, though, he proceeded to bomb seven countries, threaten a slate of nations from Latin America to Europe, and even kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. All the while, he bragged of supposedly ending eight wars.
One of the wars the president insists he ended was Israel’s two-year assault on the Gaza Strip. By the time a U.S.-brokered ceasefire came into effect there in October 2025, Israeli attacks on the coastal enclave had, according to the Gaza health ministry, killed more than 70,000 people. The truce, however, proved to be distinctly one-sided. As of early March of this year, the United Nations estimated that more than 600 Palestinians had been killed and more than 1,600 wounded in Gaza since the ceasefire was implemented. In Lebanon, where a ceasefire went into effect in November 2024, the U.N. had tallied more than 15,000 Israeli ceasefire violations and hundreds of deaths as of late February.
In the United States, war is, of course, a bipartisan affair. The Biden and Trump administrations would, for instance, send Israel more than $21 billion in military aid during the first two years of the war in Gaza. On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump would lean into anti-interventionist rhetoric, warning that a Kamala Harris presidency would drag the U.S. into World War III. Harris’s silence on Gaza evidently cost her a significant number of votes and Trump returned to the Oval Office.
Many Trump voters hoped he would avoid foreign entanglements. Instead, he has deepened the U.S. involvement in conflicts abroad, while deploying federal troops domestically to fight what he’s called an “invasion from within.”
So, the war machine now chugs ahead here and elsewhere, with Trump tightening his authoritarian grip at home, while searching for new conflicts abroad. When Iranians rose up in January, their regime killed thousands of protesters. Trump decried the “killers and abusers” in Tehran even as his masked immigration agents were assaulting protesters and immigrants in Minnesota and beyond. In fact, just a few weeks after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally opened fire on the poet, protester, and mother Renee Good in Minneapolis, Border Patrol officers shot and killed a protesting nurse, Alex Pretti, in the same city.
That the president doesn’t care about human rights is obvious, but he took that position a step further when, around the time of Pretti’s death, his administration forced about a dozen Iranians onto a deportation flight back to the very country he had criticized for wanton murder in the streets.
Some help.
Arrests, Torture, and Abuse
“Every empire,” the late Palestinian academic and literary critic Edward Said once wrote, “tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” As someone whose family had been among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians violently displaced and forced into exile by Israel’s 1948 establishment in what Palestinians called the Nakba, or catastrophe, Said was speaking from personal experience.
For nearly eight decades, Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation have paid the price of American “help.” Since 1948, the U.S. has sent an estimated $300 billion (when adjusted for inflation) in foreign aid to Israel, much of it in the form of weaponry to the Israeli military. At the same time, the U.S. Agency for International Development gave the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority more than $5.2 billion between 1994 and 2018, and the CIA worked closely with Palestinian security agents.
While living in Palestine from 2011 until 2015, I often thought about the constant flow of American financial and military aid into the region. I worked then as a journalist and, for part of the time, taught at a Palestinian high school in Ramallah. Wherever you looked, the human fallout of what Washington calls “help” was plain to see. For Palestinians in the West Bank, threats came from every direction. Israeli soldiers shot and killed Palestinians on the streets, at protests, or at checkpoints like the ones many of my students had to pass through every day to reach school. More than 730,000 Israeli settlers live in colonies across the territory, and the most hardline among them routinely attack Palestinians, vandalizing their homes and burning down their olive fields. (In one case in 2014, a group of settlers kidnapped and burned to death a Palestinian teenager named Mohammed Abu Khdeir.) Even the Palestinian Authority, ostensibly meant to represent Palestinians, arrests and tortures political opponents, even in some cases carrying out extrajudicial killings.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed to Iranians in late February, it brought my mind back to my time in Palestine. Netanyahu urged them to “cast off the yoke of [their] murderous regime,” denouncing that country’s security forces for killing “thousands of children, adults, and elderly people in cold blood.” Then he added: “Tens of thousands [of Iranians] were arrested, tortured, and abused. And why? Simply because they sought lives of freedom and dignity.”
I thought, freedom and dignity? What about arrests, torture, abuse, and cold-blooded killing?
From the time he first became prime minister in 1996, Netanyahu has served a combined total of more than 18 years in office, while presiding over four of the five wars in Gaza since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in late 2008. The first four of those wars alone killed more than 4,000 Palestinians in the Strip.
Netanyahu was serving his second term as prime minister in 2014, when the nonprofit rights watchdog Defense for Children International – Palestine hired me to research and write a report about the situation of Arab children living near Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. For several months, when school let out each day, I rushed off to travel around the territory, interviewing children and their families and listening to their experiences of arrest, torture, abuse, and cold-blooded killings.
In East Jerusalem, a 14-year-old boy filled me in on how Israeli intelligence had arrested him a year earlier. They accused him of throwing stones, a charge he denied, and set about interrogating him. While trying to coerce a confession, the boy told me, one interrogator grabbed a broomstick and threatened him. “You want me to shove this stick up your ass, so you’ll feel pain and tell me the truth?” the interrogator said (according to the child). The boy finally confessed when the interrogator vowed to have his family’s home demolished.
About 20 miles south of East Jerusalem, I visited a family who lived in Hebron’s Old City. The area is home to several Israeli settlements and a large military presence that severely restricts Palestinian movement there. One of the children, a young girl, recalled a day when she was seven. As she made her way home from school, a group of settlers snatched her off the street. They held her down and set her hair on fire. A year passed before she could sleep through a full night, her parents told me. Two years after the attack, she still wore a hat wherever she went. Her brother, who was then 12, had similarly disturbing stories. A year earlier, an Israeli soldier had stopped him at a checkpoint and accused him of throwing stones. The soldier then slapped him, the boy said, and threatened to kill him. Noticing that I was shaken, his father put his palms up. “Everyone in this house has been attacked before,” he said.
Such stories piled up by the dozens: Molotov cocktails and stones crashing through the windows of Palestinian schools; soldiers firing tear gas and rubber-coated bullets at children; families rushing their young kids from their burning homes in the middle of the night. Then, one day in May 2014, not long after I finished the report, several of my students showed up to class wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the face of a Palestinian teenager who had been shot and killed the week before. His name was Nadim Nuwara, and he had been 17 when a bullet hit him at a protest near Israel’s wall on the West Bank. (Another teenager, 16-year-old Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, was shot and killed in nearly the same spot around an hour later.)
The Israeli military initially denied involvement in the boys’ slayings. Spokespeople told reporters that Israeli forces had not used live ammunition in the area on the day the killings took place. Some suggested that a Palestinian sniper might have shot the kids. When video footage later emerged, the military claimed it was likely “forged.” I drove over to the Nuwara family’s home one day that week and met his parents. They were grieving, but they wanted to correct the record. They had found the bullet that killed their son. After passing through his body, it had been stopped by a textbook in his backpack. We measured the bullet and took photos, and I sent them to a ballistics expert. Unsurprisingly, he confirmed that the bullet appeared to have been made by Israeli Military Industries and was of a kind in active use by Israeli forces.
Israel continued to deny its involvement in the boy’s death, but amid mounting evidence, in November 2014, an Israeli border policeman was finally charged with manslaughter. A subsequent plea deal stipulated that he would serve nine months in prison. By then, I had left my job at the school and was reporting in Gaza. Israel had waged a 51-day war on the Strip over that summer and it lay in ruins. The U.N. had already tallied more than 2,200 Palestinian deaths, 551 of them children. East of Gaza City, I walked with a Palestinian colleague along a residential street in the Shujayeah neighborhood. Both sides of the street were lined with destroyed homes. All that remained standing of one house was a single wall, propped up on rubble. On it, someone had spray-painted: “All This Family Killed by USA Weapons.”
“Help Has Arrived”
This is the second time Israel has gone to war with Iran since Trump, who pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear agreement during his first term, returned to office last year. In June 2025, Israeli warplanes rained down bombs across that country for 12 days. Iran responded with missiles and suicide drones. That bout of fighting killed more than 430 civilians in Iran and at least 28 people in Israel before it ended. The U.S. also joined in, launching a series of strikes on the country, and the president boasted that the attacks had “completely and totally obliterated” the Iranian nuclear program.
Last October, Trump included that war on his list when he took credit for ending “eight wars in eight months.” After Trump and Netanyahu again went to war with Iran this February, the American president offered new justifications. In addition to vowing to help persecuted Iranians, he said that the regime was building missiles that “could soon reach the American homeland,” a claim U.S. intelligence reportedly denied. He also cited a supposedly “imminent” Iranian attack and mentioned the same nuclear program he had previously said was destroyed.
In the United States, few people believe the war is justified. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that more than half of the respondents believed Iran posed at worst a minor threat or no threat at all. Even among pro-MAGA media figures, including several prominent ones like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, have railed against the president. “It’s hard to say this, but the United States didn’t make the decision here,” Carlson said. “Benjamin Netanyahu did.”
The real reason Trump has shed his former claims to anti-interventionism, though, is history. Since 1776, according to the Military Intervention Project of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University, the United States has intervened militarily in foreign countries nearly 400 times. Since September 11, 2001, U.S.-led counterterrorism operations have reached at least 78 countries. As of 2021, the U.S. had spent more than $8 trillion on its Global War on Terror, a series of conflicts that the Cost of War project at Brown University estimates to have killed at least 900,000 people. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s budget has reached $1 trillion and defense contractors continue to pump tens of millions of dollars into lawmakers’ pockets each election cycle. With a record like that, what help can an American president really offer Iranians living under a repressive regime?
For my part, each new report of an American or Israeli airstrike hitting a home, a hospital, or a school in Iran brings back another memory from my years living in the West Bank. After a bullet cut Nadim Nuwara’s life short in the late spring of 2014, I was sitting in his family’s living room when his little brother came in. He was 10, small and gentle-voiced, and wore a backward hat. He held up a large photo of his brother. “I thought this summer was going to be very fun with my brother,” he told me. “I thought Nadim and I were going to be able to play together a lot. But he’s gone now and this is going to be a very bad summer.”
During the first 24 hours of this latest war alone, U.S. Central Command’s Brad Cooper announced in a video on X that the scope of the assault on Iran was “nearly double the scale” of the first day of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. On the first day of the war, Benjamin Netanyahu released another video in which he directly addressed Iranians. “Your suffering and sacrifice will not be in vain,” he insisted. “The help you have prayed for, that help has arrived.” And then the slaughter continued.
Patrick Strickland, a journalist and the managing editor of Inkstick Media, is the author of three books about migration and the far right, most recently You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece (Melville House, April 2025).
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