Freedom From Above: The Last Lie of Empire

The Midnight Clearance: When ‘Freedom’ arrives by F-35

On the last day of February 2026, the United States and Israel bombed Iran. They called it freedom. They always do…

Note the remarkable precision of the language. At four o’clock in the morning, somewhere between his dreams and his certainties, Donald Trump telephoned the Washington Post to explain that all he wanted was “freedom” for the Iranian people. Somewhere beneath the smoking ruins of University Street in Tehran, where American and Israeli missiles had landed minutes before, the children of that freedom were learning what the word means when it travels at supersonic speed.

“You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality — not at the same time as you’re bombing people, you can’t.”

― Naomi Klein

Five students, all girls, were killed at a school in southern Iran in the opening hours of Operation Shield of Judah. The timing of the strikes, we are told, carries symbolic significance in Judaism, launched on the eve of Purim, the festival commemorating the deliverance of the Jewish people from persecution. One struggles, in the wreckage of a girls’ school, to locate the deliverance.

But then, this is a very old story. So old that it ought, by now, to embarrass even its most devoted participants.

Seventy-three years ago this month, another American operation was launched against Iran, this one quieter and rather cheaper, but no less certain of its righteousness. Operation Ajax, the CIA-MI6 coup of August 1953, removed from power Mohammad Mosaddegh: democratically elected, economically nationalist, and guilty of the unforgivable crime of believing that Iranian oil belonged to Iranians. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, soon to rebrand itself as British Petroleum, had other ideas. Washington and London obliged. Mosaddegh spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, trained with CIA assistance, ensured that the Iranian people enjoyed the correct kind of freedom thereafter, until 1979, when they settled the account.

The Islamic Republic that emerged from that reckoning was brutal, repressive, and responsible for the murder of thousands of its own citizens, most recently in the wave of nationwide protests that saw at least thirty thousand people killed by their own government between December 2025 and February of this year. These facts are real. They are not in dispute. The Iranian regime is a tyranny. One is permitted to say so.

One is also, however, permitted to notice that a deal was on the table.

Not just any deal. According to Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who had been mediating between Washington and Tehran with the quiet, painstaking competence that diplomacy actually requires, an agreement was “within our reach.” Iran had offered never again to stockpile enriched uranium. It had committed to an irreversible downgrade of its existing stockpile. It had accepted IAEA verification. Albusaidi described the proposals as more generous than the JCPOA, the 2015 nuclear accord that Trump himself tore up in his first term, pronouncing it the worst deal in history even as it successfully kept Iran from the bomb. He was in Washington on Friday. Talks were scheduled for the following week.

On Saturday morning, the bombs fell instead.

pic.twitter.com/BZuJDudLej

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 28, 2026

Trump said Iran had “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions.” Albusaidi said the opposite, publicly, the day before the attack. These two statements cannot both be true. One of them describes the world as it was. The other describes the world as the war required it to be.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

There is a particular species of dishonesty that war demands of its sponsors, and it is not the crude lie of the tyrant but the refined lie of the liberator. Netanyahu spoke of removing “existential threats” and creating “conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands.” Trump told Iranians, in a video posted to Truth Social at four in the morning, that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” The language of liberation has been the house style of Western militarism for two centuries, from the “civilising mission” of British colonialism to the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, whose democratic experiment in Iraq produced, as a byproduct, the Islamic State. The word “freedom” has been dropped on more people than any other ordnance in the arsenal of empire, and it has never once landed softly.

Congress was not consulted. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky said what needed saying: “Acts of war unauthorised by Congress.” Senator Jack Reed, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, noted that the Trump administration had provided legislators with no “real briefings or intelligence” before launching what officials describe as a planned multiday operation, months in the making, against a sovereign nation while negotiations were still active. The constitutional requirement that Congress alone may declare war is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the mechanism by which a republic prevents its executive from becoming, in a phrase the Founders would have recognised, a king.

And yet here we are. On the same day that Oman’s mediator returned from Geneva describing substantial progress, American aircraft and naval vessels, assembled in the region over weeks in a military build-up visible to any satellite, struck Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Kermanshah, and Karaj. Iran struck back at US bases in Bahrain, Jordan, the UAE. Missiles flew above Jerusalem. A man died in Abu Dhabi, killed by falling debris from an Iranian missile intercepted overhead. The region, which had not finished grieving the previous wars, was invited to begin another.

The working class of no nation has ever benefited from any of this. Not the Iranian workers who will bear the casualties. Not the American service personnel whom Trump acknowledged, with the casual arithmetic of the commander who will never personally share the risk, “may be lost.” Not the communities across the Middle East sheltering in place tonight as the missiles trace their arcs overhead. The defence contractors, naturally, will be fine. Raytheon does not need to fear the morning news.

“Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.”

― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

There are those who will argue, not entirely without grounds, that the Iranian regime left the world with few options. That a nuclear-armed theocracy menacing its neighbours is an intolerable outcome. That sometimes force is the last resort of the desperate. These arguments deserve the respect of a serious answer rather than dismissal, and the serious answer is this: a deal was on the table, the mediator said it was within reach, three rounds of talks had been completed, a fourth was scheduled, and the bombs fell anyway. Whatever the Iranian regime has done, and it has done much that is monstrous, the decision to bomb a country in the middle of active negotiations is not the last resort of the desperate. It is the first resort of those who were never serious about an alternative.

Seventy-three years ago, the CIA overthrew Iran’s democracy because its oil was inconvenient. The 1979 revolution was, in no small part, the consequence. The hostage crisis, the tanker wars, the proxy conflicts, the sanctions that impoverished ordinary Iranians while leaving their rulers untouched: all of it flows from that original sin, from that moment when Washington decided that Iranian self-determination was subordinate to Anglo-American petroleum interests. The bill for that decision is still being presented, with compound interest, to people who had no part in incurring the debt.

“What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up. ”

― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Today a new invoice has been issued. Its costs will be paid, as always, by those who had no voice in the decision: by Iranian civilians in the rubble of their cities, by American soldiers in the hospitals of the Middle East, by workers in the Gulf states sheltering from missiles they did not invite, by a global economy that will now absorb another spike in oil prices with the particular enthusiasm of those who can least afford it.

Trump wants a “safe nation” for Iran. He said so at four in the morning, and perhaps he even meant it, in the way that men of great power sometimes mean the things they say in the gap between action and consequence, before the photographs arrive.

The photographs will arrive.

“They called it freedom. They dropped it from thirty thousand feet. And the children in the rubble are still waiting to learn the difference.”

labourheartlands.com | 28 February 2026

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