Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said on the independent news channel Democracy Now! that the current U.S. administration, in a matter of days, has committed war crimes in Iran on a scale he has not seen in his lifetime.
He told viewers that, not for the first time, the U.S. had initiated an illegal war, violated the U.S. Constitution and international law, but that the attacks on Iran, and in the midst of talks, have eclipsed all previous violations.
As Chief of Staff to Colin Powell in the lead-up to the Iraq war, he admitted that he came from an administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that committed war crimes. He said that back in 2003, he and Colin Powell realised that not only had they signed up to a war in Iraq that wasn’t necessary, they had signed up to a President of the United States who made torture public policy. But Wilkinson believes the attacks on Iran surpass in magnitude the U.S.’s previous atrocities:
We have bombed civilians relentlessly. We have bombed a school. We have bombed a hospital. We have struck installations in Iran’s oil capacity that has put black poison over more than ten million people. We are essentially not bombing missile sites and war materiel. We’re bombing people.
These are all war crimes. And one wishes, with fond hope, that some day we might be called before the Bar of Justice to account for these war crimes. We took a lesson from the IDF, who continue [to commit crimes] in Gaza and Lebanon.
Wilkerson said he told a senior editor of the Washington Post that he thought “abominable the lies that the American mainstream media, both video and press, were telling the American people, as it puts them in jeopardy in a real substantive sense, because the American people have no way of judging just how foolhardy, how stupid, how unwise, how in breach of international dictum and rules this war is. Iran was no threat to the U.S.” He added that U.S. servicemen were not only in harm’s way, but they risked being liable for war crimes at any time in the future.
Three decades ago, the illegal war against Iraq was thought up by a clique of Zionist fanatics in the Pentagon, and sold to the American public through a mass propaganda campaign. Just as in Britain, Tony Blair’s government concocted a ‘dodgy’ intelligence dossier to inveigle a gullible parliament into voting for an invasion of Iraq under false pretences.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths; five-thousand plus coalition fatalities; traumatised veterans with life-changing injuries; a destroyed Iraq; and a British weapons inspector whose death to this day remains ‘a mystery’, have not dented the British parliament’s appetite for aiding and abetting war crimes, this time against Iran, under the same tapestry of lies of phantom imminent threats. Nor is the British mainstream media squeamish in its role of purveyors of distortions.
As explained by Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew, four-star general Wesley Clark and previous Supreme Allied Commander (1997-2000) visited the Pentagon in 2001 shortly after 9/11 and, on his way out, went to say hello to members of the Joint Staff who had previously worked for him, when he was discreetly taken aside by a general who showed him a memo on which was written ‘Israel’s hit list’ of seven countries in the Middle East to be taken down, damaged and destabilised in five years. These were: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. Speaking in 2007, Wesley Clark described how dumbfounded he was, and explained that the U.S. had been taken over by a group of people through a ‘policy coup’ led by Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and half a dozen others.
Today, with those countries in tatters under the heel of the U.S., Iran stands alone in the region in its resistance to U.S.-Israeli destruction. It decries Israel’s apartheid regime and genocide in Gaza and supports the armed resistance groups of Hezbollah and Hamas. Its stance on justice for the Palestinians springs not from any religious tribalism, because Iran is predominantly Shia and the Palestinians are mainly Sunni, but from a position of principle.
The Arab states, on the other hand, pay lip service to the Palestinians’ rights to freedom and self-determination, whilst cooperating in practice with Israel. The Gulf kingdoms that host American bases operate under a U.S. protection racket whereby they sell their oil to the U.S., buy weapons from the West and receive ‘protection’. This ‘protection’ has recently proved as imaginary as the pretext for war itself, as Iran’s retaliatory strikes quickly disabled the early-warning radar system in Qatar, at America’s largest airbase in the Middle East.
It is also worth noting that damage to the Gulf States’ oil refineries attributed to Iran was immediately denied by Iran, and Mossad bomb teams were reportedly arrested in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, poised to carry out false flag attacks on Arab capitals, to sow confusion and set countries against each other.
Any empire built on destruction, subjugation and inflicting harm on others, is ultimately doomed to failure. The U.S.-Zionist empire uses bribery, blackmail and bombs to achieve its aims. But what has it left when these fail?
Iran has spent over a century battling against foreign domination, carefully observing U.S. and Israeli tactics, and the collapse of Iraq. It has the resolve to endure beyond what the U.S. will be able to sustain physically, financially and politically, and may well be the U.S.-Zionist empire’s nemesis, and that of the West.
The post Former U.S. Military Chief of Staff Blasts U.S. War Crimes in Middle East appeared first on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Serena Wylde.
Serena Wylde | Radio Free (2026-03-16T14:25:55+00:00) Former U.S. Military Chief of Staff Blasts U.S. War Crimes in Middle East. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2026/03/16/former-u-s-military-chief-of-staff-blasts-u-s-war-crimes-in-middle-east/
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