On Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT), US National Counter-terrorism Centre director Joe Kent submitted his resignation to President Donald Trump in an open letter posted on X.
Kent declared that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the US but claimed Trump “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.
Kent’s missive was nonsense. By blaming nefarious Jews and Israel, Kent conveniently changed the subject from his recent failures: an attempted bombing of an anti-Islamist protest in New York City; the murder of a US Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corp instructor at a Virginia university; and an attack on a preschool and synagogue in Michigan.
Nor was this Kent’s first foray into conspiracy; in 2011 he blamed the Syrian civil war on Israel, and his current wife works for a Kremlin-funded conspiracy theory website.
Iran’s decades-long record of targeting American personnel is not a matter of interpretation but a documented pattern stretching from Beirut to Iraq.
Even though Kent testified a year ago before the Senate – before the 12-day war in June 2025 and the current conflict – that Iran and its terror proxies posed a threat to the US, his record, like that of many Trump appointees, was inconsistent. The big question was why Trump appointed him in the first place.
Indeed, on Kent’s appointment and before he decided to blame Israel – manna to the mainstream media in the US and Australia – The New York Times questioned his fitness, arguing he had “embraced conspiracy theories and has links to extremist groups”.
Politicians and pundits in Washington always navel gaze; they live and breathe spin. Too often, the world outside the US simply becomes a template on which to wage political battles that often are detached from ground reality. So it has become with Iran.
There is no question that the Islamic Republic sought to wage war against both the US and Israel. When ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ousted shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, US president Jimmy Carter sought to cultivate relations with the new regime. Even after regime-backed students sacked the US embassy and took 52 Americans hostage, Carter refused to break relations. That came only five months later when the Iranian embassy in Washington co-ordinated the assassination of an Iranian dissident in Bethesda, Maryland.
Subsequently, Iranian terrorist proxies attacked the US embassies in Lebanon and Kuwait. In 1983, a Hezbollah truck bomb killed 241 American servicemen who had deployed to Beirut as peacekeepers in an effort to end the civil war. Nor would they be the only US peacekeepers killed. In 1988, Iranian-backed terrorists kidnapped William Higgins while he was on a UN peacekeeping mission, and held and tortured him for 17 months before murdering him.
In 2006, the former Iranian ambassador to Lebanon gave a wide-ranging interview bragging about Iran’s role in creating and directing Hezbollah. In December 1984, Hezbollah terrorists hijacked a Kuwait Airways flight, diverted it to Tehran and killed two US aid workers. The following June, Hezbollah hijacked a TWA flight from Cairo, executed a US Navy diver and threw his body on to the tarmac.
Blaming Israel for the current conflict obscures the agency, intent, and historical behavior of the Iranian regime itself.
Then there was the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. US federal courts ruled Iran liable for providing material support and training to al-Qaeda ahead of the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Federal courts later linked Iranian logistics to al-Qaeda’s USS Cole bombing off the coast of Yemen in October 2000. Importantly, the USS Cole had refuelled and replenished inside Yemen only as part of a Clinton administration agreement to infuse funds into the Yemeni economy. Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington by al-Qaeda, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gave al-Qaeda spokesman (and Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law) Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, top operative Sayf al-Adl and bin Laden’s son and heir-apparent, Saad bin Laden, safe haven inside Iran.
Before the 2003 Iraq war, senior US and British diplomats negotiated secretly with Iranian leaders in Switzerland to deconflict and avoid accidents. Iranian officials agreed to stay out of Iraq. They lied. IRGC forces in plain clothes flooded into Iraq to help stand up militias. Between 2003 and 2011, the Pentagon estimates, Iranian-backed militias – the same ones that now attack the US embassy in Baghdad – killed upwards of 600 US troops in Iraq with explosively formed projectiles.
While progressive politicians and pundits blame the US for sport, denying the agency of Iranian actions is a distortion of reality and a racist dismissal of the Iranian regime’s own agency.
While the “blame America first crowd” will start the history of conflict with Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal, they forget two things: First, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action did not release Iran from its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the International Atomic Energy Agency had found Tehran in violation of; and, second, the agreement was not a treaty. By its own terms, it was temporary.
Likewise, those who cite the January 3, 2020, drone attack on Iranian Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani – the man in charge of smuggling the explosively formed projectiles into Iraq and the car bombs into Lebanon – as Iran’s casus belli ignore the Iranian proxy militia Kata’ib Hezbollah’s attack on the K1 Air Base in Iraq the week before that killed an American civilian.
Tehran’s campaign against the United States did not begin with recent events but has unfolded over more than four decades.
Indeed, Kent was for Soleimani’s targeting before he found it politically convenient to oppose it. Iranian officials were quite open with their desire to assassinate Trump and key figures from his first administration, including national security adviser John Bolton and secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
The Iranian regime’s hostility towards Israel is even more blatant. Under the shah, Iran was friendly with the Jewish state. Indeed, why should it not be? Both Persians and Jews have millennia-old civilisations. Neither has a land dispute with the other. The Iranian regime’s antipathy towards Israel is purely ideological and solely rooted in clerical antisemitism.
While some academics in Australia and the US try to launder the regime’s goals – arguing, say, that promises to “wipe Israel off the map” are mistranslations – this ignores the fact Iran hung banners with those slogans in English.
Many who question the February 28 drive to war may accept all the above but question the timing. Again, the natural inclination for those in the West to self-flagellate is unfair and inaccurate.
First, diplomacy was unlikely to work. Economists estimate that Iran lost upwards of $1 trillion – more likely twice that – in sanctions-related losses and missed development opportunities because of its nuclear program. If one Iranian personified that program, it was Ali Khamenei, who as president revived it and as supreme leader nurtured it. If he were to forfeit the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons work, he would have to explain to the IRGC – the only base he cared about – that their sacrifice was worth it. That Russia was selling the regime anti-aircraft missiles and China had cultivated rumours about a carrier-killer missile sale simply reduced the window of time to allow diplomacy to succeed.
The regime, meanwhile, was rebuilding its nuclear program. While some academics and pundits may accept at face value Tehran’s claim its uranium enrichment program was for civilian purposes, one fact undermines that argument: While Iran operates a civilian reactor at Bushehr, it has never used its own enriched uranium to fuel it, instead purchasing low-enriched uranium from Russia. Unlike the Iraq war, which was based on faulty intelligence developed by defectors and signals intelligence, IAEA inspections drove the suspicions regarding Iran’s intention.
Political narratives in Washington often detach from strategic reality, particularly when they minimize Iran’s sustained use of proxy warfare.
Civilian energy programs do not experiment with warhead design, conduct mathematical modelling for nuclear blast radii, try to conceal enrichment facilities from the IAEA or conduct nuclear work deep under mountains.
Still, would-be international lawyers claim Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu violated the imminence standard. While opponents of US actions state there was no “imminent” threat, this ignores that imminence is not defined. Is purchasing a gun, setting up a sniper’s nest and loading the weapon, or any countermeasure, illegal until the attempt to fire it?
Hence, while article 51 of the UN charter allows self-defence, customary international law allows action against an imminent threat without defining when a threat becomes imminent.
The 1837 Caroline Affair, an incident in which British forces crossed into New York from Canada and set alight an American steamship they accused (not without reason) of helping and harbouring Canadian rebels, nearly led to war. In diplomatic negotiations that followed, US secretary of state Daniel Webster argued the necessity for pre-emptive self-defence must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment of deliberation” to justify an attack.
Nearly two centuries later, missiles and cyber threats make the Caroline test moot.
Critics of US and Israeli action can wring their hands. Scholars of international law, meanwhile, can arrogantly assume they alone have a monopoly over its interpretation, in effect acting as their own armchair dictators. The reality is, however, this is a war of choice – but of Iran’s choice only.
From the moment Iranians stormed the US embassy in Tehran and launched their first unprovoked attacks in their quest to annihilate Israel’s existence, they set in motion the events now under way. The real tragedy is that decades of cravenness, the desire by some countries – the EU, Turkey and Britain – to profit off the Islamic Republic, and Australia’s own willingness to rationalise and reward Iranian terror were what really made the current crisis inevitable.
Published originally on March 21, 2026.
