U.S. President Donald Trump told the Iranian armed forces to lay down their arms or face “certain death” and its people to rise up and “seize control of your destiny” as “major” strikes against Tehran commenced.

Joint American-Israeli strikes against Iran took place over night, with U.S. President Donald Trump addressing both the nation and the people of Iran. Announcing the strikes to eliminate “imminent threats from the Iranian regime” which “directly endangers the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world”, Trump said: “A short time ago, the United States Military began major combat operations in Iran”.

Iranian retaliatory strikes have been launched against Israel.

The strikes are intended to destroy Iran’s stockpiles of missiles and to ‘obliterate’ Iran’s missile production industry, the President said. Most importantly, Trump said, was preventing Iranian nuclear-tipped long-range missiles from ever threatening the American mainland or America’s allies in Europe.

President Trump said:

Iran is the world’s no.1 state sponsor of terror and has recently killed tens of thousands of its own people [… which is] developing long range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could seen reach the American homeland.

… for these reasons the United States military has undertaken a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It’s going to be totally, again, obliterated.

While noting “every possible step” to minimise threat to U.S. military personnel had been taken, President Trump warned the combat operations afoot were of sufficient scale that there may be casualties. He said:

I do not make this statement lightly, the Iranian regime seeks to kill. The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war.

But we’re not doing this for now, we’re doing it for the future and it is a noble mission. We pray for every service member as they selflessly risk their lives to ensure Americans and our children will never be threatened by a nuclear-armed Iran. We ask God to protect all of our heroes in harm’s way and we trust that with his help the men and woman of the armed forces will prevail.

The U.S. President called on the armed forces, paramilitary, and police of Iran to lay down their weapons. If they did so they would receive “complete immunity” and be treated fairly, he said, but else would face “certain death”. To the Iranian people, he called on them to take this opportunity to rise up against the government, stating “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and that a second opportunity to take control was likely not coming. He said:

Stay sheltered, don’t leave your home, it’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will, probably be your only chance for generations… now is the time to seize control of your destiny

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his people early Saturday morning stating the joint strikes with the U.S. were to remove the “existential threat”. Netanyahu said: “For 47 years, the Ayatollah regime has called out ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to America.’ It has shed our blood, murdered many Americans, and massacred its own people… This murderous terror regime must not be allowed to arm itself with nuclear weapons that would enable it to threaten all of humanity”, reports The Times of Israel.

Air raid sirens sounded across Israel as Iran launched retaliatory ballistic strikes, it was stated. The Israeli Defence Force said in a series of statements of what it said were multiple Iranian “barrages”: “A short while ago, the IDF identified missiles launched from Iran toward Israel… At this time, the IAF is operating to intercept and strike threats where necessary to remove the threat.”

Additionally, the BBC reports blasts were heard in Bahrain’s Manama, the home port of the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

A world on edge as Trump bombs Iran and triggers war in the Middle East. There was no need for this

They never learn. Once again, a bellicose US president has unleashed overwhelming military firepower to force a sovereign nation to its knees. Once again, blatant lies and exaggerated claims are being propagated to justify the attack. Duplicitous American diplomacy became a fig leaf for premeditated aggression. The cautionary advice of allies was spurned. The UN, international law and public opinion were ignored. Democratic consent is lacking. And once again, there are few defined goals by which to gauge success, and no long-term plan.

Now, as in the past, the predictable result of today’s renewed, expanded and apparently open-ended US-Israeli aggression against Iran will be instant, spreading chaos. Civilians will be killed, children orphaned, families torn apart. Regional turmoil and international oil-price panic will follow the Iranian retaliation that has already begun, and which may be backed by Tehran’s Hezbollah and Houthi allies. New hatreds will be seeded, terrorist vendettas sown. The west’s foes will rejoice. And almost nothing of enduring value will be achieved. That was the bitter outcome of the failed US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, it’s Tehran’s turn to reap the whirlwind.

How dismaying – how unforgivable! – that those past lessons have not been learned. How incredible that an elected 21st-century American president still believes it’s effective and permissible, let alone moral, to dictate to the world from the barrel of a gun. By what conceivable right does the US behave in this way?

While there are certain differences, the similarities between Donald Trump’s siege of Iran and George W Bush’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq are striking. Both crises fit a wider pattern of ultimately unsuccessful, costly US interventionism dating back to Vietnam – and the 1953 CIA-led Iran coup. Trump promised to avoid foreign adventures. Surprise! He lied. Anyone who believes he has radically changed the way the US engages with the world should review this sordid saga of post-1945 imperial hubris. In this, he’s no different from his predecessors.

Trump is unusual in that his self interest is so evident. Though he said today that he wants “freedom” for the Iranian people, and for Iran to be a place that’s “safe”, he’s no Woodrow Wilson, who justified plunging the US into the first world war in 1917 by saying “the world must be made safe for democracy”. (It transpired Wilson meant democracy in Europe, not in the colonial empires of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.) After attacking Venezuela in January, Trump baldly admitted he just wanted the oil. Yet in other respects, what’s happening now feels very familiar.

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Like Bush, Trump manufactured a crisis, founded on falsehood, and effectively cornered himself. He is hostage to self-imposed expectations, having confounded his own false claim to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities last year. Like Bush and his accomplice, Tony Blair, Trump deliberately inflates the threat. His unsubstantiated State of the Union claim that Tehran’s ballistic missiles could “soon” reach US territory recalls notoriously false US and UK claims about Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s claim to have mounted “pre-emptive” strikes is misleading, too. There is zero clear evidence Iran was about to attack. On the contrary, it was desperately hoping to preserve the peace after last June’s damaging US-Israeli onslaught.

Speaking on Truth Social, Trump claimed Iran has repeatedly failed to renounce nuclear weapons. Not true. The regime, from the supreme leader down, has repeatedly done that over 20 years. Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said again last week that Iran “will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon”. There is claim and counter claim, but the fact is that, neither the US, UN inspectors nor Israel’s ultra-hostile leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, have provided proof that Iran plans or wants to build nukes.

Prior to the attack, Trump refused to define his aims despite Arab and European allies’ fears of regional conflagration. Now his stated demands border on delusional. He says he is seeking to “obliterate” Iran’s nuclear facilities (again), destroy its ballistic missiles, destroy the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (or accept its unconditional surrender in return for “total immunity”), and somehow also destroy Iran’s allied proxy forces in the region.

Trump is also openly encouraging the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government, having previously declared that regime change is “the best thing that could happen” and promised “help is on its way”. But he doesn’t say how that change can be achieved without deploying ground troops, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, occupying the country for years, and fighting open-ended insurgencies – and no such US deployment is on offer. When George HW Bush made a similar appeal to Iraqis following the 1991 Gulf war, a mass slaughter of the Shia Muslim population ensued, carried out by Saddam’s undefeated regime.

“This will be probably your only chance for generations,” Trump said as he called for a national insurrection. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond.” Yet there are good, sensible reasons why no previous president has done something so reckless in Iran. And it’s certainly no “gift”. It’s an irresponsible invitation to anarchy and mayhem. It could trigger the fracturing of the Iranian state into its many ethnic and religious components and a catastrophic civil war drawing in regional states. If so, that’s on Trump. That’s the height of foolishness.