Board of peace? Trump's attack on Iran has no mandate or legal basis

The first war of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace era has begun - an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public.

- Julian Borger Senior international correspondent

Trump’s recorded eight-minute address after the first bombs had fallen made clear this would be no limited strike aimed at cajoling Tehran into concessions at the negotiating table.

He warned that if Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) did not surrender they would be killed and the country’s armed forces would be smashed.

‘The way would then be open for the Iranian opposition and the country’s ethnic minorities to rise up and bring the regime down.

“It’s time for all the people of Iran - Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Balochis and Akhvakhs - to shed from themselves the burden of tyranny and bring forth a free and peace-seeking Iran” Trump said.

There are no Akhvakhs living in Iran. They area small minority in Dagestan, and it is unclear how they were included in Trump’s list.

Coordinating the message as well as the missiles, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said his country had joined the attack “to remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran”.

The maximalist aims of the joint attack cast doubt on whether there had ever been any prospect of success for the US-Iranian negotiations in the preceding weeks in which delegates discussed possible limits on uranium enrichment.

Those talks, the latest round of which was held on Thursday, had been conducted under the shadow of what Trump called his “beautiful armada” gathering in the Middle East, the biggest US force in the region since the ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq, and it now seems likely that only a complete capitulation on Iran’s part could stop this assembled American might being unleashed.

Trump has long railed against the folly of the Iraq war. He campaigned twice on a platform of ending US military entanglements abroad, and lobbied aggressively to be awarded the Nobel peace prize based on the factually dubious claim to have ended eight wars.