By Victoria Cruz
News Writer
On Feb. 28, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated military operation against the Iranian regime. U.S. attacks are ramping up, NATO allies are being pulled into the conflict.
President Donald Trump said that the military action was necessary, in order to prevent Iran from escalating its nuclear power and threatening other nations at a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on March 3.
“They’ve been decimated, but if we didn’t do what we’re doing right now, you would have had a nuclear war. And they would have taken out many countries,” Trump said.
This comes after more than 1,320 people have been killed, including six U.S. service members, while 18 others have been injured after strikes were ordered on Iran.
Trump is now calling for Iran’s unconditional surrender and says he will not accept any possible deals. He has not ruled out the possibility of deploying U.S. ground troops if necessary.
In the initial attack, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and 48 other military and religious leaders were killed. According to National Public Radio, the official reason for the attack was to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities, which the Trump administration has previously claimed were destroyed last year.
The Iranian theocratic authoritarian regime has been extremely repressive toward its citizens. This repression has been particularly severe against women and children. The U.S. government has also attempted to consolidate power within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is tasked with ideological defense.
Ali Khamenei has also maintained influence over several groups across the Middle East outside of Iran. These include Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen and various militias in Iraq. His assassination has led to chaos within these terrorist groups. This has already been seen in Lebanon after Hezbollah fired missiles at Israel.
In response, Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces launched an assault and began preparing ground troops for a possible invasion. The U.S. has been in negotiations with Iran, asking them to phase out their uranium enrichment program.
In his State of the Union address, Trump claimed that Iran was building ballistic missiles that could reach the U.S. According to Reuters, Trump’s claim that Iran will soon have a missile that can hit the United States is not backed by U.S. intelligence reports.
“The U.S. intelligence community has been making a similar assessment that Iran might have an intercontinental ballistic missile in a decade since the mid-1990s,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, told PolitiFact.
Iran denied these claims, but the decision to attack had already been made by the administration.
In response to the initial strikes, Iran began attacking military targets in Israel, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In just the first week since the initial attack, war has spread throughout the Middle East. With no end in sight, students are questioning the necessity of U.S. intervention.
“A lot of people do not want to be involved. I feel like the U.S. is trying to deny the correlation between what is going on here,” psychology major Kristian Williamson, a senior, said.
At the time of publication, Iran has communicated no plans to surrender to U.S. or Israeli demands. Conflict is expected to continue and escalate. Congress has rejected measures to stop the conflict but have not officially declared war.
