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‘Lay down your weapons’: Trump warns Iran’s armed forces as US launches military operation \u2013 video<\/p>\nThe first war of Donald Trump\u2019s Board of Peace era has begun \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s recorded eight-minute address after the first bombs had fallen, made clear that this would be no limited strike aimed at cajoling Tehran into concessions at the negotiating table. He warned that if Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) did not surrender they would be killed, and the country\u2019s armed forces, its missile and navy would be smashed.<\/p>\n
The way would then be open for the Iranian opposition and the country\u2019s ethnic minorities to rise up and bring the regime down.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s time for all the people of Iran \u2013 Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Balochis and Akhvakhs \u2013 to shed from themselves the burden of tyranny and bring forth a free and peace-seeking Iran,\u201d Trump said. There are no Akhvakhs in Iran. They are a small minority in Dagestan, and it is unclear how they were included in Trump\u2019s list.<\/p>\n
‘Lay down your weapons’: Trump warns Iran’s armed forces as US launches military operation \u2013 video<\/p>\n
Coordinating the message as well as the missiles, Israel\u2019s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country had joined the war \u201cto remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran\u201d.<\/p>\n
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 on Thursday, had been conducted under the shadow of what Trump called his \u201cbeautiful armada\u201d gathering in the Middle East, the biggest US force in the region since the ill-fated 2003 Iraq invasion, and it now seems likely that only a complete capitulation on Iran\u2019s part could stop this assembled American might being unleashed.<\/p>\n
Trump has long railed against the folly of the Iraq war. He campaigned twice on a platform of ending US military<\/a> entanglements abroad, and lobbied aggressively to be awarded the Nobel peace prize based on the factually shaky claim to have ended eight wars.<\/p>\n Barely 10 days before launching the war, he had hosted the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace<\/a> which was supposedly going to resolve conflicts, not just in the Middle East but around the world. That meeting brought leaders and senior officials from 27 disparate states, most of them autocracies, to Washington to praise Trump the peacemaker.<\/p>\n Graphic showing numbers of US navy ships in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean between July 2023 and February 2026<\/a><\/p>\n They heard Tony Blair, a living link to the Iraq debacle 23 years ago, declare Trump\u2019s Middle East vision, \u201cthe best \u2013 indeed the only hope \u2013 for Gaza, the region and the wider world\u201d.<\/p>\n By then, however, most of Washington\u2019s traditional allies in Europe and beyond had become deeply sceptical of Trump\u2019s motives and stayed away. The Board of Peace was sold to the UN security council in November as the only path to ending the slaughter in Gaza, but it had been clear long before the first missiles were fired at Iran, that it was a \u201cbait-and-switch\u201d scam. The UN thought it was buying one thing but it was sold something quite different: a rival body to the security council, but one in which Trump would be in charge.<\/p>\n The attack on Iran is a clear violation of the UN charter, in any absence of any credible, imminent Iranian threat to the US. In an attempt at justification Trump spoke in generalities, denouncing the Tehran leadership as \u201ca vicious group of very hard, terrible people\u201d and 47 years of enmity between the US and the Islamic Republic.<\/p>\n Over that half century, Iran has arguably never posed less of a threat than now, weakened both by the joint attack by the US and Israel last June that degraded its defences, and decades of sanctions combined with economic migration which brought mass protests on to the street.<\/p>\n In the Board of Peace, however, there is no requirement for Trump to justify himself. There are no rules other than those giving Trump the power to make them up as he goes along. It has become increasingly clear that the board is not primarily a forum for resolving conflict, but a vehicle for the president\u2019s political and financial interests. Those governments who signed on as board members now find themselves complicit in a war few of them want.<\/p>\n It is not entirely clear what transformed Trump from a peace president to a war president, but there are clues. At home he faces setbacks, ever lower popularity in the runup to the midterm elections, and a recent rebuke from a normally friendly supreme court on his power to use tariffs as his favourite foreign policy tools.<\/p>\n Wilbur Ross, commerce secretary in Trump\u2019s first term, said the court defeat had made an attack on Iran more likely.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think he can take this loss and then be seen as backing down on Iran,\u201d Ross told the Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the cloud of suspicion over Trump\u2019s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has not been dispelled despite the best efforts of the justice department to ration the flow of revelations about the sex-offending financier\u2019s child-trafficking operations.<\/p>\n Anti-riot police in central Tehran in front of a state building covered with a billboard depicting the destruction of a US aircraft carrier. Photograph: Majid Saeedi\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m really worried, because he gets so unhinged almost when he\u2019s in trouble like this,\u201d Democratic senator Chuck Schumer told MS Now television a few days before the war began. \u201cI\u2019m worried what he might do in Iran \u2013 who knows?\u201d<\/p>\n Abroad, Trump appeared to have given up chasing a Nobel peace prize, warning the Norwegian prime minister (who had no say in awarding it) last month that he no longer felt \u201can obligation to think purely of peace\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n For Trump, who had far more success as a reality show character than a property developer, war began to look like a better distraction than peace. He was thrilled by a daring and successful raid on Venezuela in January, in which US special forces whisked the country\u2019s leader, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a>, out of the country without a single US casualty.<\/p>\n Trump is clearly counting on spectacular success in Iran, broadcast live, to bring his country along with him after the fact. Before his overnight recorded statement, there had been no real effort by the administration to lay out a convincing case to Congress or to the nation, at a time when polls suggest only a quarter of the US electorate supports a new war in the Middle East.<\/p>\n Regular on-camera press briefings at the Pentagon have been a historical fixture in the runup to previous conflicts, but the recently renamed Department of War had not held one since December.<\/p>\n![\"Smoke](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/4687.jpg\")
Smoke rises in Tehran after US and Israel launch joint attack on Iran \u2013 video<\/p>\n