Barbara Boyd argues that the U.S. and Israel’s major combat operations against Iran, announced by President Trump as Operation Epic Fury, are being miscast as “Iraq 2.0” and “regime change.”
She cites Trump’s message to Iranians to “take over your government” and JD Vance’s statement that there is “no chance” of a years-long Middle East war, framing the strikes as targeted to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions rather than an occupation.
Barbara also shows that Iran’s leadership has
long served a British-centered financial system rooted in the 1908 BP oil concession
been reinforced by events such as
The 1953 Mossadegh coup and
The 1979 revolution
She says Trump’s recent policies - Abraham Accords, the “Board of Peace,” Gulf investment redirection, and designating the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists - aim to dismantle that system, with Iran as the final obstacle amid escalating retaliatory strikes across the Gulf.
Chapters
00:00 The Saturday Wrap-Up - Intro
02:53 NOT IRAQ: Why This Strike Is Different
06:33 1908: When Britain Seized Iran's Oil
09:57 THE BOARD OF PEACE: Trump's Real Strategy
Snapshots and Notes
The bombs are falling on Tehran right now.
This morning, the United States and Israel launched major combat operations against Iran, and while every talking head in the Western world is screaming that this is Iraq 2.0, listen to what the president actually said to the Iranian people.
“To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand.
“When we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours to take.
“This will be probably your only chance for generations.
“Take over your government, it will be yours to take.”
That is not the language of regime change.
That is not Iraq.
And people screaming that are either lying to you or don’t understand what they’re looking at.
Right on cue, the New York Times editorial board is out shrieking that Trump is a madman who promised no new wars.
The anti-war crowd on both sides is screaming regime change.
They’re all wrong, and this is why…
This is not Iraq.
Iraq was about installing a new set of imperial puppets.
What Trump just hit is the last stronghold of a British operation that has controlled Iran’s destiny since 1908, the year British Petroleum seized its first oil well on Iranian soil.
For 118 years, every government in Iran, the Shah, the Ayatollahs, has served the same master, a financial architecture built by the City of London around Middle Eastern oil - and every war in that region has been designed to protect it.
Donald Trump has spent the last year dismantling that architecture piece by piece...
The Abraham Accords
The Board of Peace
$2 trillion in Gulf wealth redirected from London to American manufacturing
The Muslim Brotherhood was designated as terrorists
Gaza is being rebuilt
The mullahs were the last piece on the board - and as of this morning, Trump is clearing it.
Barbara Boyd has studied wars in the Middle East since the Khomeini revolution in 1979, and her colleagues at Promethean Action have tracked the British Empire’s financial operations for more than 50 years.
Here’s what is being discussed in this post...
NOT IRAQ: Why This Strike Is Different (02:53)
The president gave an eight-minute address early this morning announcing what the Department of War is calling Operation Epic Fury.
He was clear about the objectives.
“A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.
“Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.”
He listed the regime’s crimes going back 47 years, from the hostage crisis to the Marine barracks bombing to the October 7th attacks.
He emphasized that Iran has rejected every opportunity to renounce its nuclear ambitions.
And then he said this to the Iranian people…
“When we are finished, take over your government.
“It will be yours to take.
“This will probably be your only chance for generations.”
Now listen carefully to that …
He did not say the U.S. would install a new government.
He said it would be theirs to take.
This is a fundamentally different statement than anything George W. Bush said about Iraq.
Bush dismantled the entire Iraqi state, fired the police, the generals, everybody.
And as Trump himself said, a few weeks ago, about Venezuela.
“If you ever remember a place called Iraq, where everybody was fired, every single person, the police, the generals, everybody was fired, and they ended up being ISIS.
“Instead of just getting down to business, they ended up being ISIS.
“So I remember that.”
Trump knows the Iraq playbook.
He rejected it in Venezuela, where he captured Maduro but left the government intact and immediately began dealing with Maduro’s vice president.
And he’s telling us he’s rejecting it here.
The evidence speaks for itself…
On Friday morning, Vice President J.D. Vance went to the Washington Post, the establishment’s own publication, and said this…
Did you catch that?
NO CHANCE
Vance isn’t some armchair analyst; he’s a Marine who served in Iraq.
He built his political career on opposing foreign wars, and he said there is no chance this will become one.
He told the Post the strikes would be targeted and lethal, aimed at ensuring Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon, not at occupying a country of 90 million people.
Now, the New York Times editorial board pulled off an extraordinary contortion today.
They denounced the war as the act of a madman, but then admitted in their own editorial that Iran presents, and quoting them, quote,
They even acknowledge that the American presidents of both parties have rightly committed to preventing Tehran from getting a bomb.
So which is it?
Is Trump a madman?
Or is he doing what every president has said needed to be done?
The Times can’t decide because the truth doesn’t fit their narrative.
Here’s what the narrative is designed to hide…
1908: When Britain Seized Iran’s Oil (06:33)
To understand what Trump just struck, you need to understand what Iran actually is in the global power structure - and that story begins in 1908.
In that year, a British speculator named William Knox Darcy struck oil in southwest Persia.
He had purchased exclusive extraction rights from the Persian Shah for a pittance, just 16% of profits, and with no Iranian allowed to audit the books.
From that single concession,
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was born
It later became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
Today, you know it as British Petroleum, BP
Winston Churchill, as first Lord of the Admiralty called it, quote ...
… a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.
And he meant it.
The British government bought a 51% controlling stake in 1914.
The Royal Navy ran on Iranian oil.
Britain’s entire standard of living in the first half of the 20th century was subsidized by wealth extracted from Iran.
In 1950, Abaddon had become the world’s largest refinery.
The Anglo-Iranian oil company controlled all oil in Iran, while Iranian workers lived in shanty towns without running water.
Think about that.
The same empire that people think of as a quaint historical artifact was literally powered by Iranian oil, and the Iranians got almost nothing.
So when Iranian nationalists finally rose up and elected Mohammad Mosaddegh as prime minister in 1951, a man who nationalized the oil company for his own people, what happened?
The British and the CIA overthrew him in 1953 - Operation Ajax, they called it.
They installed the Shah as their puppet.
And who did they use on the ground to create the chaos for the coup?
The Muslim Brotherhood, the same organization Trump designated as terrorists just weeks ago.
Mark Curtis documents how the British and the CIA paid the Ayatollah Kashkani, who was Khomeini’s own mentor, for street violence during the uprising.
Now, here’s where it gets really interesting.
When the Shah outlived his usefulness, what happened?
The British and Americans acquiesced to Khomeini’s revolution in 1979.
One puppet replaced another.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology became the scaffold for Khomeini’s theocratic state, its belief system.
And the backward system of constant war between Israel, the Arab states, and Iran has been profitable for the City of London each time it has happened.
The City of London sets global oil prices.
It ensures virtually all oil shipments.
It banks the sovereign wealth of its former Middle East colonies.
And as we’ve documented extensively, it functions as the premier money laundromat for the drug, weapons, and trafficking mafias that thrive on regional chaos.
That is the system.
The mullahs are not an independent power.
They are the current franchise holders of a British financial operation that has controlled Iran for 118 years.
And the wars between Israel and the Arab states, between Sunni and Shia, between all the parties in the Middle East, these are managed conflicts designed to keep the region unstable so the financial architecture stays in place.
THE BOARD OF PEACE: Trump’s Real Strategy (09:57)
So here’s the question no one in the media is asking.
Why now?
Not just because of the nuclear program, not just because of the missiles.
The real answer is that Donald Trump has spent the last year systematically dismantling the British financial architecture in the Middle East, and the mullahs were the last obstacle.
Look at what he’s already done.
Since Trump assumed office the second time, he has secured over $2 trillion in Gulf sovereign-wealth-funded investments, money that used to sit in City of London banks.
It’s now committed to American manufacturing, energy, and AI infrastructure.
He organized the Arab world and Israel into his Board of Peace,
ending the carnage in Gaza and beginning to rebuild it.
The president of Kazakhstan captured it perfectly when he called Trump’s strategy, peace through construction.
Peace, in other words, through economic development.
“The Board of Peace is widely expected to respond directly to new realities by reinforcing existing multilateral efforts.
“The world has never seen a move like this.
“It is absolutely unprecedented because, in essence, peace through construction is a very innovative concept or project.”
Trump designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, cutting off the infrastructure that the British have used to manipulate the region for nearly a century.
He brought Egypt’s al-Sisi, the man who actually defeated the Brotherhood, to the table as a central partner.
He’s working with Turkey and Qatar, countries that Netanyahu doesn’t want involved because this isn’t Netanyahu’s plan, it’s Trump’s plan.
And think about what Scott Bessent, our treasury secretary, said earlier in January, that 50% of his job involves national security.
That’s because the real war isn’t kinetic, it’s financial.
It’s about breaking the City of London’s control over the flow of money in the Middle East.
The only thing standing in the way of this entire new architecture was the Iranian regime was still…
pursuing a nuclear weapon
pledging to destroy both Israel and the United States
developing the ballistic missile capability to accomplish that, and
funding proxies from Lebanon to Yemen to make war
You cannot build a board of peace while the molars are arming for war.
You cannot redirect $2 trillion in Gulf investment while Iran threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz.
You cannot rebuild Gaza while Iranian proxies are rearming.
That’s why this happened.
Not because Trump is a warmonger, but because the mullahs were the last piece on the British chessboard, and they refused to leave it voluntarily.
They rejected every deal.
And as Trump put it in his address this morning …
“We sought repeatedly to make a deal.
“We tried.
“They wanted to do it.
“Then they didn’t want to do it.
“Again, they wanted to do it.
“They didn’t want to do it.
“They didn’t know what was happening.
“They just wanted to practice evil.
“But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades.
“They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.”
So here’s the bottom line…
We are at the earliest stages of this conflict, and the situation is rapidly evolving.
Iran has already launched retaliatory strikes against the Gulf, targeting US assets in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE.
This is serious, and it’s dangerous.
But Barbara can tell you what she knows from watching 50 years of these wars…
This is not Iraq
Trump is not dismantling the state to install new puppets
He is removing the final obstacle to a peace architecture he has been building for over a year
And Vice President Vance, a Marine veteran and the most vocal opponent of the forever wars in the administration, has told us there is no chance this becomes one.
The Democrats and their friends in London will try to play this in the midterms.
They’ll scream regime change
They’ll invoke Iraq
They’ll call Trump a madman
And they will never, ever tell you about the 118 years of British financial control over Iran that made this moment inevitable
Now, we firmly believe that we can defend the president’s action as just and that grave and serious intelligence, much of it presently classified, supports his action.
But all of us know exactly how the Democrat lunatics and their friends in London will try to play this.
And we plan here not to let them have their game.
Follow Promethean Action on their website as well as here on Decisive Liberty News - both of us will be covering this as it evolves.
There’s no better way to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence than by finishing off the British Empire once and for all.
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