The Banditry of a Declining Empire
By Tom Somah
The Sherbro Islander
History is replete with the desperate convulsions of declining empires, their obsessive, hegemonic quest to maintain a status quo that keeps them unrivalled in their systematic plunder of other nations’ resources, sovereign wealth, and human dignity. These are countries that have grown morally bankrupt. And contemptuous of both domestic accountability and international law, answerable to no one. Ashamed of nothing.
The Iran Farce
The claim that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon and poses an existential threat to the West is a manufactured hymn, chanted through the corridors of power by habitual liars who have elevated fabrication into the grammar of foreign policy.
We have heard this hymn before. It was sung over Iraq, with the same grave faces, the same classified dossiers, and the same theatrical urgency. What followed was not liberation, but deliberate and methodical destruction. A civilisation dismembered. A nation bled into rubble. And the choir that composed that requiem has never answered for a single note.
What Iran represents, to those who manufacture these threats, is not danger but disobedience: a refusal to be disciplined into submission by Washington’s imperial preferences and Tel Aviv’s expansionist anxieties.
In the theatre of Western geopolitics, defiance is rebranded as menace, sovereignty is repackaged as aggression, and every nation that will not kneel is fitted for the role of villain.
The farce is not Iran’s nuclear programme. The farce is the audience that keeps applauding the performance.
And the performance is well funded. Think tanks are staffed by former weapons inspectors who now speak less like experts than hired advocates. Cable networks take speculation and, between commercial breaks, dress it up as fact. Politicians cite intelligence assessments they have barely read to justify wars they will never fight, on behalf of interests they dare not name in public.
The architecture of the lie is sophisticated because the lie has been profitable. It has paid in contracts, in influence, and in the geopolitical remaking of regions judged insufficiently obedient.
One must ask: who benefits from a perpetually menacing Iran? Not the Iranian people, who have absorbed decades of sanctions designed to starve a population into overthrowing its own government. Not the peoples of the Middle East, who have watched the region balkanised by interventions marketed as humanitarian and executed as conquest.
The beneficiaries are a narrower company: the arms manufacturers whose quarterly reports bloom in the season of manufactured crisis, the intelligence agencies that justify their budgets through the size of the threats they invent, and the political class that has discovered, across administrations and party lines, that fear is the most reliable currency in democratic governance.
Iraq was the proof of concept. Libya was the refinement. The rubble of both nations serves as a standing advertisement for what awaits any country foolish enough to surrender the deterrent the West has spent decades insisting it must not possess. Gaddafi gave up his weapons programme. He was sodomised with a bayonet in a ditch while Western foreign ministers smiled for cameras. The lesson was not lost on Tehran. The lesson was not lost on Pyongyang. The lesson, in fact, was the point.
Iran has not occupied foreign territory, blockaded civilian populations, demolished homes, or conducted the indiscriminate slaughter of children and families sheltering in the ruins of what were once their lives. The existential threat in this story has never been Iran. It has always been the lie itself and the machinery of power that requires the lie to keep running.
Iran signed and honoured the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It was not Tehran that walked away. It was Washington, in 2018, without legal justification and without consequence to those who tore the agreement apart. But it is Iran that is sanctioned, isolated, bombed, and condemned in the carefully choreographed theatre of Western moral outrage.
And then there is the contradiction that exposes the entire farce. Donald Trump declared before the world that, after a twelve-day war, Iran’s key nuclear facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated". His words, not ours.
Yet the same administration continues to justify further pressure and the possibility of renewed aggression, on the grounds that Iran’s nuclear infrastructure remains a threat. One of these statements is a lie. Possibly both are.
Together, they reveal something more damning than dishonesty: a power that no longer feels obliged to keep its contradictions consistent, because it has concluded that no one with the authority to challenge it will bother to try.
Still, a world populated by cowardly leaders, men and women who have perfected the art of licking the boots of satanic megalomaniacs, applauds the mayhem inflicted upon Iran while conferring undeserved legitimacy on those responsible for it.
The Nuclear Hypocrisy
Iran has never developed a nuclear bomb. The countries that have, and in one case deployed them against civilian populations, incinerating hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are presented to the world as the guardians of non-proliferation. The architects of nuclear annihilation appoint themselves the judges of who may and may not pursue nuclear technology.
The audacity is breathtaking. The hypocrisy is boundless. And the silence of the international community is a condemnation that history will not forgive.
The Litany of Destruction
The record speaks for itself. From the CIA-orchestrated coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, to decades of American-backed military dictatorships across South America, to the destruction of Iraq on fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction that were never found, to the reduction of Libya from Africa’s most prosperous state to an open-air slave market. This litany is documented history.
These are not the actions of nations with the moral authority to lecture others about human rights, terrorism, or the rule of law. These are the actions of states that have betrayed the very principles they claim to uphold, demonstrating repeatedly and without remorse that international law is a tool to be wielded against the weak and ignored by the powerful.
The Irrelevance of the United Nations
When powerful nations resort to destroying peaceful sovereign states, the UN convenes meetings. It passes resolutions. It issues statements of concern. It appoints special rapporteurs. It does everything except the one thing it was created to do: protect the vulnerable from the powerful.
The Security Council, with its permanent five members wielding veto power, is structurally designed to ensure that the world’s most powerful nations are never held accountable for their crimes. It is not a system of collective security. It is a system of collective impunity dressed in the language of international order.
Until that architecture is fundamentally reformed, until the nations of the Global South and Africa refuse to participate in institutions that exist to legitimise their own subjugation, the UN will remain what it has largely become: a stage on which powerful nations perform concern while conducting destruction.
A Final Word
The narratives are sophisticated. The media infrastructure that amplifies them is global. The financial systems that reward compliance and punish dissent are formidable. But narratives, however sophisticated, eventually collide with reality. Empires, however powerful, eventually decline. And the lies that sustained them are eventually named for what they were.
Politicians then cite intelligence assessments they have not read to justify wars they will never fight, serving defence contractors, oil interests, regional allies and imperial ambitions they dare not name in public. The architecture of the lie is sophisticated because the lie has been profitable. It has paid in contracts, influence, and the geopolitical reordering of regions deemed insufficiently compliant.
One must ask: who benefits from a perpetually menacing Iran?
Not the Iranian people, who have endured decades of sanctions designed to turn suffering into political revolt. Not the people of the Middle East, who have watched their region fractured by interventions sold as humanitarian but carried out as conquest.
The beneficiaries belong to a narrower circle: the arms manufacturers whose quarterly reports bloom in seasons of manufactured crisis; the intelligence agencies that justify their budgets by the size of the threats they inflate; and the political class that has discovered, across administrations and party lines, that fear is the most reliable currency in democratic governance.
Iraq was the proof of concept. Libya was the refinement. The rubble of both nations serves as a standing advertisement for what awaits any country foolish enough to surrender the deterrent the West has spent decades insisting it must not possess. Gaddafi gave up his weapons programme. He was sodomised with a bayonet in a ditch while Western foreign ministers smiled for cameras. The lesson was not lost on Tehran. The lesson was not lost on Pyongyang. The lesson, in fact, was the point.
Iran has not occupied foreign territory, blockaded civilian populations, demolished homes, or conducted the indiscriminate slaughter of children and families sheltering in the ruins of what were once their lives. The existential threat in this story has never been Iran. It has always been the lie itself and the machinery of power that requires the lie to keep running.
Iran signed and honoured the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It was not Tehran that walked away. It was Washington, in 2018, without legal justification and without consequence to those who tore the agreement apart. But it is Iran that is sanctioned, isolated, bombed, and condemned in the carefully choreographed theatre of Western moral outrage.
And then there is the contradiction that exposes the entire farce: Donald Trump declared before the world that, after a twelve-day war, Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated". His words, not ours.
Yet the same administration continues to justify further pressure, and the possibility of renewed aggression, on the grounds that Iran’s nuclear infrastructure remains a threat. One of these statements is a lie. Possibly both are.
Together, they reveal something more damning than dishonesty: a power that no longer feels the need to keep its contradictions consistent, because it has concluded that no one with the authority to challenge it will bother to try.
Still, a world populated by cowardly leaders, men and women who have perfected the art of licking the boots of satanic megalomaniacs, applauds the mayhem inflicted upon Iran while conferring undeserved legitimacy on those responsible for it.
The Nuclear Hypocrisy
Iran has not been shown to have developed a nuclear bomb. Yet the countries that have developed them, and in one case used them against civilian populations, incinerating hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, present themselves to the world as guardians of non-proliferation.
The audacity is breathtaking. The hypocrisy is boundless. And the silence of the international community is a condemnation history will not forgive.
The Litany of Destruction
The record speaks for itself. From the CIA-orchestrated coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, to decades of American-backed military dictatorships across South America, to the destruction of Iraq on fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction that were never found, to the reduction of Libya from Africa’s most prosperous state to an open-air slave market. This litany is not a matter of interpretation. It is documented history.
These are not the actions of nations with the moral authority to lecture others about human rights, terrorism, or the rule of law. These are the actions of infidels to the very principles they claim to uphold, states that have demonstrated, repeatedly and without remorse, that international law is a tool to be wielded against the weak and ignored by the powerful.
The Irrelevance of the United Nations
When powerful nations destroy peaceful sovereign states, the UN convenes meetings. It passes resolutions. It issues statements of concern. It appoints special rapporteurs. It does everything except the one thing it was created to do: protect the vulnerable from the powerful.
The Security Council, with its five permanent members wielding veto power, is structurally designed to ensure that the world’s most powerful nations are rarely held accountable for their crimes. It is not a system of collective security. It is a system of collective impunity dressed in the language of international order.
Until that system is fundamentally reformed, and until the nations of the Global South refuse to lend legitimacy to institutions designed to manage their subjugation, the UN will remain what it has largely become: a stage on which powerful nations perform concern while conducting destruction.
A Final Word
The narratives are sophisticated. The media infrastructure that amplifies them is global. The financial systems that reward compliance and punish dissent are formidable. But narratives, however sophisticated, eventually collide with reality. Empires, however powerful, decline. And the lies that sustained them are finally named for what they were.