US–Israel strikes on Iran have already started widening into a regional war, and the spillover is happening fast. Right, so Donald Trump has ordered the United States into strikes on Iran, Israel has joined in, and Tehran has been hit, and the pretence of a tidy, controlled event is already dead. Sirens have been sounding in Israel, a state of emergency has been declared there, and that is what “backfires already” looks like though isn’t it: once you hit a country like Iran, you don’t get to dictate the reply, the timing, or the shape of the region’s next forty-eight hours. A statement from Donald Trump has put the scale on record in his own words, because he is calling it “major combat operations” and saying the objective is to eliminate what he calls “imminent threats” from Iran. He is talking about destroying missiles, razing an industry, annihilating a navy, and preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon, they don’t want anyway and this is the public opening of a campaign built to justify the words he has chosen. A claim about “imminent threats” is the word you use to say you had no choice and had to act now. The trouble is its what they always say and with Iran never having launched an attack on any other nation unprovoked, it is particularly weak here. Trump has used the word anyway, and the public is being asked to treat his deranged speech as evidence and to accept that the same people who chose the timing get to define the urgency after the fact. Israel’s government has mirrored that framing, because Benjamin Netanyahu has called Iran an “existential threat”, he’s been saying it for 30 years, and has praised Trump for leadership, nothing to do with him having gone to the states 7 times since Trump became President again of course and talked about joint action while pitching it as creating conditions for Iranians to take their fate into their own hands.