Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine speaks during a news conference at the Pentagon in Washington on Sunday, June 22, 2025, following U.S. airstrikes on three sites in Iran. The strikes mark the first direct American military involvement in support of Israel’s effort to dismantle Iran. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
By a Former SFO
On June 22, 2025, the United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer, a precision airstrike that hit three of Iran’s most fortified nuclear sites. The Pentagon claimed it wasn’t about regime change. But if you’ve been paying attention or like myself, you’ve worn the uniform and carried out the missions, you know that’s not true.
To the people of the world watching this unfold, wondering how we got here again, let me say what many in Washington won’t: This was never about democracy. It never is.
I’ve served in these wars. I’ve seen the playbook up close. And behind every “freedom mission,” there’s always a pipeline, a port, or a profit margin.
In Iraq, we were told we were bringing liberation. But we were guarding oil infrastructure while the country collapsed around us. Iraq has the fifth-largest oil reserves on Earth. Libya, before we shattered it, had Africa’s largest. Syria resists U.S. control and sits on key energy corridors. Yemen’s coast controls one of the most strategic oil shipping lanes in the world, known as the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
These aren’t wars for freedom. These are wars for access and control.
And it all ties back to the petrodollar. The U.S. dollar isn’t backed by gold, it’s backed by the global oil trade. When leaders challenge that system, they get taken out. Saddam Hussein tried to sell oil in euros. Gaddafi pushed for a gold-backed African currency. Both were removed, their countries reduced to chaos. Now Iran, Russia, and the expanded BRICS alliance are making the same moves trying to exit the dollar system. So now Iran is being bombed under the guise of “security.”
Let’s call this what it is: empire maintenance.
Destabilizing nations isn’t a failure, it’s the primary objective. Break countries that resist. Keep them weak. Prevent alliances with Russia, China, or anyone else outside the U.S. sphere. It’s an old playbook. Divide, conquer, install puppets. If that doesn’t work, create chaos and pretend we’re the firefighters, not the arsonists.
And don’t forget the profit. Every bomb dropped, every drone launched, every military base built feeds the defense industry. Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, these are just a few of the real winners of every war we provoke. I saw it firsthand. I watched billion-dollar contracts handed out while our equipment in the field broke down or was left. This isn’t about patriotism. It’s a business. And business is booming no matter who the president of the United States is.
That’s why the war never ends. Permanent conflict justifies mass surveillance, not just on them but on us. It keeps over 800 U.S. military bases running. It feeds a trillion-dollar defense budget. And it keeps the American people afraid and numb, just afraid enough to keep asking for more bombs, more boots, more lies.
Now, Israel has struck first. The U.S. followed. And the war machine rolls on now pointed squarely at Iran.
This didn’t start yesterday. Back in 2007, General Wesley Clark said the Pentagon had a classified plan to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Every name on that list has since been destabilized, overthrown, or bombed. Iran was the last one.
And if you’re wondering who’s next, just look at who’s resisting the dollar, blocking Western influence, or nationalizing their resources. Venezuela has already been targeted. Somalia, Niger, and others are in the crosshairs and not because they’re threats to peace, but because they’re threats to profit.
The cost? It’s not counted in defense budgets or quarterly earnings. It’s measured in bodies. In families torn apart. In children growing up under drones and rubble. In the rise of terrorist groups born out of the vacuums we leave behind. In entire generations who now associate “democracy” not with hope, but with fire raining from the sky.
“They hate us for our freedoms” was never true. They hate what we do. They hate what we destroy.
I believed the mission once. But now I see what it really was.
Regime change was never about freedom. It was always about control. About money. About fear.
And until we admit that the wars will never stop.
Nkozi Knight 