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U.S. President Donald Trump gives a speech in Washington, United States, on March 02, 2026. [Kyle Mazza – Anadolu Agency]
US President Donald Trump said the war with Iran is “very complete”, claiming that the country’s naval, air and communications capabilities have been destroyed, and revealing that he has someone in mind to replace the new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei if he is assassinated.
Speaking in remarks reported by US media, Trump said: “I think the war is very complete, pretty much. They have no navy, no communications, no air force.”
He added that he has “somebody in mind to replace Mojtaba Khamenei”, but did not reveal the person’s identity.
Separately, Western media reported that Trump had told his advisers he would be ready to support the assassination of the new Iranian Supreme Leader if he refuses to meet US demands.
According to The Wall Street Journal, citing US officials on Monday, Trump told aides he would back the killing of Khamenei if he declined to comply with American demands, including ending Iran’s nuclear programme.
However, the newspaper said that Israel — not the United States — would be expected to carry out any direct assassination of the Iranian leader.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Keir Starmer explains that UK is participating defensively in Trump and Israel’s criminal war for Israel’s genocidal expansion in Iran and states that he supports Zionism “without qualification”.Orcas discuss rotting brain. Front Orca says “Wish someone would lock him up”.Donald Trump warns against following the https://onaquietday.org blog, says that it’s easy atm, she only needs to report war crimes supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion.
Rescue workers and residents search through the rubble in the aftermath of the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school. Photograph: AP
Trump has blamed Iran for the mass killing at Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school but geolocation, videos and satellite imagery indicate otherwise
The bombing of a primary school in Minab on 28 February killed scores of people, most of them seven- to 12-year-old girls. The strike is the worst mass killing of the US and Israel’s war on Iran so far – and has been described by Unesco as a “grave violation” of international law.
On Saturday, the US president, Donald Trump, declared that Iran was responsible for the school bombing. “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran … they’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
The president presented no evidence for his claim. His assertion has not been repeated by spokespeople for the US military, who have said only that they are “investigating” the bombing.
But a growing body of evidence indicates that the strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school was carried out by the US. Here is what we know – and why it points to the US being responsible.
Donald Trump warns against following the https://onaquietday.org blog, says that it’s easy atm, she only needs to report war crimes supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion.Orcas discuss rotting brain. Front Orca says “Wish someone would lock him up”.Keir Starmer explains that UK is participating defensively in Trump and Israel’s criminal war for Israel’s genocidal expansion in Iran and states that he supports Zionism “without qualification”.
In 2002, former US President George W. Bush meets María Corina Machado, then director of Súmate, an “independent democratic civil society group” funded by the US government to “oversee the electoral process in Venezuela”. Source: White House/Eric Draper
Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but there’s nothing peaceful about her politics
When I saw the headline María Corina Machado wins the Peace Prize, I almost laughed at the absurdity. But I didn’t, because there’s nothing funny about rewarding someone whose politics have brought so much suffering. Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.
If this is what counts as “peace” in 2025, then the prize itself has lost every ounce of credibility. I’m Venezuelan-American, and I know exactly what Machado represents. She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatization, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.
Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs under the banner of “freedom,” She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.
Machado has spent her entire political life promoting division, eroding Venezuela’s sovereignty, and denying its people the right to live with dignity.
This is who María Corina Machado really is:
She helped lead the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew a democratically elected president, and signed the Carmona Decree that erased the Constitution and dissolved every public institution overnight.
She worked hand in hand with Washington to justify regime change, using her platform to demand foreign military intervention to “liberate” Venezuela through force.
She cheered on Donald Trump’s threats of invasion and his naval deployments in the Caribbean, a show of force that risks igniting regional war under the pretext of “combating narcotrafficking.” While Trump sent warships and froze assets, Machado stood ready to serve as his local proxy, promising to deliver Venezuela’s sovereignty on a silver platter.
She pushed for the US sanctions that strangled the economy, knowing exactly who would pay the price: the poor, the sick, the working class.
She helped construct the so-called “interim government,” a Washington-backed puppet show run by a self-appointed “president” who looted Venezuela’s resources abroad while children at home went hungry.
She vows to reopen Venezuela’s embassy in Jerusalem, aligning herself openly with the same apartheid state that bombs hospitals and calls it self-defense.
Now she wants to hand over the country’s oil, water, and infrastructure to private corporations. This is the same recipe that made Latin America the laboratory of neoliberal misery in the 1990s.
Machado was also one of the political architects of “La Salida,” the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics. Those weren’t “peaceful protests” as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it “resistance.”
She praises Trump’s “decisive action” against what she calls a “criminal enterprise,” aligning herself with the same man who cages migrant children and tears families apart under ICE’s watch, while Venezuelan mothers search for their children disappeared by US migration policies.
Machado isn’t a symbol of peace or progress. She is part of a global alliance between fascism, Zionism, and neoliberalism, an axis that justifies domination in the language of democracy and peace. In Venezuela, that alliance has meant coups, sanctions, and privatization. In Gaza, it means genocide and the erasure of a people. The ideology is the same: a belief that some lives are disposable, that sovereignty is negotiable, and that violence can be sold as order.
If Henry Kissinger could win a Peace Prize, why not María Corina Machado? Maybe next year they’ll give one to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for “compassion under occupation.”
Every time this award is handed to an architect of violence disguised as diplomacy, it spits in the face of those who actually fight for peace: the Palestinian medics digging bodies from rubble, the journalists risking their lives in Gaza to document the truth and the humanitarian workers of the Flotilla sailing to break the siege and deliver aid to starving children in Gaza, with nothing but courage and conviction.
But real peace is not negotiated in boardrooms or awarded on stages. Real peace is built by women organizing food networks during blockades, by Indigenous communities defending rivers from extraction, by workers who refuse to be starved into obedience, by Venezuelan mothers mobilizing to demand the return of children seized under US ICE and migration policies and by nations that choose sovereignty over servitude. That’s the peace Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, and every nation of the Global South deserves.
Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK.
