The 12 days of fighting between Iran and Israel, along with the U.S. intervention, left a deep impact on all three countries. Where do each stand now that the fighting has stopped, and what comes next?

Michael Arria speaks with expert Sina Toossi about the influence neoconservatives will hold in the new Trump administration and what this could mean for policy toward Iran and the broader Middle East.

The mood in Washington today is similar to 2003 when the neocons of the Bush administration sought to remake the Middle East. This time, a joint vision shared by Israel and the Biden administration seeks to remake the region in the West’s vision.

Twenty years ago the entire U.S. establishment lined up behind our war on Iraq. It was one of the greatest disasters in history, and there’s been no accountability.

Israel is a “strategic liability of the first order” for the United States and is “the most likely state in the world to take the United States to Armageddon,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Sec’y of State Colin Powell. And the neoconservatives planned to set the Middle East on fire so that Israel’s enemies wouldn’t be able to give it trouble.

The media cannot look at the causes of the 9/11 attacks even 20 years later. But Al Qaeda perpetrated the bombings because the U.S. was an occupying military force in Saudi Arabia. A 1998 declaration of war by Osama bin Laden cites two other issues: the “devastation” of Iraq by U.S. sanctions including the alleged deaths of 1 million Iraqis, and the effort by the U.S. to “fragment” Arab nations and leave them as “paper statelets” so as to insure the survival of Israel.

The U.S. embarked on the “war on terror” with Israel as a model. Occupy Muslim lands, bomb civilians to defeat political opposition. It didn’t work in Afghanistan; and the U.S. withdrawal will force the Israel lobby to come up with new messaging to maintain the false belief that Israel and the U.S. face the same “bad neighborhood.”

As the tragedy in Afghanistan continues, there is at least one positive consequence. The warmongers in Israel and their allies in the neoconservative Washington, D.C. war party will find it even harder to convince the American public to support an invasion and “regime change” in Iran.

Joe Biden helped Bush and Cheney build the case for the Iraq war by allowing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be a doormat. Scott Horton’s book “Enough Already” reminds us that lies and conspiracy theories by Israel supporters fed the runup to the Iraq war. That record is required reading now that our supposed client state is escalating its attacks on Iran just as the U.S. is trying to reenter the Iran deal.

The Philos Project is the latest Christian Zionist organization seeking to drive a wedge between Muslim and Christian Arabs.