A nation with 4% of the world’s population – 0.0004% when we remove those Americans who, beneath an embarrassing charade of democracy, have no actual say in the matter – and deems itself “The Indispensable Nation” muses on whether to risk WW3. Why? Three soldiers illegally in Syria and Iraq have been killed by a local group tired of politely asking them to leave.
1. If the US withdraws, it will be viewed as the mother of all failures and weaknesses for the Biden administration, akin to the Afghan withdrawal x 100. I have no idea why it should be viewed that way, when in reality it’s a giant win for Americans to disentangle their country from globalist and MIC pursuits, but that’s how it will be spun by the totally compromised media which is the enemy of humanity. Most Republican warhawks will of course agree and stoke this interpretation as well, as they’re on the MIC payroll.
2. If Biden escalates and orders major strikes on Iran itself as Lindsey Graham and others are now cheerleading for, it could lead to an escalatory cascade that would shut down the entire region by engulfing it in flames, crashing the world economy to new levels, which would be a massive shock to any establishment re-election chances this year.
Simplicius the Thinker
Even corporate media systemically incapable of getting to the truth of the Western presence in the Middle East are aware of the dangers. The pompous know-nothings of Guardian, New York Times and the rest mull at ponderous length on what Washington may or may not do by way of a calibrated response to Sunday’s strike on Tower 2 …
… but in so doing they betray the arrogance of a West steeped in assumptions, for the most part unconscious, born of centuries of dominance.
All the ‘calibrated response’ options have vaporised.
These sages assume Washington can do a minor tit-for-tat – take out an Iran-allied resistance leader, say, safely outside Iran and hope a line may thereby be drawn under the affair. That can never satisfy a Lindsey Graham or John Bolton, they know, but might it work as a US face-saver? Such unspoken rules of engagement with Tehran have, they reason, worked in the past for both Tel Aviv and Washington.
And here we have on the one hand Tehran’s plausible denial of involvement or foreknowledge; on the other, Blinken’s announcement yesterday that Washington has no proof of either. Will these factors aid the back-channelling?
Netanyahu and his criminally deranged associates aside – no small ‘aside’ when their methods, if not they themselves, have the backing of most Israelis – we all hope so. But option 2 as set out by Simplicius, while catastrophic for an oil-addicted West, understates the dangers – and not only because Israel’s sole chance of winning its war is to drag America in. The world stands as it did in June 1914, seconds before a pistol shot in Sarajevo took out the Archduke Ferdinand.
Wake up and smell the coffee. No punitive response Washington could possibly make can be guaranteed not to ignite, by way of spiralling escalation, a regional conflagration with every prospect of going global.
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