June 13 was a game changer

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Here’s a question. Why do you suppose a Western-vilified DPRK, aka North Korea, hasn’t been bombed or invaded while Middle East state after vilified Middle East state has suffered one or both at the hands of the Empire of Carnage and Chaos?

Too easy? Proceed to question 2. On June 12 I reported – Iran goes soixante-neuf – that 69% of Iranians want the Islamic Republic, notwithstanding Ayatollah Khamenei’s fatwa  against such a thing, to acquire a nuclear deterrent. Do you suppose that figure went up or down just twenty-four hours later?

Park that thought while I momentarily digress. It’s a common misconception that senior Nazi figures – Himmler, Göring, Ribbentrop, Doenitz, Keitel and Jodl – were handed death sentences at Nuremberg for their part in the Holocaust. In fact such a charge was deemed too difficult to prove. Instead they went to the gallows (or in the cases of Himmler and Göring cheated Albert Pierrepoint’s noose) for what the 1946 International Military Tribunal called “the supreme crime” of waging aggressive war.

“Victors’ justice”, said Himmler, cyanide pill at the ready.

He had a point. What has the US Empire done, this past quarter century in the Middle East, if not wage unprovoked aggressive war? And what did the US and Israel do on June 13th?

The US-Israeli attempted regime change that day, masked without evidence as a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, was a wake up call not just for Tehran but – given the perfidy not only of Washington and Tel Aviv but a supposedly independent IAEA – for Beijing and Moscow too. Here to discuss how and why “the supreme crime” failed (for now) – is an erudite and articulate Western pundit on matters Middle East. Former UK diplomat Alastair Crooke, more scrupulous than most in distinguishing knowns from probables from can’t-yet-be-calleds – discusses its inception, failure and anticipable consequences. As the myth of Israeli invincibility melted in a hail of drone and hypersonic missile counter-strikes, so to lesser extent did that that of America as planetary hegemon.

I see only one flaw in his masterful analysis. It comes at the end. He rightly notes the problems for Trump’s presidency posed by much of his MAGA base seeing June 13, and the more overt (if theatrically performative) despatch of US B-2 bombers a week later, as kowtowing to Israel and the Neocons. So far so good. I made a similar observation in All eyes are now on America:

For Mr Trump this is a disaster. A long and drawn out war in the Middle East, with flag draped coffins coming home in quantity, will cost him his America First support base. Then again, his planet sized ego can hardly relish the prospect of going down in history as the POTUS who hung Israel out to dry.

But I wrote in the context of ‘deep state’ continuity in US foreign policy, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office; a context Alastair shows awareness of but fails to make explicit in ways that would have enriched his otherwise perceptive appraisal. For such enrichment I look to another, Brian Berletic, to be considered in a later post.

Meanwhile I commend this as a skilful dissection of June 13 and its consequences.

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