Yesterday Israel and the US Neocons finally got what they’ve sought for at least a quarter of a century: hot war on Iran. The big question now being, how will Iran respond? In my previous post – It’s regime change, stupid! – I wrote:
Tehran now has three response options: (a) roll over and accept Israeli superiority in ways that spell regime change – crown jewel of the seven nations plan revealed 22 years ago to General Wesley Clark on the eve of the criminal war on Iraq; (b) respond economically and/or militarily in ways that seriously damage Israeli and Western interests, so handing to Israel what it has always sought: hot war, with America overtly onboard, regardless of the potential to drag in China and Russia; (c) go thermonuclear in a matter of months or even, if a wide consensus of experts is to be believed, weeks.
Which option it takes is as yet undetermined, with the big unknowns the true military strength of the Islamic Republic, and whether it will close down a Hormuz Strait through which a third of the world’s oil (and half of China’s) passes. Soaring prices on oil spot markets, with immediate knock-on at the world’s petrol pumps, could prove as WW3 inducing as a direct hit on Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev Desert – or, less inflammatorily, on Bibi’s house with the war criminal at home.
Some components of an answer may become clear very soon. Meanwhile I offer Novara Media. Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani aren’t the first to point to Trump Administration complicity, as revealed by its nominal leader in that childishly boastful way of his. 1 But they are the first to my knowledge to zero on the despicable treachery with which Trump led the Iranian negotiators to believe a resolution was in sight. In this respect the enrichment talks were Iran’s equivalent of the West’s deceiving of Russia over Minsk.
There’s a second reason this video, despite Novara not being my go to choice on Middle East affairs, merits a twenty-four minute slice of your weekend. I’ve written often on how the proxy war on Russia in Ukraine saw Europe’s comprador leaders subordinating national interest to those of Washington elites. Here the two, Aaron Bastani in particular, speak with forceful clarity on how the same US groomed leaders 2 – in this instance Emmanuel Macron, German Foreign Secretary Johann Wadephul, Sir Keir Starmer and former head of MI6 John Scarlett – are now doing the same vis a vis Washington and Tel Aviv.
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- Here’s what Trump posted on his Truth Social platform yesterday morning, replicated in The Guardian:
I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to “just do it,” but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done.
I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come – And they know how to use it.
Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!
There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end.
Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. God Bless You All!
- When Canadian political economist Radhika Desai was asked by the host of a discussion last September why Europe’s leaders act against the interests of their citizens, she said:
The entire Left in most Western countries – by ‘Left’ I mean the Social Democratic Left, the Green Parties and perhaps most of the entire political establishment – is now led by individuals who have been through the US ideological factories … the think tanks, the annual meetings etc. You know, the Leaders of Tomorrow type programs for which these people go to the USA on junkets, and become part of a network of leaders with a similar understanding of what is to be done, both domestically and internationally. People like Starmer, Macron, Von der Leyen and Baerbock … they belong to these circles. So in answer to the question – why are European governments acting so manifestly contrary to the interest of their economies, their people etc? – the only reason I can find is that at the present moment the United States is in this sweet spot where the people it has groomed have taken power in major European capitals.