A little more on June 13 and all that

June 13: IDF image of Israeli warplanes, US supplied with help from UK and EU, en route  to Iran

Two posts ago, in June 13 was a game changer, I wrote …

Middle East state after vilified Middle East state has suffered [bombing and/or invasion] at the hands of the Empire of Carnage and Chaos.

… while in a series of four posts last year I used the framework of an alignment of US Neocons with Israel’s far Right to give substance to that description.

Syria was for me transformative, almost single-handedly inspiring this site. By now even I, slow of uptake, had cottoned on to an empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of ‘bringing democracy’, and in the ashes build a new regional order answerable to Washington.

In an imminent post I will use a Brian Berletic podcast to show how the proxy wars in Middle East and Ukraine, and efforts to encircle China in the South Pacific, are inextricably linked as a waning hegemon seeks with a recklessness born of desperation to preserve at any cost the unchallenged global supremacy it had for two or three decades assumed, with the USSR gone, as God given right.

if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.

US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright in a 1998 interview for NBC-TV

The White House aide [widely thought to be Karl Rove] said guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’ , which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality  [but] that’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’. 

US journalist Ron Suskind, 2004

But let me return to that last post but one. Apropos the chain of events triggered by June 13, I wrote:

The US-Israeli attempted regime change that day, masquerading 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. As David’s Sling and Iron Dome – and with them the myth of Israeli invincibility – wilted in a maelstrom of drone and hypersonic missile counter-strikes, so to lesser extent did that of America as global hegemon.

Now to the short read I’m featuring today. As I so often do, I have my carps. One is trifling, not so much a carp as a mildly irked raising of the Dennis Healeys. Yes, “Middle East”  is a colonially Eurocentric designator but “Western Asia”  is inaccurate for its exclusion of North African states like Libya and Egypt. In any case I find insistence on it somewhat prissy, smacking of that IdPol fetichising of terminology so neatly skewered by Caitlin Johnstone:

In just 200 years we’ve progressed all the way from expecting our leaders to slaughter brown skinned people while saying racist things, to expecting our leaders to slaughter brown skinned people while condemning racism.

More importantly, my eyebrows shot skywards at Patrick Lawrence’s uncritical endorsement of Rafael Grossi, the Israel friendly Director of the IAEA. This despite the settler colony’s refusal to submit to its inspections, or be a party to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Señor Grossi’s inglorious role in the June 13 aggression – chillingly reminiscent of how another “independent” body, the UN’s Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was used to aid the dirty war on Syria – is set out here.

In all other respects I give this piece a high rating.

“The war on sovereignty.”

Iran is now a front-line state.

29 JUNE—No, not yet by a long way. There is no calculating as of now the extravagant costs of the Israeli–American bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic—which is certain to resume at some point despite the rickety ceasefire now in place. We think of the fatalities of these wanton assaults, truth being ever war’s first casualty. Apart from the deaths of innocents, there are the risks of political chaos, the destruction of an economy, the damage to productive capacities, the social dislocations, the ruined dreams of countless Iranians who had been preparing to contribute one or another way to the human cause.

The list goes on and we may never be able to complete it—certainly not since the Air Force’s B–2 bombers have flown alongside Israeli jets, so making the United States directly a party to these daily acts of barbarity.

But we must not omit the principle of national sovereignty as we weigh the damage of what we now witness. An American-led war on sovereignty has blighted the community of nations for many decades. Many of us know this, and those who missed this elephant in the living room should now face it squarely. In my view the United States and Israel just opened a decisive front in this long-running combat. Let us not leave so extreme and momentous a breach off our list.

As the Zionist state extends its illegal aggressions further into West Asia—with some measure of American support at every stage—the fundamental implications of this its 21–month spree of criminality and terror are bitterly plain. The Israeli–American operation against Iran—and it seems to me by no means over—confirms an era of lawlessness and disorder such as humanity has not known for centuries. It is time, I mean to say, to consider in a world-historical context the conduct of the Zionist state and its American sponsor as they abuse the territorial integrity of another West Asian nation, possibly on the way to another “regime change”—this quite openly now.

It has been evident for some time—my date for this point of departure is 11 September 2001—that “the international rules-based order” is a preposterous misnomer for a long regime of chaos, violence, and at times near-anarchy. I think of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of that year, the invasion of Iraq two years later, the bombing of Libya eight years after that, the Central Intelligence Agency’s long, covert operation to topple the Assad regime in Syria, Israel’s incessant attacks against Iran, covert and overt, and now the genocide in Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon, the grinding, barely visible assaults on Venezuela and Nicaragua. If Iran is a front-line state in the war against sovereignty, so should we think of these latter.

Disorder, then, is nothing new. The extreme degree of disorder with which we live, to make this point another way, will have endured 24 years this autumn.

One could cast the U.S.–Israeli aerial invasion of Iran as another page in this book. As an exercise of raw power in the name of raw power it is comparable with many others that preceded it—another unrestrained, uninhibited contravention of international law and all norms associated with it. Its perpetrators make no apology for themselves, just as in the past. And there appears to be no prospect of an effective multilateral censure or intervention in the cause of global justice.

But this reading would be to miss the larger significance of what transpires in West Asia daily. Israel and the United States, have embarked—carelessly, thoughtlessly but also strategically—on an adventure that cannot end well for them and stands to harm many others aside from the Iranians. Straight off the top, the White House and the Pentagon continue to repeat President Trump’s rash, impulsive declaration immediately after the B–2s flew that Iran’s nuclear programs have been “completely and totally obliterated.” But, given this is quite obviously untrue, the risk of future attacks, and so the continued risk of nuclear contamination, remains.

Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned of this in a statement to the U.N. Security Council the very day the bombs fell. Attacking of Iran’s nuclear research and development sites, he said, would risk releasing catastrophic levels of radioactivity that would require mass evacuations on both sides of the Persian Gulf. Grossi singled out the Bushehr nuclear power plant on Iran’s gulf coast. The plant still stands, and it is hardly the only survivor of the Israeli–U.S. onslaught.

Iran is not the outcome of lines drawn on maps a century ago in the manner of Sykes and Picot. ¹ It is an old civilization with a singularly strong sense of national identity—a point apparently lost in Tel Aviv and Washington. It will not tip over or disintegrate as Iraq did after the 2003 invasion, or as Syria, crippled by years of covert Central Intelligence Agency operations, did late last year. Iran has made it clear severally since the bombs fell, and as anyone who knows the country and its people would have anticipated, that it will defend its sovereignty against any power that challenges it; its right to run nuclear programs has long stood as a totemic signifier of this determination …

NB the piece does continue, but only if you’re a paid subscriber to Patrick Lawrence’s substack. I’m not, and in any case as far as I’m concerned he’s made his point and, subject to aforesaid caveats, made it well. For a rich exploration of the ground he begins to open up with that last paragraph, see my post of June 22, Why Iran? Context & Consequences, and the Roger Boyd piece featured therein.

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1. Sykes-Picot (with an Ottoman Empire in post WW1 collapse, oil rising in importance, and a Middle East geographically vital to thwarting any threat to Western supremacy posed by a Eurasia united east and west, as feared for 500 years by first Anglo-French then US strategists) sought with ruled line borders and no small success to divide the Arab nation, humanity’s largest ethnic group after China’s Han. Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel (Colonel) Nasser Hussein sought  to build a Pan Arabism which, though unsuccessful, inspired the next generation of leaders – Hafez al-Assad, Muhammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussain – all of whom danced a complex tango with imperialism; frequently collaborating with it while embracing a state capitalism, in the form of ba’athism, which would ultimately lead the US to implement violent regime change in all three of the states they led.