CIA/Mossad fingerprints are all over this!

BTL comment on the Kernow Damo podcast featured below

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Yesterday I welcomed – “with all due tepidity” – a Guardian piece earlier in the week by Owen Jones on the violence in Iran; the welcome bit for its opening sentence: “What does it take to shake illusions in western intervention?” …

… and my tepidity for two related reasons. One is Owen’s ‘plague-on-both-houses’  damning of the ayatollahs even as – rightly but ineffectually – he reminds those who call for ‘outside help’ of the carnage and chaos such ‘help’ invariably begets. ¹ Much of my output on Iran this week has targeted the absurdity, if we’re being kind, of this position as ably summarised by Caitlin Johnstone:

I see some lefty types going “I oppose the US empire AND the Iranian regime!”  No, you support the US empire. If you desire the downfall of the Iranian government in today’s geopolitical reality, you desire the expansion of US imperial power.

This post turns its attention to the other thing Owen gets wrong. With the self-same uncritical approach that marked his understanding of Syria, he takes as read that the protests are indeed genuinely grass roots through and through. He says nothing of much larger rallies in support of their government by a people for whom the US-Israeli attacks in June, which caught Iranian air defences off-guard as its diplomats negotiated with the Americans, had revealed the extent of Anglo-Zionist perfidy, and consequent folly not only of appeasement but of looking westwards for disinterested help. ²

And, again with the same uncritical approach marking his understanding of Syria, he is silent on the fact CIA, Mossad and in all likelihood MI6 fingerprints are all over this. ³  FWIW I think that’s more ignorance than mendacity, though this is meagre mitigation given (a) the responsibilities attendant on his privileged platform and (b) an abundance of evidence of empire machinations in a quarter-century of ‘colour revolutions’ and coups which by divine coincidence advanced the interests of a US oligarchy masquerading as a democracy and determined at all costs, up to and including thermonuclear Armageddon, to shore up its weakening but still murderously powerful grip on the planet.

With these thoughts in mind, I offer two short videos. The first, by Kernow Damo, overlaps – but with sufficiently different emphasis to make it worth the watch – with several featuring former UK diplomat and highly erudite Middle East commentator Alastair Crooke. Specifically, it asks why both Washington and Tel Aviv might conclude that, following their failure in June, any new decapitation strike on Iran will be met with a response devastating for Israel and for US assets in the Gulf.

And why Trump, ever ready to declare ‘mission accomplished’ where everyone else sees climb-down, has walked back his ‘strong options’ against Iran on the risible ground of a promise not to hang ‘protestors’. (As if Trump gave a damn, other than as window dressing, ⁴ and as if this was some huge concession by Tehran.) Then again, it could equally be that he and Bibi seek yet again to wrong-foot by signalling peace while preparing to strike.

As does Alastair, Kernow rules out neither in a podcast a shade over fifteen minutes.

My second short is a maverick offering. It zeroes in on a point also made by Alastair Crooke in several interviews, including this one at The Cradle with Sharmine Narwani, of which I wrote in a BTL exchange yesterday with Susan O’Neill, who’d alerted me to it, that:

… there’s more flesh on the bones here, both in respect of CIA/Mossad involvement and in the greater detail on the significance – reversing the element of surprise enjoyed by US and Israel in June – of Iran’s unexpected ability, likely with Russian and Chinese help, to take down Starlink and thereby confound the co-ordination of the thugs on the streets.

Alastair focused on the high strategic value of neutralising Starlink. In his words it reversed the element of surprise, an advantage America and Israel had to begin with enjoyed in June. Now it was their turn to be caught out as, with Starlink immunity to internet shutdown neutralised, the suddenly isolated terrorists were rounded up and indeed – Trump got this part right – on a fast track to the gallows.

This AI generated offering by contrast, and I stress I have no way of confirming or refuting its claims, is one for the propellor-heads. It focuses on how Starlink was so rapidly taken down.

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1. I took perverse delight in the absurdity of Owen’s pieties being skewered below the line by readers with a position the mirror opposite of mine. Unabashedly in favour of military ‘help’ for the ‘protestors’, they ask with dripping sarcasm what alternative form, on earth as it is on Planet Owen, the support he calls for might take! Me, unabashedly relieved the ‘protests’ have been defeated, I’m reminded of Jonathan Cook’s rebuke, nigh on a decade ago, of George Monbiot:

   Monbiot has repeatedly denied he wants a military attack on Syria. But if he weakly accepts whatever narratives are crafted by those who do – and refuses to subject them to meaningful scrutiny – he is decisively helping to promote such an attack.

2. Here’s another parallel with, inter alia, Syria. Bashar al-Assad, reluctantly thrust into the top job by the death of his father (preceded by that of the tougher minded brother who’d been groomed for the role) began to liberalise a multi-faith and artificially created state whose secularism had relied on Hafez Assad’s Ba’athist authoritarianism. Liberalisation is always a dangerous process, even without the threats from the Muslim Brotherhood, and from US intent as revealed to General Wesley Clark in 2003 and former French foreign minister Roland Dumas six years later. There’s a plethora of evidence not only that the Daraa protests of 2011, demanding faster progress on reform, were hijacked by Western backed jihadists – the “moderate Islamists” of David Cameron fantasy – but that many of the original protestors swung behind their government while damning Bashar – ‘the old man would never have stood for it!’ – for his excess of ruth. Other parallels include neo-Nazi snipers in the ‘spontaneous’ Maidan protests of 2014 that ousted Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine while Victoria Nuland doled out cookies. Like George Monbiot, Owen Jones suffers from selective myopia when cold facts threaten his simplistic morality tales. And like George, he does good work in other arenas. Trouble is, that gives him a credibility quite unwarranted here.
3. I speak of a long record of secret service involvement in protests sold as organic by the most powerful propaganda machine the world has known. But mention must be made of how the CIA, ever evolving in sophistication and over exposed by the bloody excesses of Operation Condor, saw plausible deniability in NGO cut-outs like National Endowment for Democracy, human rights groups which uncritically accept State Department dollars, and such private funders as Soros and the Gates Foundation. That’s before we even get to the likes of  Syria’s “White Helmets”, of which volumes have been written and which invariably vacated ISIS held areas the moment these were retaken by the Syrian Army. I sometimes wonder if the ‘conspiracy theorist’ putdown was algorithmically slipped into social media discourse precisely to deny a hearing to those who research such matters – but that’d be a conspiracy theory, right?
4. I should make room for the probability of those marked for execution being CIA/Mossad recruited, and the path to future recruitments being smoother with Washington seen to make efforts on their behalf. I wouldn’t attach great weight to such considerations is all. I deem face-saving and/or feint a stronger motive here.