The Iran war is unlikely to end soon

Apologies: bad html code in this post, now fixed, made the site inaccessible for several hours today. Thanks to Alain for reporting it, apologies to all for the inconvenience. 

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I’m struggling to juggle the unpacking of personal effects (main casualty to date a lost passport) from banana boxes which have made steel city house’s new premises a toe-stubbing minefield, with keeping up with events in West Asia. One thing I do without fail is tune in at day’s end to the YouTube podcasts of, inter alia, The Duran, Brian Berletic, Larry Johnson, John Mearsheimer, and Professor Marandi in Tehran; and in the morning to Naked Capitalism’s daily war briefings.

On that last, my flashes of irritation with Yves Smith’s vanity above the line, egoic intolerance of dissent below it, are minor. Her daily reports, and at its best the comments section, are a must read. Today’s offers a crisp summary of the US-Israeli war of criminal aggression, the second for which Europeans – again inter alia – will pay a bitter price in soaring inflation if not depression and food riots, and the first one in which, unlike Ukraine, nobody is buying, as Caitlin observed yesterday, Washington’s bullshit.

It’s the first US war I’ve ever seen where a big chunk of the imperial power structure just refuses to get on board. The media’s not playing along, US allies are telling Trump to get stuffed when he asks for military assistance with the Strait of Hormuz, and the public’s not buying the lies.

But back to Yves’ piece. I have carps over its depiction of Russian ‘opportunism’ – she’s fighting an existential war on her southwest flank! – and it ignores one off-ramp the US plutocracy still has; viz, replacing Trump on ground of mental incompetence, blaming the war on him and Bibi, and accepting that for the foreseeable future regime change in Tehran is out of the question. ¹

Those caveats aside, her short briefing today sums things up neatly.

Iran War: Even as Breakdowns and Lasting Damage Mounts, Denial, Normalcy Bias, and Arrogance of the Belligerents Will Produce a Long and Highly Destructive War

Even after Trump came as close to contrition as he ever does, in trying to throw Israel under the bus for attacks on Iranian energy facilities that led to swift, brutal retaliation, including most importantly, destruction at Qatar’s vital Ras Laffan LNG operations that will take years to repair and promising really, truly, Israel will never do anything like that again. Even though Netanyahu said the Israel “acted alone”, Reuters joined Axios in reporting that the settler colony coordinated its attacks with the US.

The fact that Trump and Netanyahu seem momentarily chastened does not change the underlying dynamic. This war is a test to destruction. Reader ISL pointed to ISL March, 16-19: diplomatic impunity by NO1. This section summed up the state of play:

• • Iran’s declared terms are: reparations, closure of all US bases in the GCC, guarantees against future aggression.
  • The US’s declared goal is: regime change, denuclearisation, dismantlement of the “Iranian terror regime”.
  • Neither side has moved an inch. The only people who might have found a middle lane are either dead or sidelined. ²

The US cannot voluntarily swallow the epic level of defeat that accepting Iran’s terms would amount to. We have repeatedly said that even if Trump and Netanyahu were to have Damascene conversions and show genuine, credible movement to an exit ramp, there are too many powerfully placed factions and individuals who are deeply invested in the Iran hatred project for that to happen. The one measure that could impress Iran of US sincerity would be to turn over the $100+ billion of Iran’s frozen assets, which Iran could treat as meeting its reparations demands. Please tell me in what alternative universe you think that might happen.

In this one. It’s not hard to envisage scenarios in which such a ‘reparation’ might seem the least costly option for the US ruling class. I don’t say it will happen, mind. Simply that Yves, with that brittle certainty which mars her otherwise invaluable input, overstates the case against.

And Iran has no reason to back down. It has stood alone for decades, with no friends save perhaps North Korea. Readers recounted long form how Russia has a history of broken promises¹ and can at best be regarded as opportunistic in backing Iran now (not that that is unhelpful).

Iran has been demonized, sanctioned, and subjected to repeated attempts to break it as a nation and even a culture. Yet the Persians have a long and storied history of defeating seemingly far more powerful military opponents by careful study of their weaknesses and extensive planning and preparation. At best, they were never going to go down without an extremely bloody fight, the opposite of what the high-on-their-misplaced-sense-of-power-and-superiority belligerents assumed.

The Gulf States, they are starting to grapple with how dire their situation is becoming. Notice the quiet emotional exhaustion of the presenter and his use of the expression “breaking point”:

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1. There are those, not to my knowledge including Naked Capitalism, who say that since the USA has morphed from value-seeking capitalism to rent-seeking neo-feudalism premised on what Giscard d’Eistang called the dollar’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ – Bretton Woods with the gold standard removed by Nixon, and artificial demand created by petrodollars – the US plutocracy can no more U-turn on this criminal war than Trump can. This could form one explanation – there are others – of its having let the tangerine narcissist and/or Bibi continue so disastrous a course even after it became evident their “regime change in a weekend” had failed massively. One such voice can be found here. The arguments get technical – some might say sophist – but at root derive from the ideas of Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff on the one hand, Yanis Varoufakis on the other; that US capitalism is now a form of what Yanis calls a ‘technofeudalism’ overseen by creditor oligarchies.
2. “The only people who might have found a middle lane are either dead or sidelined.” One sign of the shift Caitlin notes is that even in the mainstream the idea of Israel seeking to silence those who might end the war is no longer seen as wild-eyed conspiracism. The opening it might indicate, of a loosening of the alignment described in my series on US Neocons & Israel’s far Right, has other indicators in those voices on the Democrat left and Republican conservatism now pushing back against “Israel first-ism”. One aspect of this shift is that a binary debate – between pundits (including such Jewish critics of Israel as Jeffrey Sachs, Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal) who say Israel dictates US policy, and those led by Brian Berletic (who comes closer to my view) who find that specious – is on both sides too entrenched to reflect today’s shifting realities. In a not too distant post I intend to return to this.