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Why the United States Won’t Launch a Ground War Versus Iran

Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2019

The US is not capable of defeating Iran in a conventional war

https://theduran.com/why-the-united-states-wont-launch-a-ground-war-versus-iran/

Submitted by Steve Brown…

In recent weeks we have seen numerous probing attempts and provocations in and around the Strait of Hormuz — whether false flags or actual events — intended to raise the profile of the US’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA, and renewed US sanctions versus Iran.  Iran is pushing the issue with the United States, and is apparently offering a sacrificial pawn on the board (or perhaps knight!) by seizing two British oil tankers alleged to be operating illegally in the Strait of Hormuz.

While it is too soon to predict how the United States and its allies Israel and Saudi Arabia (both sworn enemies of Iran) will react, let’s explore the reasons why any US reactionary response will be largely symbolic, even if that involves a token strike versus Iran.

Global alliances have shifted

Turkey has defacto announced its withdrawal from NATO, by its purchase of S-400 missiles. That purchase and collaboration with Russia guarantees its departure from NATO, even if Turkey has not publicly announced such a withdrawal.  Furthermore, while Turkey’s military bases host US aircraft and operations, Turkey says it will not allow its bases to be used in any attack on Iran, by the US.

Iraq, an ally of Iran, has likewise stated that it will not allow its territory to be used as a base for attacking Iran.

Next, Imran Khan’s Pakistan has moved away from its alliance with the US to court China. China is Pakistan’s largest trading partner, and China has guaranteed security to Pakistan for Kashmir. Thus, no bases in Pakistan will be provided to the United States for any attack on Iran.

China and Russia have warned Washington too that it must not attack Iran. Iran has guarantees from Russia, China, Pakistan, Turkey, and even Japan and India that its economic future is secure… despite US sanctions.

So, only Saudia remains as a host for US aggression versus Iran.  But Saudia has much to lose by hosting US aggression, especially with Russia pushing OPEC+.  And even the largely defunct Arab League opposes US aggression versus Iran, from any Saudi base.

Iran will fight back

Next, consider the military force that Iran has at its disposal. From advanced Grad rockets to the Kornet, expect an announcement soon that S-400’s and other advanced armaments will be provided to Iran to ensure its right to defend itself. That, in conjunction with an already formidable array of defensive weapons to secure Iran’s borders and sea lanes will guarantee a formidable defense.

The United States cannot afford another new war

While the Federal Reserve may print the USD at will, a new war – especially a major war versus Iran – will weaken the US economically, despite the gamed casino numbers we see daily from Wall Street…

The US is not capable of defeating Iran in a conventional war

This time, there is no “coalition of the willing” to posture and pretend that the US has many and varied allies engaged in some just cause to rid the world of evil, as it proclaimed in 1994 versus North Korea, and in 2003 versus Iraq.  Apparently, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau and Solomon Islands have no real grievance versus Iran right now.

But the possibility exists that France, the UK and Germany will consider Iran enough of a threat around the Strait of Hormuz to impose additional sanctions on the country, and increase Naval military patrols to accompany tankers through the Strait. The increased patrols will increase tensions in the region, but should not result in war unless the US takes the bait of Iran sacrificing a knight to leave the West’s queen exposed, ie a greater war in the Middle East which may involve Iraq, Syria, Israel, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

Last time, just ten minutes prior to pulling the trigger (depending on accounts!) to consummate the Neocon’s dream for war with Iran, Trump had other ideas. Now,  let’s review the reasons the United States cannot initiate a ground war versus Iran.

Iran Strike Strategic map

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Afghanistan

Most likely candidate here would be to stage US air strikes on Iran from Bagram air base. But at this time Afghanistan seeks closer ties with Iran on trade; for example, to trade with India via Iran’s Chabahar port.

And while the US could stage air strikes from Bagram, to launch a ground attack from this region would be a virtual impossibility. That is, due to mountainous terrain and firmly entrenched and well-armed IRGC mountain troops, neighboring.

Furthermore, it is exceedingly likely that Dostum/Ghani would forbid any attack by the US on Iran from Afghanistan, that would result in a major new war. And note that Dostum is pushing for the removal of US troops from Afghanistan, including its air bases…

What of Iran’s Motives?  

The culture that invented the game of chess never makes a move without careful and calculating consideration. Iran has been forced to play black for decades now, and has done so with skill, alacrity, and will take the initiative whenever possible.

Whether Iran has sensed a particular point of weakness in the West at this time, or Iran has hidden agreements in place with significant allies to come to its defense in the event of an US attack, is of course unknown.

That Iran may be holding a surprise move in check with support from its allies must be of extreme concern to the US Hegemon.  And eventually that concern must be all of ours, when the hegemon inevitably fails to intimidate and control the board with its white advantage, and its queen is taken.

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John Bolton's zeal for regime change extends to Latin ...

 

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : How Trump’s Arch-Hawk Lured Britain into a Dangerous Trap to Punish Iran

Posted by M. C. on July 21, 2019

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2019/july/21/how-trump-s-arch-hawk-lured-britain-into-a-dangerous-trap-to-punish-iran/

written by Simon Tisdall

John Bolton, White House national security adviser and notorious Iraq-era hawk, is a man on a mission. Given broad latitude over policy by Donald Trump, he is widely held to be driving the US confrontation with Iran. And in his passionate bid to tame Tehran, Bolton cares little who gets hurt – even if collateral damage includes a close ally such as Britain.

So when Bolton heard British Royal Marines had seized an Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar on America’s Independence Day, his joy was unconfined. “Excellent news: UK has detained the supertanker Grace I laden with Iranian oil bound for Syria in violation of EU sanctions,” he exulted on Twitter.

Bolton’s delighted reaction suggested the seizure was a surprise. But accumulating evidence suggests the opposite is true, and that Bolton’s national security team was directly involved in manufacturing the Gibraltar incident. The suspicion is that Conservative politicians, distracted by picking a new prime minister, jockeying for power, and preoccupied with Brexit, stumbled into an American trap.

In short, it seems, Britain was set up.

The consequences of the Gibraltar affair are only now becoming clear. The seizure of Grace I led directly to Friday’s capture by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of a British tanker, the Stena Impero, in the Strait of Hormuz. Although it has not made an explicit link, Iran had previously vowed to retaliate for Britain’s Gibraltar “piracy”. Now it has its revenge.

As a result, Britain has been plunged into the middle of an international crisis it is ill-prepared to deal with. The timing could hardly be worse. An untested prime minister, presumably Boris Johnson, will enter Downing Street this week. Britain is on the brink of a disorderly exit from the EU, alienating its closest European partners. And its relationship with Trump’s America is uniquely strained.

Much of this angst could have been avoided. Britain opposed Trump’s decision to quit the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the trigger for today’s crisis. It has watched with alarm as the Trump-Bolton policy of “maximum pressure”, involving punitive sanctions and an oil embargo, has radicalised the most moderate Iranians.

Yet even as Britain backed EU attempts to rescue the nuclear deal, Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt, foreign secretary, tried to have it both ways – to keep Trump sweet. They publicly supported Washington’s complaints about Iran’s “destabilising” regional activities and missile programme, and berated Iran when it bypassed agreed nuclear curbs.

Fair Use Excerpt. Read the full article here.

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Join the CIA: Travel the World Passing Out Nuclear Blueprints – The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on July 21, 2019

CIA. One of the reasons we are where we are.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/join-the-cia-travel-the-world-passing-out-nuclear-blueprints/

By

David Swanson

In the year 2000, the CIA gave Iran (slightly and obviously flawed) blueprints for a key component of a nuclear weapon. In 2006 James Risen wrote about this “operation” in his book State of War. In 2015, the United States prosecuted a former CIA agent, Jeffrey Sterling, for supposedly having leaked the story to Risen. In the course of the prosecution, the CIA made public a partially redacted cable that showed that immediately after bestowing its gift on Iran, the CIA had begun efforts to do the same for Iraq. Now in 2019, Sterling is publishing his own book, Unwanted Spy: The Persecution of an American Whistleblower.

I can only make sense of one reason why the CIA hands out blueprints for nuclear bombs (and in the case of Iran planned to deliver actual parts as well). Both Risen and Sterling claim that the goal was to slow down Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Yet we now know that the CIA had no solid knowledge that Iran had any nuclear weapons program, or if it had one how advanced it was. We know that the CIA has been involved in promoting the false belief that Iran is a nuclear threat since the early 1990s. But even assuming that the CIA believed Iran to have a nuclear weapons program in 2000 (which the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate would later claim had been ended in 2003), we have not been offered any explanation of how providing flawed blueprints could have been imagined to slow such a program down. If the idea is supposed to be that Iran or Iraq would simply waste time building the wrong thing, we run up against two problems. First, they would likely waste vastly more time if working without plans, as compared to working with flawed ones. Second, the flaws in the plans given to Iran were obvious and apparent.

 

When the former-Russian assigned to deliver the blueprints to the Iranian government immediately spotted the flaws in them, the CIA told him not to worry. But they didn’t tell him that the flawed plans would somehow slow down an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Instead they told him that the flawed plans would somehow reveal to the CIA how far along Iran’s program was. But how that would happen has never been explained either. And it conflicts with something else they told him, namely that they already knew how far along Iran was and that Iran already had the nuclear knowledge that they were providing. My point is not that these assertions were true but that the slow-them-down rationale was not attempted.

One never wants to underestimate incompetence…

We have no possible way of knowing a complete list of countries the U.S. government has handed nuclear weapons plans to. Trump is now giving nuclear weapons secrets to Saudi Arabia in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, his oath of office, and common sense…

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US Poised to Send 500 Troops to Saudi Arabia Amid Iran Tensions – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2019

This is how our kids defend oil… America. By doing SA’s and Israel’s dirty work.

Think about that the next time you see a young paraplegic or when you are at a military celebration that suddenly breaks out into a sporting event.

Remember when Obama said was sending 275 troops to Iraq for support and training? It didn’t take long for that number to reach many thousand.

We can’t defeat ME countries that are barely out of the stone-age militarily. Iran is bigger than Afghanistan and Iraq combined and has a real army with Russia as an Allie.

Iran has never attacked US and poses no threat. Iran does pose a threat to SA’s dream of a pan Sunni Islamic state. You remember Saudi Arabia, it is the country that sponsored 9/11 and we pay them back by supplying arms and (more) American lives.

I have seen estimates of up to 1 million troops required to defeat Iran in a full blown war. That means the draft and massive expenditure. We can’t afford either.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the practicality of low yield tactical nukes and nuclear upgrade.

Coincidence?

https://news.antiwar.com/2019/07/18/us-poised-to-send-500-troops-to-saudi-arabia-amid-iran-tensions/

Jason Ditz

After satellite images showed facilities being prepared for them, US officials were quoted in the media as saying that there is a plan to send “up to 500” US ground troops to Saudi Arabia in response to Iran tensions.

Former Congressman Ron Paul commented on the matter, both saying it accomplishes very little, and warning that historically having US troops on the Arabian Peninsula has been a source of anger among Islamists. Osama bin Laden specifically attributed his 9/11 attack to the US having troops in his holy land. After 9/11, the US made a point of removing troops from Saudi Arabia, and now seems to be in the process of sending them back…

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Pompeo’s Big Lie on Iran – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on July 16, 2019

https://www.fff.org/2019/07/15/pompeos-big-lie-on-iran/

by

In a tiff over whether Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his delegation would be permitted to enter the United States as part of a meeting of the United Nations and over whether they would be free to travel freely around New York City, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a whopper, one that might have even embarrassed Pinocchio. Expressing a desire to be invited to appear on Iranian television, Pompeo said that he would tell Iranians that “we care deeply about them, that we’re supportive of the Iranian people, that we understand that the revolutionary theocracy is not acting in a way that is in their best interest.”

Why, that’s just a lie, a plain old, downright, old-fashioned lie.

When Pompeo is using the pronoun “we,” he is referring to U.S. officials. And the fact is that U.S. officials, from President Trump on down, couldn’t care less about the well-being of the Iranian people. All that U.S. officials care about is re-installing a pro-U.S. dictatorship in Iran, no different from that of the Shah, who U.S. officials made Iran’s brutal dictator in 1953.

After all, look at the U.S. sanctions on Iran. They target the Iranian people for economic impoverishment and even death. The idea is that if the U.S. government can squeeze the life out of the Iranian people, they will rise up in a violent revolution against the ruling regime and replace it with one that is acceptable to U.S. officials…

Moreover, even though a violent revolution would cost the lives of thousands of Iranians, U.S. officials couldn’t care less. All that matters to them is regime change. If thousands of Iranians have to be sacrificed for that goal, so be it.

How in the world can such a cruel and brutal policy be reconciled with Pompeo’s claim that he and his cohorts “care deeply” about the Iranian people? It can’t be. It’s a flat-out lie…

When an American named Bert Sacks took medicine to Iraq to help the Iraqi people, U.S. officials went after him with a vengeance, first fining him and then spending many years in an obsessive quest to get their money from him. Make no mistake about it: If any American violates U.S. sanctions against Iran by trying to help the Iranian people, U.S. officials will go after him with all guns blaring, this time with both harsh criminal and civil penalties.

Think about what U.S. officials did to the Iranian people in 1953. The CIA knowingly, intentionally, deliberately, and secretly ousted Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, from office and vested full dictatorial power in the Shah of Iran. The CIA trained the Shah and his secretive SAVAK police force, which was a combination Pentagon, CIA, and NSA, into one of the most tyrannical agencies in history. Torture. Assassination. Indefinite detention. Secret surveillance. Arbitrary arrests. Suppression of free speech. All of the things that were in the U.S. national-security state’s playbook were vested in the Shah and his SAVAK.

After around 26 years of suffering under this horrific U.S.-installed and U.S. trained tyranny, the Iranian people finally violently revolted. The shame, however, was that they were unable to replace the Shah with the democratic regime that U.S. officials had destroyed in 1953. They ended up with a theocratic tyranny…

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Tomgram: Michael Klare, It’s Always the Oil | TomDispatch

Posted by M. C. on July 12, 2019

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176584/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_it%27s_always_the_oil/#more

Michael Klare

What more did you need to know once Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted that a suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, claimed by the Taliban, was Iranian-inspired or plotted, one “in a series of attacks instigated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its surrogates against American and allied interests”? In other words, behind the Sunni extremist insurgents the U.S. has been fighting in Afghanistan since October 2001 lurks the regime of the Shiite fundamentalists in Tehran that many in Washington have been eager to fight since at least the spring of 2003 (when, coincidentally enough, the Bush administration was insisting that Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime had significant ties to al-Qaeda).

It couldn’t have made more sense once you thought about it. I don’t mean Pompeo’s claim itself, which was little short of idiotic, but what lurked behind it.  I mean the knowledge that, only a week after the 9/11 attacks, Congress had passed an authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF, that allowed the president (and any future president, as it turned out) “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

In other words, almost 18 years later, as Pompeo knows, if you can link any country or group you’re eager to go to war with to al-Qaeda, no matter how confected the connection, you can promptly claim authorization to do your damnedest to them. How convenient, then, should you be in the mood to make war on Iran, if that country just happens to be responsible for terror attacks linked to the Taliban (which once did harbor al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden). Why, you wouldn’t even need to ask Congress for permission to pursue your war of choice. And keep in mind that, recently, Congress — or a crew of corrupted, degraded Republican senators — simply couldn’t muster the votes or the will to deny President Trump the power to make war on Iran without its approval.

Let me hasten to add that the supposed link to al-Qaeda isn’t the only thing the Trump administration has conjured up to ensure that it will be free to do whatever it pleases when it comes to Iran. It’s found various other inventive ways to justify future military actions there without congressional approval. Pompeo and crew have, in that sense, been clever indeed. As TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author of the upcoming book All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, points out today, there’s only one word largely missing from their discussions of the increasingly edgy situation in the Persian Gulf, the most obvious word of all. But read him yourself if you want to understand just how, when it comes to Iran and that missing word — to steal a phrase from the late, great Jonathan Schell — the fate of the Earth is at stake. Tom

The Missing Three-Letter Word in the Iran Crisis
Oil’s Enduring Sway in U.S. Policy in the Middle East
By Michael T. Klare

It’s always the oil. While President Trump was hobnobbing with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the G-20 summit in Japan, brushing off a recent U.N. report about the prince’s role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Asia and the Middle East, pleading with foreign leaders to support “Sentinel.” The aim of that administration plan: to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. Both Trump and Pompeo insisted that their efforts were driven by concern over Iranian misbehavior in the region and the need to ensure the safety of maritime commerce. Neither, however, mentioned one inconvenient three-letter word — O-I-L — that lay behind their Iranian maneuvering (as it has impelled every other American incursion in the Middle East since World War II)….

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How Iran Would Battle the U.S. In a War (It Would Be Bloody) | The National Interest

Posted by M. C. on July 11, 2019

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/how-iran-would-battle-us-war-it-would-be-bloody-64681

by Ted Galen Carpenter

Kenneth Adelman, a former assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a prominent figure in the U.S. foreign policy community, famously predicted in 2002 that a war to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would be a “cakewalk.” President Donald Trump apparently learned nothing from Adelman’s hubris and rosy optimism. Although he aborted a planned airstrike on Iran at the last minute, Trump later warned Iranian leaders that the military option was still very much on the table. He added that if the United States used force against Iran, Washington would not put boots on the ground but would wage the conflict entirely with America’s vast air and naval power. There was no doubt in his mind about the outcome. He asserted that such a war “wouldn’t last very long,” and that it would mean the “obliteration” of Iran.

But history is littered with examples of wars that political leaders and the general public erroneously believed would be quick and easy. When Abraham Lincoln opted to confront the secession of the Southern states with force, his initial troop request was merely for 90-day enlistments. People in Washington, DC, were so confident that the Union army would crush the upstart rebels at the impending battle of Manassas that hundreds drove out in carriages to view the likely battlefield. They treated it like a spectator event, in some cases complete with picnic baskets. Four years later, more than 500,000 American soldiers were dead.

Leaders and populations in the major European capitals in 1914 exuded optimism that the new war would be over in a matter of months—with their side winning a glorious victory, of course. Once again, the situation did not turn out as planned. The projected quick and relatively bloodless conflict became a prolonged, horrific slaughter consuming millions of young lives, toppling established political systems in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, and ushering in the plagues of fascism and communism.

…a cakewalk.

That is what makes President Trump’s cavalier attitude about a war with Iran so worrisome. He implicitly assumes that the United States has control over the twin processes of retaliation and escalation. U.S. officials made that same faulty assumption in Iraq—and decades earlier in Vietnam. But even adversaries that are inferior in terms of conventional military capabilities may have numerous options to wage asymmetric warfare. And that strategy can become a war of attrition that inflicts serious damage on the militarily superior United States.

Iran may be especially effective if it adopts that course. Indeed, just in the narrow military sense, Iranian capabilities are far from trivial. Retired Admiral James Stavridis notes that Iran has “exceptionally strong asymmetric warfare capability” in several areas. “Cyber [attacks], swarm small-boat tactics, diesel submarines, special forces and surface-to-surface cruise missiles are all high-level assets,” Stavridis stated. “They are also very experienced at employing them in the demanding environment of the Middle East.”

Beyond utilizing its direct military capabilities, Tehran might well call upon its network of Shia political and military allies in the Middle East to create havoc for the United States. Iran maintains very close ties with Hezbollah in Lebanon and several Shia militias in Iraq. The residual U.S. force deployed in the latter country could be especially vulnerable to harassment and lethal attacks. And one should not ignore or discount the potential role of the angry, oppressed Shia majority in Bahrain. If their seething discontent at the Sunni-controlled regime that Washington backs explodes into outright conflict, the Trump administration could find it increasingly difficult to continue basing the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.

 

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Bolton Demands Iran Abandon Non-Existent Nuclear Arms Program – News From Antiwar.com

Posted by M. C. on July 9, 2019

https://news.antiwar.com/2019/07/08/bolton-demands-iran-abandon-non-existent-nuclear-arms-program/

Jason Ditz

US officials are continuing to express demands that Iran get rid of its nuclear weapons program. This is a long-standing demand, and Iran is well aware of it. The problem is Iran doesn’t have such a program, and has repeatedly disavowed ever having a program in the future.

They might as well not bother to have spent the last 16 years disavowing arms, with hawkish John Bolton clearly acting like it never happened, saying the US is determined to “increase the pressure on the Iranian regime until it abandons its nuclear weapons program.”…

US officials have been reiterating the idea of an Iranian “nuclear threat” so long, and against all reason, that at this point the facts don’t matter for most US officials. Policy is to escalate sanctions, and the escalation has become an end unto itself…

This puts Iran in a tough position with the US, because it plainly doesn’t matter what Iran promises, what Iran does, or what Iranian leaders declare as religiously forbidden. The US will always lead with the same nonsensical demand, and US officials will always feel justified with threatening Iran over plain lies.

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The U.S. Killed 300 Iranian Citizens. Americans Don’t Remember This—But Iranians Do

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2019

https://www.newsweek.com/iran-remembers-killed-americans-should-1445104

By

The downing of a U.S. spy drone, the near-launch of military action against Iran and recent unclaimed attacks against nearby oil tankers in the last month have not only set off tensions in the Persian Gulf, but invoked memories of an even deadlier time in the two rivals’ troubled history three decades ago when the U.S. killed nearly 300 Iranian civilians.

The U.S. and Iran have never officially fought a war but the two sides have engaged in bouts of violence since the CIA-backed coup that reinstalled Iran’s monarchy in 1953 and the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted that leadership for the current cleric-led government. The following decade would prove complex for Washington and Tehran amid the regional volatility of the Iran-Iraq War, during which the U.S. sought to protect Kuwaiti vessels in the Persian Gulf.

The war often spilled over into these narrow, strategic waters, where the guided-missile frigate USS Stark was bombed by a modified Iraqi warplane, killing 37 sailors in May 1987, and fellow warship USS Samuel B. Roberts struck a mine in April 1988.

The U.S. blamed Iran for the latter incident and conducted one of the largest naval operations since World War II, destroying a number of Iranian ships and killing dozens of sailors.

Less than two months later, on July 3, 1988, Aegis-armed guided-missile cruiser USS Vincennes opened fire at what its crew would later claim they thought to be an attacking Iranian F-14 fighter jet.

Instead, the aircraft was Iran Air Flight 655, a Dubai-bound civilian Airbus A300 with 290 people on board—all of whom were killed.

“The incident still resonates with Iranians,” Reza H. Akbari, program manager at the U.K.-based Institute for War & Peace Reporting, told Newsweek. “Once a year, the country’s state media rebroadcasts the tragic footage of the plane’s wreckage and civilian bodies floating in the Persian Gulf. For a few days, heart-wrenching images of family members crying over the loss of their loved ones and painful facts like the number of children on board are reviewed…

As Tehran’s embassies around the world broadcast reminders of the Iran Air Flight 655 shooting in recent days, its Washington building has since remained vacant, with diplomacy between the two seeming less likely than ever before, even as the State Department touted its efforts to upkeep the property should things ever change.

Khamenei just last week referenced the airliner downing while addressing Iranian judiciary and justice officials, calling it “human rights American style!”

Noting the history of U.S. intervention in his country, he argued: “You cannot be an agent of progress, but only a factor in making this country backward. The Iranian nation will move forward provided only that you do not get involved.”

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Goodbye Dollar, It Was Nice Knowing You! — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2019

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/04/goodbye-dollar-it-was-nice-knowing-you/

Philip Giraldi

 

Over the past two years, the White House has initiated trade disputes, insulted allies and enemies alike, and withdrawn from or refused to ratify multinational treaties and agreements. It has also expanded the reach of its unilaterally imposed rules, forcing other nations to abide by its demands or face economic sanctions. While the stated Trump Administration intention has been to enter into new arrangements more favorable to the United States, the end result has been quite different, creating a broad consensus within the international community that Washington is unstable, not a reliable partner and cannot be trusted. This sentiment has, in turn, resulted in conversations among foreign governments regarding how to circumvent the American banking system, which is the primary offensive weapon apart from dropping bombs that Washington has to force compliance with its dictates.

Consequently, there has been considerable blowback from the Make America Great Again campaign, particularly as the flip side of the coin appears to be that the “greatness” will be obtained by making everyone else less great. The only country in the world that currently regards the United States favorably is Israel, which certainly has good reason to do so given the largesse that has come from the Trump Administration. Everyone else is keen to get out from under the American heel.

Well the worm has finally turned, maybe. Even the feckless Angela Merkel’s Germany now understands that national interests must prevail when the United States is demanding that it do the unspeakable. At the recently concluded G20 meeting in Tokyo Britain, France and Germany announced that the special trade mechanism that they have been working on this year is now up and running. It is called the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (Instex) and it will permit companies in Europe to do business with countries like Iran, avoiding American sanctions by trading outside the SWIFT system, which is dollar denominated and de facto controlled by the US Treasury.

The significance of the European move cannot be understated. It is the first major step in moving away from the dominance of the dollar as the world’s trading and reserve currency. As is often the case, the damage to US perceived interests is self-inflicted. There has been talk for years regarding setting up trade mechanisms that would not be dollar based, but they did not gain any momentum until the Trump Administration abruptly withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran over a year ago…

Indeed, the White House appears to be willing to engage in economic warfare with Europe over the issue of punishing Iran. The Treasury Department issued a statement regarding the Mandelker letter, saying “entities that transact in trade with the Iranian regime through any means may expose themselves to considerable sanctions risk, and Treasury intends to aggressively enforce our authorities.” Mike Pompeo also was explicit during a visit to London on May 8th when he stated that “…it doesn’t matter what vehicle’s out there, if the transaction is sanctionable, we will evaluate it, review it, and if appropriate, levy sanctions against those that were involved in that transaction. It’s very straightforward.”

It is perhaps not unreasonable to wish the Europeans success, as they are supporting free trade while also registering their opposition to the White House’s bullying tactics using the world financial system. And if the dollar ceases to be the world’s trade and reserve currency, what of it? It would mean that the Treasury might have to cease printing surplus dollars and the US ability to establish global hegemony on a credit card might well be impeded. Those would be good results and one might also hope that some day soon the United States might once again become a normal country that Americans would be proud to call home.

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