(More) Bad news for Israel.
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Posts Tagged ‘Iran’
Off To A Bad Start — J.D. Vance’s Bombastic Threats Against Iran
Posted by M. C. on July 19, 2024
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Iran, Israel, J.D. Vance | Leave a Comment »
Anyone Who Wants The US To Attack Iran Is An Enemy Of Humanity
Posted by M. C. on April 17, 2024
It’s so obnoxious how the mass media are helping the White House pretend this is something the Biden administration is just passively sitting around hoping doesn’t happen, as though the US hasn’t had the power to end all this every single day for the last six months.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/143589310
Anyone who wants the US and its allies to attack Iran is a psychopath. People who want to unleash a war of that scale upon our species should be rejected from our society as aggressively as child molesters and Nazis.
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A new CNN report says multiple Biden administration officials “saw Iran’s attacks on Israel Saturday as disproportionate to Israel’s strikes in Damascus that prompted the retaliation.”
There are zero reported fatalities as a result of the Iranian retaliation. The Israeli strikes on the Iranian embassy in Damascus killed 16 people, including multiple high-level Iranian military officials. To see Iran’s response as “disproportionate” is to admit you believe Israeli lives are worth literally orders of magnitude more than Iranian lives.
And it was at an embassy, for god’s sake. Israel can assassinate 16 people while shattering decades of diplomatic norms, and in the eyes of the US that’s still not as bad as Iran creating a few potholes in an Israeli street.
And anyway how obscene is it that these shitstains can babble about proportionality at all after backing Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza? When Iran attacks the response needs to be proportionate, but when Israel incinerates Gaza over October 7 it’s “LMAO fuck around and find out, laughcry emoji, Israeli flag.”
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After six months of mass murder and chaos the only thing that looks more absurd than the claim that Israel is morally superior to other nations in the middle east is the claim that the United States is morally superior to other nations in the world.
No matter how low your opinion was of western power structures and western civilization, if you’ve been watching events of the last six months with sincerity it will have sunk even lower by now.
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It’s so obnoxious how the mass media are helping the White House pretend this is something the Biden administration is just passively sitting around hoping doesn’t happen, as though the US hasn’t had the power to end all this every single day for the last six months.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Humanity, Iran, Iranian embassy, PSYCHOPATH | Leave a Comment »
Iran on the Rise: Retaliation, “Important Military Targets”. Peter Koenig
Posted by M. C. on April 17, 2024
By Peter Koenig
Strategically speaking, can the US afford this “unwavering” support for an outright genocide nation? And secondly, Washington knows that Iran has full support from Russia and China, Iran’s BRICS allies. BRICS association has similar meaning to that of NATO’s: Attack one country means you attack them all – and retaliation may be massive.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/iran-on-the-rise/5854744
The warning was on the wall. Ever since Israel attacked “out of the blue” on 1 April 2024 the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing 7, including two generals, an Iranian retaliation was to be expected.
The New York Times (NYT) reports
“Iran mounted an immense aerial attack on Israel on Saturday night, launching more than 200 drones [other sources talk about 300 drones] and missiles in retaliation for a deadly Israeli airstrike in Syria two weeks ago, and marking a significant escalation in hostilities between the two regional foes.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) say there were over 300 areal threats, including some 200 drones, 100 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles. See this.
Israel and her Western friends claim that many of the drones were intercepted by IDF and the help from allied military support. The latter apparently include the UK, France, and Jordan – and most likely also US-NATO forces that have long been stationed in the region.
Nevertheless, according to several RT reports, a large-scale missile and drone attack against Israel has been a success, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has said in a statement published by IRNA news agency. The Islamic Republic’s military managed to “hit and destroy” some “important military targets,” it added, without providing any further details.
Short video clips published by Iranian media on social networks, viewing Islamic Republic’s missiles hitting their targets in Israel. Several missiles appeared to have been striking targets in a settlement, RT reports, however without being able to confirm the veracity of the clips.
The Guardian informs, that it was the Islamic Republic’s first-ever direct attack on the Jewish State, a development that brings the two countries to the brink of all-out conflict after more than a decade of shadow war and soaring stress six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, following the Hamas attack last October.
It was reported on Israeli television that Iran had launched more than 100 drones as well as cruise missiles towards Israel, and Iran later said it had fired a “first wave” of ballistic missiles. See this.
This latest war theatre is in full development. At this point it is unclear what exactly happened and to what level the conflict may escalate.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: BRICS, Iran, NATO, Retaliation | Leave a Comment »
Biden Rightfully Tells Netanyahu That America Won’t Support An Attack On Iran
Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2024
War means shutting down Middle East oil supplies in an election year.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Biden, Iran, Netanyahu | Leave a Comment »
US Declines Israel’s Invitation To Start WW3 (For Now)
Posted by M. C. on April 16, 2024
Here in Australia the Sydney Morning Herald write-up about the strike didn’t get around to informing its readers about the attack on the Iranian consulate until the tenth paragraph of the article, and said only that Iran had “accused” Israel of launching the attack because Israel has never officially confirmed it.
If you can find a stabilizing entity in the Middle East, let us know.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/143571202
Iran has carried out its long-promised retaliation for Israel’s attack on its consulate building in Damascus, launching a massive barrage of drones and missiles which it claims hit and destroyed Israeli military targets, while Israel says they dealt only superficial damage with a few injuries. The US and its allies reportedly helped shoot down a number of the Iranian projectiles.
Just as we discussed in the lead-up to the strike, the western political-media class are acting as though this was a completely unprovoked attack launched against the innocent, Bambi-eyed victim Israel. Comments from western officials and pundits and headlines from the mass media are omitting the fact that Israel instigated these hostilities with its extreme act of aggression in Syria as much as possible. Here in Australia the Sydney Morning Herald write-up about the strike didn’t get around to informing its readers about the attack on the Iranian consulate until the tenth paragraph of the article, and said only that Iran had “accused” Israel of launching the attack because Israel has never officially confirmed it.
In any case, Iran says the attack is now over. Given that we’re not seeing any signs of massive damage, Iran’s reported claim that its retaliation would be calibrated to avoid escalation into a full-scale regional war seems to have been accurate, as does Washington’s reported claim that it didn’t expect the strike to be large enough to draw the US into war.
A new report from Axios says Biden has personally told Netanyahu that the US will not be supporting any Israeli military response to the Iranian strike. An anonymous senior White House official told Axios that Biden said to Netanyahu, “You got a win. Take the win,” in reference to the number of Iranian weapons that were taken out of the sky by the international coalition in Israel’s defense. Apparently helping to mitigate the damage from the Iranian attack is all the military commitment the White House is willing to make against Iran at this time.
And thank all that is holy for that. A war between the US alliance and Iran and its allies would be the stuff of nightmares, making the horrors we’ve been seeing in Gaza these last six months look like an episode of Peppa Pig.
But Washington merely declining to get involved is nowhere near enough. As the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi quipped on Twitter, “Biden needs to PREVENT further escalation, not just declare his desire to stay out of it.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Iran, Iranian consulate, Israel, WW3 | 1 Comment »
The Resistance’s Disruptive Military Innovation May Determine the Fate of Israel
Posted by M. C. on March 20, 2024
Whether the U.S. and Europe likes it or not, Iran is a major regional political player, Alastair Crooke writes.
Put plainly, we have experienced a Mackinder-style ‘pivot of history’: Russia and China – and Iran – are slowly taking control of the Asian heartland (both institutionally and economically), as the pendulum of the West swings away.
The Sunni world – ineluctably and warily – marches towards the BRICS.
Looking back to what I wrote in 2012, in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring and its aftermath, it is striking just how much the Region has shifted. It is now almost 180° re-orientated. Then, I argued,
“That the Arab Spring “Awakening” is taking a turn, very different to the excitement and promise with which it was hailed at the outset. Sired from an initial, broad popular impulse, it is becoming increasingly understood, and feared, as a nascent counter-revolutionary “cultural revolution” – a re-culturation of the region in the direction of a prescriptive canon that is emptying out those early high expectations …
“That popular impulse associated with the ‘awakening’ has now been subsumed and absorbed into three major political projects associated with this push to reassert [Sunni primacy]: a Muslim Brotherhood project, a Saudi-Qatari-Salafist project, and a [radical jihadi] project.
“No one really knows the nature of the [first project] the Brotherhood project – whether it is that of a sect; or if it is truly mainstream … What is clear, however, is that the Brotherhood tone everywhere is increasingly one of militant sectarian grievance. The joint Saudi-Salafist project was conceived as a direct counter to the Brotherhood project – and [the third] was the uncompromising Sunni radicalism [Wahhabism], funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, that aims, not to contain, but rather, to displace traditional Sunnism with the culture of Salafism. i.e. It sought the ‘Salifisation’ of traditional Sunni Islam.
“All these projects, whilst they may overlap in some parts, are in a fundamental way competitors with each other. And [were] being fired-up in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, north Africa, the Sahel, Nigeria, and the horn of Africa.
[Not surprisingly] …“Iranians increasingly interpret Saudi Arabia’s mood as a hungering for war, and Gulf statements do often have that edge of hysteria and aggression: a recent editorial in the Saudi-owned al-Hayat stated: “The climate in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] indicates that matters are heading towards a GCC-Iranian-Russian confrontation on Syrian soil, similar to what took place in Afghanistan during the Cold War. To be sure, the decision has been taken to overthrow the Syrian regime, seeing as it is vital to the regional influence and hegemony of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
Well, that was then. How different the landscape is today: The Muslim Brotherhood largely is a ‘broken reed’, compared to what it was; Saudi Arabia has effectively ‘switched off the lights’ on Salafist jihadism, and is focussed more on courting tourism, and the Kingdom now has a peace accord with Iran (brokered by China).
“The cultural shift toward re-imagining a wider Sunni Muslim polity”, as I wrote in 2012, always was an American dream, dating back to Richard Perle’s ‘Clean Break’ Policy Paper of 1996 (a report that had been commissioned by Israel’s then-PM, Netanyahu). Its roots lay with the British post-war II policy of transplanting the stalwart family notables of the Ottoman era into the Gulf as an Anglophile ruling strata catering to western oil interests.
But look what has happened —
A mini revolution: Iran has, in the interim, ‘come in from the cold’ and is firmly anchored as ‘a regional power’. It is now the strategic partner to Russia and China. And Gulf States today are more preoccupied with ‘business’ and Tech than Islamic jurisprudence. Syria, targeted by the West, and an outcast in the region, has been welcomed back into the Arab League’s Arab sphere with high ceremony, and Syria is on its way to assuming again its former standing within the Middle East.
What is interesting is that even then, hints of the coming conflict between Israel and the Palestinians were apparent; as I wrote in 2012:
“Over recent years we have heard the Israelis emphasise their demand for recognition of a specifically Jewish nation-state, rather than for an Israeli State, per se. A Jewish state that in principle, would remain open to any Jew seeking to return: the creation of a ‘Jewish umma’, as it were.
“Now, it seems we have, in the western half of the Middle East, at least, a mirror trend, asking for the reinstatement of a wider Sunni nation – representing the ‘undoing’ of the last remnants of the colonial era. Will we see the struggle increasing epitomised as a primordial struggle between Jewish and Islamic religious symbols – between al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount?
“It seems that both Israel and its surrounding terrain are marching in step toward language which takes them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles?”
What has driven this 180° turn? One factor, assuredly, was Russia’s limited intervention into Syria to prevent a jihadi sweep. The second has been China’s appearance on the scene as a truly gargantuan business partner – and putative mediator too – precisely at a time when the U.S. had begun its withdrawal from the region (at least in terms of the attention it pays to it, if not (yet) reflected in any substantive physical departure).
The latter – U.S. military withdrawal (Iraq and Syria) – however, seems more a question of ‘when’, rather than if. All expect it.
Put plainly, we have experienced a Mackinder-style ‘pivot of history’: Russia and China – and Iran – are slowly taking control of the Asian heartland (both institutionally and economically), as the pendulum of the West swings away.
The Sunni world – ineluctably and warily – marches towards the BRICS. Effectively, the Gulf finds itself badly wrong-footed by the so-called ‘Abraham Accords’ that tied them to Israeli Tech (which, in turn, was channelling considerable Wall Street venture ‘free money’ their way). Israel’s ‘suspect genocide’ (ICJ language) in Gaza is slowly driving a stake into the heart of the Gulf ‘business model’.
But another key factor has been the smart diplomacy pursued by Iran.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Abraham Accords, Arab Spring, BRICS, Iran | Leave a Comment »
The Evolving Battle Lines in the Middle East
Posted by M. C. on November 9, 2023
The latter have clearly dusted off “Plan R” and pulled it from the shelf and are now executing it. This Plan R looks like the one that Dick Cheney and company ran after 9/11; shift the focus away from the ones who did the deed onto the ones you need an excuse to go to war with.
So, 19 Saudis flew planes into the World Trade Center but we went to war with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today “Hamas” slaughters a lot of jews and the first people threatened is Iran.
Power, empire building and who owes whom.
Author: Tom Luongo
The biggest stumbling block to analyzing what’s happening between Israel and the rest of the Middle East is dispensing with our biases and ignorance about pretty much the entire affair. I will be the first to admit to having profound ignorance about so much of the history between Israel and the Palestinians.
I really wish everyone else having opinions right now would at least admit that up front versus trying to sound like another incarnation of the Newly-Minted Subject Matter Expert of the Week thanks to having read a couple of articles in the New York Times.
And that’s the thing I believe we are fighting more than anything else at this point: the profound amount of propaganda and outright bullshit being slung around about every event of any significance.
All it does is create confusion and cognitive dissonance. That confusion is, by the way, the goal of the propaganda, from all sides.
That said, what’s abundantly clear is that this conflict has unleashed pent-up frustrations and simmering anger from all of the major players, not just the obvious ones like Hamas, the Israeli hardliners led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his echo chamber on K-Street, Capitol Hill and GCHQ.
The latter have clearly dusted off “Plan R” and pulled it from the shelf and are now executing it. This Plan R looks like the one that Dick Cheney and company ran after 9/11; shift the focus away from the ones who did the deed onto the ones you need an excuse to go to war with.
So, 19 Saudis flew planes into the World Trade Center but we went to war with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today “Hamas” slaughters a lot of jews and the first people threatened is Iran.
Even though there is good evidence that “Hamas” wasn’t the only one involved in this attack, have closer ties to Sunni organizations than Shia, and are financed out of Qatar and the UK.
I’m not saying Iran has no role to play here. It did, according to Theirry Meyssan at Voltairenet (linked above), it was Iran, earlier this year, that brought all of the Palestinian factions together to reconcile their differences.
In 2023, Iran hosted talks between the region’s various pro-independence forces, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. They were held in Beirut (Lebanon) under the presidency of General Ismaïl Qaani, commander of the al-Quds brigades of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Their aim was to reconcile these actors who had fought a ferocious war in Gaza, then in Syria. These meetings were made public in May 2023. On this occasion the Lebanese press discussed the preparation of the unitary operation which was carried out on October 7. Iran is therefore responsible for reconciling the Palestinian factions.
So, let’s dispense with the fiction that Bibi and company in Tel Aviv didn’t know about this operation beforehand. It’s preparation was made public knowledge in May.
But, in Neocon-speak this meeting was the equivalent of having masterminded the entire attack. Again, I’m not naïve here. Of course the simple narrative of “whatever is bad for Israel is good for Iran” holds water, but that doesn’t immediately elevate to “Iran did it!” as the South Carolinian hyenas Lindsay Graham and Nimrata Haley want you to believe.
Benefitting from something is not masterminding it or funding it.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: BRICS, Egypt, Erdogan, Gaza, Hamas, Iran, Middle East, Ottoman Empire, Plan R | Leave a Comment »
American Neocons Push For War With Iran — But Israel Does Not
Posted by M. C. on October 11, 2023
The Ron Paul Liberty Report
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Iran, neocons, war | Leave a Comment »
A security pact with Saudi Arabia would be a disaster for US interests
Posted by M. C. on August 22, 2023
For one, desperately giving into demands will mean that the Kingdom — and Israel — will soon be asking for more.
Written by
Daniel Larison
As the Biden administration continues to pursue a normalization deal with Israel and Saudi Arabia, supporters of a U.S. security guarantee for the Saudis have started making their case in public.
The Israeli foreign minister, Eli Cohen, took to the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal earlier this week to sell a U.S. defense commitment to Riyadh as “the foundation upon which true regional harmony can be built” and used the example of Washington’s treaty with South Korea as a model.
A new formal security commitment is one of the biggest Saudi demands as part of their steep price for normalizing relations with Israel, and recent reports suggest that the Biden administration is seriously entertaining the idea.
President Biden should shut this down now. The U.S. does not need and cannot afford any additional security commitments. It certainly shouldn’t be pledging to send its soldiers to fight on behalf of a despotic monarchy that has been waging an aggressive war against its poorer neighbor for most of the last ten years. The U.S. has already put its military personnel in harm’s way too many times on behalf of the Saudis, and there should be no guarantee to do so in the future.
A formal defense commitment to Saudi Arabia is unacceptable and contrary to U.S. interests, and it is far too large of a bribe to give Riyadh just so that it will establish relations with Israel.
The case for a U.S. commitment to fight for the Saudis is weak on the merits. The U.S. does not have vital interests at stake that would warrant making a pledge to defend the kingdom. It is also unnecessary. Iran isn’t about to invade or even attack Saudi Arabia. Aside from the strikes on the ARAMCO facility at Abqaiq in 2019, which were themselves a reaction to the Trump administration’s economic war, Iran and Saudi Arabia have no history of direct clashes.
Cohen’s comparison with Korea is bizarre. For one thing, the animosity between Iran and Saudi Arabia is nothing like the decades-long hostility between North and South Korea. Iran has no interest in conquering the kingdom, and it lacks the means to do it even if it wanted to try. Unlike North Korea, Iran does not have nuclear weapons, and despite the best efforts of the U.S. and Israeli governments in the last few years their government has still not decided to pursue them.
Creating a stronger U.S.-Saudi security relationship in opposition to Iran would likely make regional tensions worse and might encourage hardliners in Iran to pursue more confrontational policies. Far from fostering “true regional harmony,” this would stoke conflict by expanding the U.S. role in the Persian Gulf.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, security pact | Leave a Comment »
Senate Moves To Block Sale Of Oil From Strategic Petroleum Reserve To China, Iran
Posted by M. C. on July 22, 2023
“We know China has been amassing the largest stockpile of crude in the world. Nevertheless, last year, the United States sold off part of our reserves to China.
Your Big Government in action
The Senate on Thursday passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would ban sales of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia.
The effort, which passed the Senate 85-12, was spearheaded by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV). Under President Joe Biden, the SPR has been drained to 40-year lows.
“We know China has been amassing the largest stockpile of crude in the world. Nevertheless, last year, the United States sold off part of our reserves to China. I have been working with Senator Manchin to prohibit such inexplicably reckless moves in a bipartisan way. Our amendment prevents the federal government from selling oil from the strategic petroleum reserve to China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. We should not be selling our emergency oil reserves to our adversaries,” Cruz said.
Manchin, a critic of the Biden administration’s energy policy, also warned about American oil going to China.
“Following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. ramped up production and exports to help meet global demand. It had been devastating to the world. China, on the other hand, stockpiled oil and held back refinery production and while China was stockpiling, one of its state-owned companies purchased over 1.4 million barrels from the United States of America, the people of our great country, from our own stock of reserves. That’s what we’re trying to stop,” the West Virginia Democrat said.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Big Government, China, Iran, Strategic Petroleum Reserve | Leave a Comment »
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