Israel prefers hardline leaders to maintain a monolithic view of the enemy. Its assassination in Tehran now forces the reformist Pezeshkian into a corner.
Tag: Iran
The imperial spin machine operates by reversing victim and victimizer, aggressor and defender — claiming to act in self-defense while existing in a continuous state of attack, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
US to Iran: Only Israel May Escalate
August 12, 2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Iranian spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Nasser Kanani, condemned Israel on Saturday on “X” Saturday for practicing “medieval forms […]
Iran condemns “medieval barbarity” of Israel’s Sde Teiman Camp, insists on Right to Deter further Aggression
For some in Iran, the West’s relentless punishment has weakened the revolutionary fires of 1979. But for countless others, they are being rekindled by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.
Iran’s attack on Israel was lawful self-defence carried out in compliance with international humanitarian law.
Source: Under UN Charter, Iran’s Attack Was a Legal Response to Israel’s Illegal Attack – ScheerPost
But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties. So long as experts, the government, and the media worry only about a kind of war that is obsolete, it cannot see the war right in front of our faces.
Source: Israel Attack on Iran Is What World War III Looks Like
These same Arab nations are now pivotal in stopping Israel from further escalating the war after Iran’s missile and drone attack.
Source: The Secret U.S. Alliance That Defended Israel From Iran Attack
Had Iran sought to catch Israel by surprise, it could have unleashed the ballistic missiles that were deployed in the final phase of the attack, whose flight time is 10-12 minutes, without any warning. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of these missiles were aimed at Israeli military bases — that is, Iran refrained from targeting civilian population centers. Only one person was seriously wounded as a result of the attack: a 7-year-old girl from an unrecognized Bedouin village, who was injured by a fragment of a missile that was intercepted by the Iron Dome (unrecognized villages, home to over 100,000 Arab Bedouin citizens in the Negev/Naqab desert, are not provided with shelters, leaving them completely exposed to rockets and falling shrapnel). Immediately afterward, Iran announced that as far as it was concerned, the issue was settled, unless Israel insisted on retaliating further.
Source: Iran is acting more rationally than Israel — for now
Netanyahu’s recklessness was fostered by blind U.S. support, but Israel is the one pushing its war with Iran out of the shadows.
Contrary to the words of some sycophantic U.S. politicians, the interests of the two countries are not identical and, today, do not even appear to be aligned.
Source: Israel Escalation With Iran Trying to Drag U.S. Into War
“Netanyahu’s repeated disregard of U.S. red lines in Gaza, moves to deepen permanent occupation in the Palestinian territory, and escalation with Iran are destabilizing the entire region,” she added. “With American forces already drawn into hostilities with the Iranian-backed Houthis and actively engaging Iranian missiles and drones, President Biden cannot afford to let the extremist prime minister continue to have a harmful, undue influence on the course of events. Hopefully, the president’s efforts have averted a wider regional war with Iran; we urge him to bring that same level of effort to save the people of Gaza.”
Source: Calls for De-Escalation Mount as Israel Plans to ‘Exact a Price From Iran’ | Common Dreams
There will be only one winner in the war that has broken out between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
And it is neither Israel nor Hamas. In an operation coined “the Al-Aqsa Storm,” Hamas, whose formal name is the Islamic Resistance Movement, fired thousands of rockets into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters infiltrated Israel by land, sea and air. Hundreds of Israelis have been killed, more than 2,000 injured, and many taken hostage.
In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on Hamas and launched airstrikes in Gaza. In the first day of reprisals, close to 400 Palestinians were killed, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
In the weeks ahead, the Israeli military will surely retaliate and kill hundreds more Palestinian militants and civilians. As an analyst of Middle East politics and security, I believe that thousands on both sides will suffer. But when the smoke settles, only one country’s interests will have been served: Iran’s.
Source: The Israel-Hamas war: No matter who loses, Iran wins
North Korea has delivered infantry rockets and missiles to Russian private military company, the Wagner Group, to support the war in Ukraine.
Hartcher can’t see the difference between Democracies, Protest and what people want,
Just who this message is meant for is uncertain. The economic gains of democracy are probably not all that high on the priority list for Iranian demonstrators, or for the Chinese who are increasingly demanding change. Democracy for these courageous people is about freedom and for the chance to live without fear of arbitrary arrest. It’s certainly not about electing one group or party to organise a capitalist economy that will deliver better economic returns to a minority.
Source: China and Iran protestors fighting for real democracy, not capitalist capture
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky lambasted Israel on Monday, saying that the latter’s refusal to provide Ukraine with anti-missile defenses and its neutrality on the war had permitted Iran and Russia to deepen their ties, with benefits for Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
Source: Zelensky Lambastes Israel for not Helping Ukraine, Warns of Russian Aid to Iran’s Nuclear Program
Likewise, more that 3/4s of Republican evangelicans want to declare the United States a “Christian” state, essentially repealing the First Amendment with its Establishment Cause. They want to control people’s bodies in the U.S., even if they have to do it undemocratically, just as the ayatollahs have the same goal in Iran. Iran has the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent. America’s Red States have the Guardianship of the Pastor and Priest. In neither case are we autonomous adults. We are wards of the state, reduced to being juveniles in custody.
Because of evangelical Republican rule of some US states, we already have elements of the Christian Republic of America, to mirror the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal offered Europe a way to diversify natural gas supplies, but instead Europeans were left at Russia’s mercy.
Source: This Winter, Freezing Europeans Can Blame Trump’s Neocon Foreign Policy
Russia and Iran are both suffering from maximum pressure sanctions by the US, which is attempting to crash their economies and currencies and prevent their oil and gas exports. The two cannot be sanctioned more than they already are, so defying the US to team up makes good economic sense.
We may be seeing the limits of American economic power– trying to take on both Russia and Iran at the same time, plus threatening China, may be classical imperial overstretch.
Source: Russia announces Bn. Investment in Iran Oil & Gas, as Khamenei Supports Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
It seems to me that the only difference between Australians and Iranians in this regard is that Australia is part of the white Anglophone diaspora. It is also part of the Five Eyes intelligence program, which groups the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia (hmm, I wonder what they have in common)? Race is so central to US politics that it even comes into nuclear policy!
New extreme-right Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett came out on Sunday to argue that the election of an extreme-right Iranian cleric (Ebrahim Raisi) as president of that country should cause the Biden administration to back off reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Bennett called Raisi the “hangman of Tehran” and said, “of all the people that (Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei could have chosen, he chose the hangman of Tehran, the man infamous among Iranians and across the world for leading the death committees that executed thousands of innocent Iranian citizens throughout the years.”
A member of an Iranian investigation team has told a local news outlet that Tel Aviv was most likely behind the attack on a Europe-bound Iranian container ship in the Mediterranean Sea earlier this week. “Considering the geographical location and the way the ship was targeted, one of the strong possibilities is that this terrorist operation was carried out by the Zionist regime (Israel),” an unnamed investigator told the Nournews agency. Several containers on the deck of the Shahr-e Kord vessel were hit with high-explosive objects. The damage they suffered indicates that the Iranian ship could have been targeted by an aerial vehicle, the expert pointed out. The attack on a commercial vessel travelling through the Mediterranean to Europe took place on Wednesday. There were no casualties, and the crew swiftly extinguished the small fire in the hull it caused.
Israel most likely responsible for blast on Iranian container ship in Mediterranean – media — RT World News
Trump Appears to Have Outsourced His Iran Policy to Israel
Trump’s Support for Israel’s Killing of Iranian Scientist Could Lead to War | The Smirking Chimp
Iran, Russia and electoral interference. It is all part of the delicious mess that any observer of US politics has come to expect. Were the US body politic capable of being examined on the clinician’s couch, historical fears, psychic disturbances, and a range of unsettling syndromes would be identified. The issue of electoral interference would certainly be at the fore; it would also be fitting that a state so indifferent to the electoral sovereignty of others would now find itself constantly fearing large return servings.
Trusted Demonologies: US Electoral Interference, the Proud Boys and Iran – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Israel’ grand plan was always to keep the Middle East religiously divided their biggest danger a secular and united pan Arabic military union Libya, Syria Iraq made it urgent to get rid of Qaddafi, Assad and Saddam.
Peace hasn’t arrived in the Middle East only a light shone on what was always the goal keep Shia and Sunni divided with Israel and the US on the side of Israel Sunni States and Oil. ISIS is not their enemy anymore. Fuck the Kurds.
The Iraqi government says that Soleimani came to Baghdad on a commercial flight with a diplomatic passport to engage in behind the scenes talks Saudi Arabia that the Iraqi government was mediating. There is no evidence that he was, as Trump alleged, coming to kill Americans, and the Pentagon has refused to make that charge. The furious Iraqi parliament voted to constrain the prime minister to find a way to move US troops out of Iraq in the aftermath, since Trump whacked Soleimani on Iraqi soil without bothering to tell that government. The prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, has complied, arranging for the US gradually to leave. This month 2,000 of the some 5,000 US troops in Iraq will depart.
Lindsey Graham: Soleimani hit “Over the Top”– As all Tru
mp’s Iran Goals Foiled
Trump walks Alone: Former US Allies Britain, France, Germany join Russia and China in Forcefully Rejecting Trump Iran Sanctions
Trump walks Alone: Former US Allies Britain, France, Germany join Russia and China in Forcefully Rejecting Trump Iran Sanctions
This entire act of gross miscalculation did its fair share of harm, though not in the sense understood by Pompeo and his officials. It spoke to a clumsy unilateralism masquerading as credible support; to great power obstinacy misguided in attaining a goal. It was not the UN Security Council that had failed, but the US that had failed it, an effort that many at the UN are reading as directed at torching the remnants of the Iran nuclear deal. The assessment of the US effort by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter was sharp and relevant. “You got the Dominican Republic on board (how much did that cost the US taxpayer?) Not a single other nation voted with you! The shining city on the hill has been reduced to a glow, like the embers of a dying fire.”
Trump’s donor and election war aganst Iran (ODT)
The point is that the U.S. and the Israelis are intent on going to war against enemy number one Iran and are packaging their actions in such away as to suggest that they are really behaving in a moderate fashion. They are assuming that Iran will retaliate, but in such a way as to avoid intensifying the conflict. In reality, taking action to destroy a nation’s economy is an act of war just as much as is staging attacks using bombs carried by spies or using missiles fired from planes. There is already a war going on, but the smokescreen provided by the coronavirus spread and BLM means that no one seems to want more on their plate and there is great reluctance to call it for what it is.
Couple Trump’s Kim Jong-un Style mine’s bigger than your’s threat with the clowns that lie on his behalf and you have Dr Strangelove being played out before your very eyes. HE’S YOUR PRESIDENT AMERICA. (ODT)
Bad press.
Reuters reports that the death toll in Iran from Covid-19 has risen to 1,284, and infections to 18,407. The country’s ministry of health spokesman, Kianush Jahanpur, is quoted as saying that another person dies there every 10 minutes now and every hour sees 50 people infected.
Researchers at Sharif University of Technology have modeled likely deaths and say Iran could be stricken with as many as 3.5 million dead.
Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo just announced that the US would actually tighten its economic and financial blockade on Iran. Iranians are already saying that US Treasury Department restrictions on bank transfers have made it impossible for them to buy needed medicines, tests and medical supplies. The US does not prevent medicine from going to Iran, it just makes it impossible for Iranians to afford them or for the international banking system to handle the money exchanges necessary to buy them.
via Trump Spared Iran from Bombing, but his Sanctions Fed Pandemic in which 1 dies every 10 Minutes
During recent increased US-Iran confrontation, so many people viewed the Selective Service website to find out about the draft that the website crashed. People were right to be concerned about a return of the draft.
Trump launched a reckless criminal act of state terror designed to provoke a war. Iran de-escalated the situation as of Wednesday — refusing to engage in a retaliatory cycle of violent escalation while demonstrating their military capability. Trump responded with a rambling, lifeless, incoherent slurred speech that promised to ratchet up economic sanctions without threatening further violence.
Pete Buttigieg@PeteButtigiegInnocent civilians are now dead because they were caught in the middle of an unnecessary and unwanted military tit for tat. My thoughts are with the families and loved ones of all 176 souls lost aboard this flight.
The consequence of Trump’s recklessness
A total of 176 people were killed when a Ukrainian passenger plane came down soon after taking off from Tehran in the hours after the missile strike.
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has revealed intelligence that suggests it was shot out of the sky by Iran. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the Australians have the same intelligence.
“The evidence indicates that the plane was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile,” Mr Trudeau said. “This may well have been unintentional.”
Iran was on a war footing in the hours after launching its ballistic missiles and would have been prepared for an American response from the air.
All indications point to a tragic mistake.
It won’t take long for critics to point the finger of blame at Mr Trump himself.
Even before Mr Trudeau’s press conference, Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, who served for the US military in Afghanistan, implied the President should carry responsibility.
“Innocent civilians are now dead because they were caught in the middle of an unnecessary and unwanted military tit for tat” he tweeted.
Trump is a know-nothing President simply following plans laid down since the 80s after the 6 day war. No country in the Middle East was allowed to establish an Army let alone a number of Arabic and Muslim States and so the demise of Libya, Iraq Syria and Iran were laid out years ago by Israel and the US acting as it’s proxy their reward oil and global dominance. The greatest threat to that plan today is Renewable and clean energy. (ODT)
And there is no end in sight with Donald Trump now tweeting furiously that if the Iranian government seeks to retaliate for Soleimani the U.S. will strike 52 targets inside Iran, including cultural sites, a war crime. Congress will do nothing to stop the carnage because it is just as completely controlled by the Israel Lobby as is the White House.
The blood of the Americans, Iranians and Iraqis who will die in the next few weeks is clearly on Donald Trump’s hands as this war was never inevitable and serves no U.S. national interest. It will surely turn out to be a debacle, as well as devastating for all parties involved. And it might well, on top of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, be the long-awaited beginning of the end of America’s imperial ambitions. Trump has had three years to learn the lesson gleaned from Iraq and Afghanistan. He obviously used that time to learn nothing.
via Killing Inside Iraq to Punish Iran, by Philip Giraldi – The Unz Review
A personal comment in response to the Trump regime’s assassination of redoubtable Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, a national hero now martyred by US imperial rage.
He represented Iranian resilience and resistance against US state-terrorism, its endless wars of aggression, its rage for global control by brute force — responsible for countless millions of deaths, vast destruction, and human misery globally.
The nation I grew up in long ago no longer exists. Never beautiful, it was world’s apart from today’s permanent US state of war on humanity at home and abroad.
via Stupid Is As Stupid Does Defines the Trump Regime’s Foreign Policy – Stephen Lendman
The United States, like Israel, has become a pariah that shreds, violates or absents itself from international law. We launch preemptive wars, which under international law is defined as a “crime of aggression,” based on fabricated evidence. We, as citizens, must hold our government accountable for these crimes.
via War With Iran
With the release by JustSecurity.org of unredacted emails on the Ukraine scandal showing that Trump personally (and illegally) withheld congressionally mandated military aid to an ally, the Republican defense of the president is collapsing. Some GOP senators such as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski seem to be weakening on calling witnesses and subpoenaing records for the Senate trial, and the Democrats only need four Republican senators to ensure a proper proceeding, which would certainly put Trump’s presidency in peril.
It is extremely suspicious that Trump has abruptly begun trafficking in the sanguinary merchandise of all-out war just at this moment when his throne is on the brink of toppling.
The Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is one of the world players who pushed Trump to breach the 2015 treaty with Iran. Trump then slapped the severest economic sanctions on Iran ever imposed on any country in the absence of war. Trump went around the world menacing other countries into ceasing to buy Iranian petroleum and threatening billions in fines against any company anywhere in the world that invested in or traded with Iran.
Instead, Netanyahu and Trump have pushed Iran straight into the arms of China which is investing $400 billion in the country and which is now taking most of Iran’s oil exports. China seems intent on integrating Iran into its economy even more robustly than it had proposed with Pakistan.
via Israeli PM Netanyahu’s Himalayan Miscalculation on Iran: Bringing China into the Mideast
olddogthoughts 