So much for Pax Americana. We’ve had endless war as long as memory serves and now the big one: Iran and possibly World War 3. With Vladimir Putin’s decisive victory in Russia, the west had best heed Putin’s dire warnings concerning further escalation of the imperial aggression on Russia’s southern borders. The Russians are not happy with the way US policy is unfolding, and it appears the roll-up in Iraq was simply to help prepare the US military for an assault on its neighbor Iran.
Washington has also provoked the Chinese into shoveling $100Bn into upgrading their military this year. The “peace laureate” could feasibly end life on earth if this Iran assault escalates and explodes out of control. The unrestrained belligerence coming out of Washington and Tel Aviv is something to behold. One can almost hear the echoes of Poppy Bush, and his four-word foreign policy: “What we say goes.”
Hypocrisy can’t shame these people. They wield numerous nuclear warheads. The US count was upwards of 10,000 during the cold war era, including 100 megaton fusion bombs that can incinerate large cities. The Israelis, we all know, have several hundred atomic warheads. And yet countries who don’t follow orders simply aren’t allowed to possess them. It would deter attacks by the empire, and so that in and of itself is reason to attack. It’s truly through the mirror. First Iraq was attacked for the crime of not having the weapons necessary to fight back. And now Iran.
The North Koreans took their defense seriously enough to get the bomb. No peace laureate blitzkrieg is planned for them. I wonder if there’s some kind of lesson here.
While Obama declared Iran’s acquiring a nuclear deterrent “unacceptable” Putin spoke up in similar language, regarding the United States itself:
“The Americans are obsessed with the idea of ensuring absolute invulnerability for themselves, which is utopian and unfeasible from both technological and geopolitical points of view… An absolute invulnerability for one means an absolute vulnerability for all the others. It’s impossible to accept such a prospect.”
In a tirade published a week before the Russian election, Putin warned Washington against interference in Russia’s ally Syria as well as in Russia’s ally Iran. These warnings come as Putin himself is in the cross hairs of Washington’s “soft power” NGO assault on his own legitimacy.
Militarily Putin speaks the truth. No “missile defense” can guard a nation as large as the USA from submarine-launched cruise missiles tipped with nuclear warheads. There is no shield fool-proof enough to protect the “homeland” from the retaliation of a capable enemy like the Russians or the Chinese. There is only the threat of further retaliation, the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction.
The Russian president looked with skepticism at the so-called “Arab Spring” uprisings and the NATO bombing of Libya.
“That raises the thought that the tragic events to some extent had been driven not by concern about human rights, but a desire by some to redistribute markets.”
Both Russian and Chinese companies lost ground as a result of the Arab uprisings, which have been linked to US State Department sponsored NGOs, such as Freedom House, the International Republican Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy, among many others.
Both Russia and Iran have moved warships to Syria. If Syria falls, Iran is left with few allies in the region and nearly completely surrounded by hostile Arab states and US forward military bases. The Syria domino seems to be the last remaining piece before Iran is attacked.
Putin issued a warning against crossing that line:
“Russia is worried about the growing threat of a strike on Iran… If it happens, the consequences will be truly catastrophic. Their real scale is impossible to imagine.”
When a man who commands thousands of nuclear weapons uses words like truly catastrophic and a scale impossible to imagine, people should take note. Iran is not completely isolated and without support. It is not completely helpless, nor has it actually attacked any other nations, unlike the western aggressor nations who try to portray it as the boogeyman. This blood lust in the US and Israel is irrational and borderline psychotic. They are drunk on their own propaganda at this point.
Some think Obama doesn’t want to bomb Iran. They cite his delays as proof of his commitment to peace, despite his rhetoric and actions to the contrary. Although Obama doesn’t “bluff” when threatening illegal preemptive war on sovereign nations, and he is proud to be in “lockstep” with the loony Netanyahu hawks, some in the US pretend that Obama prefers peace to imperial aggression. Not so. It’s about the timing, and it’s about putting the assets in place for maximum “shock and awe.” Obama wants to capitalize politically if he decides to unleash hell on Iran.
Obama will have learned some lessons from presidencies past. Poppy Bush beat Iraq in six days and still managed to lose his second term to the philandering good ole boy Clinton. When Bush Jr. declared “Mission Accomplished” he found he was mired in an imperial occupation that could actually bite back, indefinitely. Neither scenario seems all that attractive to the peace laureate, who would prefer to win quickly, with no invasion, and to have the blood lust of the masses still riled up and on his side when that fateful day comes in November. So he tamps down the shrieks for war; after all there is no real hurry, as Iran has no actual nuclear weapons development program. Obama bides his time and he allows the propaganda complex to keep the public attuned to the idea of bombing Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program so that when that order comes it is accepted without question.
The Republicans are screaming for it. The Israelis are foaming at the bit. Obama’s neo-liberal base will swallow whatever the hallowed leader decides to do, even if that includes Armageddon, a ride down the Highway to Hell. Those pesky Mayans could be proved right yet; these people have it in their power to end human history.
We should be clear about the real reasons Washington goes to war and overthrows governments: because those governments aren’t taking orders from Washington. It has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, biological or chemical weapons. It has nothing to do with terrorism. It has nothing to do with democracy (laughable). Nothing to do with “freedom” (more laughable). It has nothing to do with women’s rights, the children, the aspirations of the blah blah blah. No educated person could fall for that claptrap. It has everything to do with raw power projection and the securing of resources and the profits and the control of those resources.
Some have noticed that Iran is selling oil in currencies other than the dollar, thereby setting a bad example. A threat to dollar hegemony is a threat to a fundamental core principle, which the US will not tolerate. When Iraq began selling its oil in Euros it was swiftly attacked and overthrown. Libya similarly sought to empower other currencies and move away from the dollar. It was attacked by a NATO air assault and a foreign-sponsored and trained guerrilla army of Jihadis, now war criminals. The “responsibility to protect” was actually the protection of the dollar as reserve currency and had nothing to do with civilians on the ground in Libya. Tens of thousands have now perished.
I was in the street on February 15th 2003, the “focus group” to stop the illegal and immoral onslaught against Iraq. That war crime has since killed over 1 million human beings by several credible estimates and another million in the decade preceding it due to medieval-styled “sanctions,” all courtesy of Washington policy. And now I’ve signed the petition at Stop War on Iran (stopwaroniran.org), which I expect to have as much of an effect on foreign policy.
The public was whipped up into a war hysteria prior to the attack on Iraq, a hysteria that persisted for a couple of years although no weapons of mass destruction were found. The public was fed new rationales for the criminal aggression, and it took quite a while for the public to digest just how completely they had been suckered.
A recent study by a Cornell researcher concluded that most people are too uninformed for democracy to work. To that I say, “duh.” Where’s he been these last thirty years?
How do we get through to these yahoos? Maybe it’s time we started talking about Mutual Assured Destruction once again. It’s a MAD world, don’t you know? A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD world.
Joe Giambrone is a filmmaker and author of Hell of a Deal: A Supernatural Satire. He edits The Political Film Blog, which welcomes submissions. polfilmblog at gmail.
