We’ve seen it repeatedly: You invent a pretext based on deliberate lies, fake news, exaggerations or a false flag operation which serves to construct a story that country or leader X is a threat to “us” which legitimates that we do a ‘preemptive’ strike against that against – obviously invented – threat to eliminate it.
Mainstream media’s task is to propagate the ploy, not to ask questions or reveal the lie.
Take Serbia’s ‘genocide’ in Kosovo, Afghanistan’s responsibility for 9/11, Saddam’s possession of nukes in Iraq, Assad’s use of chemical weapons against the Syrians, Russia’s planning to occupy and administer not only Ukraine but also a series of European countries thereafter, Hamas’ attack on Israel – that Israel knew everything about before it happened – and now you have the blatant lie about Iran’s being just about to become a nuclear power.
Basic facts about Iran that we are not hearing
Just a few facts you almost never hear but which are extremely important no matter what you think of the Iranian theocracy: It was the US/CIA and UK that made a regime-change in 1953 that deposed the democratically elected Dr. Mossadegh. The US installed the Shah – at the time the most ruthless and militarist leader in the world, and gave him nuclear technology.
Since 1979, when the Iranian revolution sent him running and occupied the US Embassy in Tehran, the US has done nothing – nothing – but harass Iran and its 90 million innocent Iranian citizens with the hardest sanctions thinkable (that have destroyed the middle class that could, if any, have changed the country’s leadership). The US and other NATO countries have systematically been building up Israel militarily – knowing full well that Netanyahu’s 30-year-old pathological dream is to eliminate Iran.
The leading actors in this drama are therefore “USrael” and not Iran.
Furthermore, Iran does not have nuclear weapons; Israel has – estimates state up to 400. Iran is a member of the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty; Israel is not. Iran has been under constant inspection by the IAEA, but Israel has never accepted that. Around 2003, the present Supreme Leader, Khamenei, issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons, which is considered by some to be consistent with Islamic tradition.
More recently, in 2015, the JCPOA Agreement was concluded, which was rightly considered a major diplomatic victory for all involved parties. It led Iran to significantly decrease its uranium enrichment. Iran kept itself within the limits of that agreement, but the boastful, grumpy Donald Trump cancelled the US’ participation in 2018, and Iran has since used its enrichment as a bargaining chip while never getting near the level that would permit it to produce a nuclear weapon. In March, Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, confirmed that there was no indication that Iran was nearing the threshold. On June 17, Trump said that he did not care about what she said; he knew that Iran was ‘very close.’ More information on these matters can be found in my article from yesterday, available here.
This will do as a broader background to the prediction in the headline. The West’s stockpile of lies, misinformation and media deception seems to me to be way more fateful than any Iranian military fact or activity.
Specific reasons for the prediction and the laws of war
Now to the more specific reasons, which point in one direction, only: A larger war on Iran with aim of changing the Iranian regime.
According to media reports, Netanyahu had told Trump that Israel could kill the Supreme Leader, and Trump said he would not accept that. Israel has bombed civilian areas and the Iranian IRIB broadcasting complex in Iran, and Israeli agents have blown up cars inside Iran. None of that would be necessary to destroy nuclear research facilities. Trump left the G7 meeting early and stated that he was not working on a ceasefire between Iran and Israel but working on an “end, a real end,” and he has called for Iranian “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” and demanded that Tehran’s population leave the city.
He also talked about something bigger to come and that Iran better accept his demands before there would be nothing left of it. In the afternoon, US time today, he had a meeting in the White House Situation Room with his national security team. He talks about knowing exactly where the Supreme Leader is hiding, but that he has no plans to kill him – “at least not now.” (I leave aside at this point what to think about these international law-violating, fascist statements. Trump would have no qualms about killing Iranian top leaders, remember the 2020 liquidation of Qassem Soleimani).
There are, while I write this, movements of huge US and British naval vessels to the region and talk about B52’s delivering bunker busters.
There is no doubt that the Trump Regime gave the green light to the Netanyahu Regime’s unprovoked and fake-preemptive attack on Iran. Trump said that he knew “everything” about it well in advance. This, in my view, means that he has also faced the possibility that the US will be drawn in if the Iranian response over time would be too hard for Israel – already in war with several neighbouring states – to handle alone.
This time, Iran has responded more forcefully than before, and it probably sees the USraeli threat as existential. If Iran continues to respond to Israeli attacks, this would drag in the US – and sooner rather than later. Trump would simply have no choice. He also knows that NATO allies in Europe will remain supportive of both him and Netanyahu if he goes down that slippery slope: A repetition of the Iraq war.
Some may object here that Trump is just bluffing. First, bluffing whom? If Iran perceives this as a threat to its very existence, it is, of course, not going to unconditionally surrender. It will fight to the last Iranian, and the idea that the Iranians would stand along the roads when the US and Israeli forces roll into Tehran is as delusional as it was in the case of Iraq. (After one day in Baghdad in 2002, I understood that there would be no one, no matter what they thought of Saddam).
No, there is another dynamic that is both much more powerful and relevant: the escalation of conflicts and violence, up to the outbreak of wars, pretty much follows its own dynamics and laws. If you’ve said “A” you have to move on and say “B” and do tit-for-tat – “C”… to the end of the alphabet, or the world.
De-escalation is extremely difficult, but phoney/pious statesmen love to advocate de-escalation because they have nothing else to suggest and because they themselves caused the escalation in the first place by pumping in weapons, supporting one side and demonise the other in a conflict and have no clue about conflict-resolution, mediation, peace-making, reconciliation and that sort of – to them totally irrelevant – professional knowledge. Simply put, they are conflict and peace illiterates.
Given what has already happened, I do not have the imagination to see how Trump and Netanyahu can now back down from their words and deeds without losing face, and that is not exactly what they are known for. They will soon be guided less by their own decisions than by the laws of militarism, escalation and eventually full warfare: warfare for regime-change in Iran.
De-nuclearise Israel and have both under NPT and IAEA
To some extent, the nuclear issue is a pretext. To some extent, it is a real issue too. The tragedy is that it is impossible for anyone to destroy nuclear technology facilities and equipment, perhaps 100 meters down in massive mountains. Secondly, if they could succeed, Iran is capable of re-establishing its capacity and will likely have become convinced by the USrael policies that it has, against its will, to acquire nuclear weapons.
Since Israel has nuclear weapons and thereby violates all the non-binding UN resolutions about the Middle East as a zone free of weapons of mass destruction, the simple, effective solution would be for the international community to deprive Israel of its nuclear weapons and place both countries in the NPT and under IAEA surveillance. The West’s stupid insistence that Israel shall have nuclear weapons while Iran shall not is simply illogical, conflict- and war-promoting as well as morally unsustainable and discriminatory.
The dissolution of the messianic West: Evil, exceptionalism, escalation and eschatology
None of these decision-makers is burdened with ethics, long-term thinking or analyses of the consequences of their actions. They are driven by emotions, groupthink, lack of basic security knowledge, hubris, hate (of an Iran they do not know as anything but ‘mullahs’), of self-aggrandisement and a belief that they are exceptionalist. After all, the US and Israel are the two exceptionalist states par excellence. They see themselves as standing above the laws, ethics, and norms that the rest of the world feels obliged to respect at least to some extent.
In their delusional omnipotence, they seem to accept a kind of modern-day eschatological paradigm supplemented with the catharsis that the use of nuclear weapons may seem to promise: The birth of a new world in which Evil – that of the ‘others’ has been eradicated. That that evil is merely a psycho-political projection of their own evil system, such as militarism, and personalities, is of course, an unthinkable thought. However, it is an end-time view that is deeply embedded in Western Christian and Jewish social cosmology, which probably steers more in situations such as this than any rational thought, analysis, or prudent statesmanship.
Macro-historically, it belongs to a civilisation, an Empire, in rapid decline, decay and dissolution. And at the micro-level, it would be foolish to underestimate Trump’s and Netanyahu’s messianic zeal in times of their systems’ decay. I fear weapons, yes. But I fear these types of people more.