April
12, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Unz
Review"
-
The real Donald
Trump has been exposed. The man who promised a
sensible and non-interventionist Middle Eastern
policy and a reset with Moscow has now reneged
on both pledges. His nitwit United Nations
Ambassador Nikki Haley has
directly linked
Russia and Syria for punishment by the
omnipotent Leader of the Free World lest anyone
be confused.
The
unconscionable attack on Syria based on the
usual unsubstantiated allegations has shifted
the playing field dramatically, with the “new
sheriff in town” apparently intent on proving he
is a real man who can play hardball with the
rest of them. Last week Syria was blamed by all
and sundry in the Establishment for an alleged
chemical weapons attack just two days after the
White House backed away from the Obama
Administration demand that President Bashar al-Assad
be removed. Was Syria dumb enough to use
chemical weapons in a war that it is winning at
a point when the overt hostility from Washington
had been ratcheted down? Or was it staged by the
so-called rebels?
And who
benefits from weakening al-Assad of Syria? ISIS
and al-Qaeda. Now that Trump has the bit between
his teeth on how abysmal approval ratings can
skyrocket if one starts a war, look forward to
more of the same with my sources telling me that
establishment of a no-fly zone is currently
being discussed in the Pentagon. A no-fly zone
would be toe-to-toe with the Russkies to see who
would blink first.
Meanwhile
an aircraft carrier battle group is making its
way to confront North Korea, which is being
warned with the good old “all options are on the
table” rhetoric which will almost certainly
produce a schizophrenic result of some kind. If
I were a resident of Seoul I would be moving out
of the city tout suite as it is within
range of Pyongyang’s massed heavy artillery
batteries along the DMZ.
Trump,
regarded by many including myself as the
sensible “peace candidate,” appears to be
preparing to engage militarily on multiple
fronts worldwide. And things are particularly
heating up in the Middle East and South Asia.
More U.S. troops are being deployed to Iraq and
also to Syria, in that latter case without any
invitation from Damascus or legal justification
or even a phony United Nations mandate, and
thousands more soldiers will be returning to
Afghanistan to “stabilize” the situation.
Meanwhile Yemen continues to suffer as the U.S.
supports Saudi aggression.
And it
doesn’t help to look for enlightenment from the
cheerleading Fourth Estate, which has been
completely coopted by the Establishment point of
view. In the eyes of the mainstream media the
Syria narrative is all about the evils of its
government which Washington is now pledging to
remove. Russia meanwhile is indicted without
evidence for trying to overthrow our democratic
system and the recent terrorist attack in St.
Petersburg would have been reported more
extensively but for the fact that those Soviet
holdovers probably deserved it. No one is asking
why the United States should believe itself to
be empowered to intervene anywhere unless it is
actually being directly and seriously threatened
by some other nation.
So
it is all a mess, largely of our own creation
due to our tendency to get involved in places
regarding which we know nothing and could really
care less about. And by supplementing all of
that with our inclination to believe in the myth
of our national Exceptionalism as a genuine
force for good, you wind up with a witch’s brew
that has fueled anti-Americanism worldwide, led
to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and
emptied our treasury. Ambassador Chas Freeman
has
aptly perceived
the U.S. government as the “foreign relations
equivalent of a sociopath – a country
indifferent to the rules, the consequences for
others of its ignoring them, and the reliability
of its word.”
As bad as
that all seems, if I had to pick one place where
our inability to discern right from wrong is
likely to lead to the next major armed conflict,
i.e. a real war, in fairly short order it would
have to be Iran. The recent increase in tension
between Washington and Tehran combined with the
lack of any diplomatic dialogue mean that an
actual shooting war might now be a “false flag,”
fake intelligence report, or accidental naval
encounter away. And once things start to sour,
no one would stand up and say “Stop!” as the
Trump Administration, Democrats, Republicans and
the media all hate Iran.
I have
long viewed this visceral hatred of Iran on the
part of many Americans as a byproduct of the
Iranian revolution and the occupation of the
U.S. Embassy. Revolutionary Iran became
overnight the dangerous “other,” a source of
nightmares for the Washington Establishment.
During my time in government, when the hostage
taking at the embassy was still fresh, hating
Iranians was almost a requirement in the
national security community. More recently,
Israel and its supporters have used Iran as a
punching bag to maintain the myth that the
Jewish State is existentially menaced by Tehran
and its minions in the region. Being threatened
in a serious way insures that the money tap from
the U.S. Treasury will continue to be open and
it also justifies many of Israel’s other
transgressions as it chooses to portray itself
as a nation under siege, ever the victim. More
recently Saudi Arabia has jumped onto pretty
much the same Iran band wagon, blaming Iran for
all regional problems and providing
justification for the ongoing slaughter in
Yemen.
All of
that is understandable enough, so far as it
goes, but the generation of government officials
who were around during the Iran hostage crisis
is now retired, while the pleas of Israel and
Saudi Arabia are generally best received while
holding one’s nose if one has even a basic
understanding of what is going on in the Middle
East. But that would require some ability to
establish a reasonable perspective on what is
taking place and what is particularly disturbing
is that some people in the government hierarchy
who should know better apparently are just as
delusional as some junior straight out of
college scribbler for The Washington Post.
During his
campaign Donald Trump repeatedly denounced the
Iran Nuclear Agreement, to my mind one of only
two foreign policy accomplishments of the
outgoing Obama Administration. Trump said he
would tear the agreement up and require Tehran
to come up with something better “or else.” He
has since backed off the tear-up theme, but has
unfortunately appointed to high office a group
of former military officers who appear to have
swallowed the Iran-as-threat proposition
hook-line-and-sinker.
There are some similarities between what is
happening with Iran and what has been going on
with Russia. Russia, it is being claimed,
has been responsible
for hundreds military intrusions that required a
response from NATO in the Baltic. But Russia
borders on the Baltic and it is part of its
territorial waters, so what is really being said
is that Moscow is operating in and around its
own maritime coastal zone and it is NATO that is
responded as if it were a threat. Similarly,
Iran, which sits on top of the Straits of Hormuz
is accused of being aggressive when its small
boats patrol in and around its coastal waters.
It is the American Sixth Fleet that is the out
of region intruder. Both Iran and Russia are
being subjected to Washington’s belief that its
writ runs worldwide and that it has a right to
be the hegemon wherever it seeks to plant the
flag.
I
first encountered the Iran-as-threat crowd back
in December 2015 when I listened in disbelief to
a rambling speech by retired General Michael
Flynn in Moscow. Ignoring the fact that Iran
cannot actually threaten the United States or
any genuine vital national interests, Flynn
explained his
concept of 21st century
geo-political-economic strategy. At the time, I
knew little about Flynn and his views, but I was
particularly taken aback by a
random shot he took at the Iranians,
stating very clearly that they were responsible
for “fueling four proxy wars in the Middle
East.” He was presumably referring to Iraq,
Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen. The audience,
which included a number of international
journalists and genuine foreign-policy experts,
became somewhat restless and began to mutter.
Two minutes later, Flynn returned to the theme,
mentioning the “terrible nuclear deal with
Iran.”
Later, in December, Donald Trump’s then
national-security adviser Michael Flynn,
“officially” put Iran “on notice” while
declaring that
“The Trump Administration will no longer
tolerate Iran’s provocations that threaten our
interests. The days of turning a blind eye to
Iran’s hostile and belligerent actions toward
the United States and the world community are
over.” He did not elaborate on what those
“actions” were.
Trumps’ Pentagon Chief General James Mattis and
his new National Security Adviser Lt. General
H.R. McMaster have also
taken shots at
Iran, making clear their own assessments that
Tehran constitutes a major threat both
regionally and against the United States. But
the most recent diatribe by an American General
against Iran is perhaps one of the oddest
indictments of that country. It came in a
briefing provided by
Army General Joseph Votel, Commander of the U.S.
Central Command. Votel was testifying before the
House Armed Services Committee regarding
security issues relating to the greater Middle
East. Votel told the congressmen, who were of
course delighted to hear bad things about the
Mullahs, that Iran is “one of the greatest
threats to the U.S. today” and that it has
increased its “destabilizing role” in the entire
region.
How Iran,
with its miniscule defense budget and complete
inability to project power greatly threatens the
United States has to remain a mystery, though
Votel provided some elaboration. He said that
Iran operates in “a gray area…just short of open
conflict.” Per the general, Iran engages in
“lethal aid facilitation,” uses “surrogate
forces” and carries out cyber attacks. He also
cited Iranian small boats harassing incidents
involving U.S. warships, some of which “could be
considered ‘unprofessional’ or ‘unsafe.’” Put it
all together and Iran is “the greatest long-term
threat to stability” for the entire Middle East.
Votel then advocated disrupting Iran “through
military means or other means.”
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One has to
ask if Votel or the congressmen cheering him on
are mentally defective. I was a bit thrown by
the Pentagonese expression “lethal aid
facilitation,” but it must mean supplying
weapons to Syria and other Iranian allies. Some
congressman who had not had his brain phasered
should have asked Votel if his indictment of
Iran wasn’t for doing precisely what the United
States has been doing only orders of magnitude
greater. The United States arms the entire
region and also provides lethal weapons to
so-called rebels in Syria. And those rebels are
U.S. surrogates, are they not? And as for cyber
attacks, no one is better at it than the United
States and its good buddy Israel. Does Stuxnet
ring a bell? And what is the Sixth Fleet doing
in the Persian Gulf in any event? Send the ships
home and there won’t be any “incidents”
involving Iranian speedboats.
Iran’s government admittedly is not to
everyone’s liking for good reasons, but the
country itself is only the enemy because we have
been making it happen after empowering it’s
government in the first place by bringing down
Saddam Hussein. Iran’s own perspective appears
to have evaded American critics. It is a country
surrounded by enemies, constantly threatened,
which views its relations with its few friends
in Syria and Lebanon as defensive measures. I am
accustomed to seeing and hearing nasty things
about the Mullahs, but they usually come from
Israeli and Saudi partisans who persist in
falsely describing the Iranians as a global
threat. It is in their interest to do so, and
many pliable American politicians and media
talking heads have picked up the refrain, so
much so that a U.S. attack on Iran would likely
be endorsed overwhelmingly by Congress
and applauded
in the media. The danger here is that there is a
groupthink about Iran and war could happen in a
heartbeat if someone does or says something
really dumb to trigger it. Votel sounds stupid
enough to do just that.
Phil
Giraldi is a former CIA Case Officer and Army
Intelligence Officer who spent twenty years
overseas in Europe and the Middle East working
terrorism cases. He holds a BA with honors from
the University of Chicago and an MA and PhD in
Modern History from the University of London.
Ed
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