January 05, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -For the United
States to abandon proxy warfare and directly
kill one of Iran’s most senior political
figures has changed international politics
in a fundamental way. It is a massive error.
Its ramifications are profound and complex.
There is also a lesson to be learned here in that
this morning there will be excitement and satisfaction
in the palaces of Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh and
Tehran. All of the political elites will see prospects
for gain from the new fluidity. While for ordinary
people in all those countries there is only the
certainty of more conflict, death and economic loss, for
the political elite, the arms manufacturers, the
military and security services and allied interests, the
hedge funds, speculators and oil companies, there are
the sweet smells of cash and power.
Tehran will be pleased because the USA has just
definitively lost Iraq. Iraq has a Shia majority and so
naturally tends to ally with Iran. The only thing
preventing that was the Arab nationalism of Saddam
Hussein’s Ba’ath Socialist Party. Bush and Blair were
certainly fully informed that by destroying the Ba’ath
system they were creating an Iranian/Iraqi nexus, but
they decided that was containable. The “containment”
consisted of a deliberate and profound push across the
Middle East to oppose Shia influence in proxy wars
everywhere.
This is the root cause of the disastrous war in
Yemen, where the Zaidi-Shia would have been victorious
long ago but for the sustained brutal aerial warfare on
civilians carried out by the Western powers through
Saudi Arabia. This anti-Shia western policy included the
unwavering support for the Sunni Bahraini autocracy in
the brutal suppression of its overwhelmingly Shia
population. And of course it included the sustained and
disastrous attempt to overthrow the Assad regime in
Syria and replace it with pro-Saudi Sunni jihadists.
