John Chuckman

COMMENT – ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON TRUMP’S IRAN CRISIS AND AMERICAN IMPERIAL DECLINE

 

The American empire has overreached itself in recent decades, in places like Afghanistan and Syria and Libya and Somalia and Yemen and even in Iraq. America has basically lost all of those wars in the sense of having created enduring unstable conditions and great hostilities, not peace or stability and not democratic values. All those places are wrecks with smoldering conflicts continuing and outcomes uncertain. The Neocon Wars of the Middle East have been a disaster, but Trump is closely tuned into the Neocons. He is literally surrounded with them.

Even though America clearly won the Iraq War, a war advocated for directly by Ariel Sharon, with a victory memorialized in the blood of a million Iraqis, it was a kind of technical victory, because the key result was something completely unwanted, that is, greatly strengthening Iran as a regional power. Iraq was a war that should not have been fought, but Washington was incapable of seeing that as a result of both its imperial hubris and its vulnerability to Israel’s tireless efforts to influence. Iraq’s invasion has been called by a number of experts America’s greatest strategic blunder ever.

Just as many Israelis live in a kind of foggy fantasy of sentimental Biblical names and notions combined with efforts to recreate American middle-class urban society in a hostile environment – Ozzie and Harriet on the Desert – all floated on an immense Noah’s Flood of American subsidies, public and private, many of them do not realize the full impact of what they do in the region. They believe America is there to bail them out no matter how badly they behave towards others and create unnecessary hostilities. America can flatten Iraq. American can topple Syria. And America can topple Iran. The thinking is terribly wrong and self-indulgent and dangerous. And people subservient to the Neocons, like Trump, are immersed in it.

Trump now seems perilously close to repeating the mistake of Iraq, only on a far grander scale, with Iran. There are many powerful Israeli interests who want to see America go to war with Iran, something they realize is beyond the capacity of Israel despite its rhetoric and threats. The assassination of General Soleimani seems almost certainly to have been a trap designed for that purpose, and Trump just thoughtlessly walked into it. If Iran had not proceeded in the carefully considered way that it did, giving Trump room to slip out of the trap, and without being humiliated, we would have a big new war.

The set of events carries important lessons. First, there is the remarkable steadiness and rationality displayed by Iran’s leaders. They are responsible for avoiding a gigantic, unnecessary conflict.

Second, I think are the unmistakable signs of American imperial decline. Iraq has asked America to leave. Iran has promised new pressures for America to leave. Syria is also effectively telling the United States to leave. America has been reduced to sophomoric jokes about stealing oil, and its treatment of the Iran nuclear agreement has made its word for many close to worthless. It’s pretty hard to stay in a place where the people don’t want you and where long and costly efforts have yielded little of worth. Especially as the near-term future promises nothing but continued relative economic decline for the United States with the privileged position of the dollar gradually disappearing.

Trump has listened to Israel’s bad advice time after time. And the assassination was just the most explosive instance. You do not increase stability or security with such acts. You actually create instabilities that weren’t there before. They may not all be matters to appear in tomorrow’s headlines, but they are like new fault lines in an earthquake-prone zone.

In the end, despite all the bluster, Trump was unwilling to retaliate against Iran. Of course, Iran made it as easy as possible for him with its orchestrated missile attack, an event perhaps better described as an orchestrated missile demonstration. Trump now looks more ineffectual and less in command than ever. The only people looking to him are special interests in Israel, dangerous ones that view him as a big piñata to be poked at with sticks for gifts, and the degree to which he listens to them measures our risk of war.

Trump is likely aware that Iran holds some important cards. No, Iran cannot possibly defeat the United States in a war, but Iran has never sought a war.

Perhaps I shouldn’t speak of “cannot possibly defeat the United States.” We must never forget what the tough and resourceful people of Vietnam achieved vis-à-vis the United States. Wars can go on for very long periods of time, and sometimes a less wealthy, less complex society is able to absorb the costs and demands better than a wealthier, privileged opponent. There have been other instances of that. Note that the United States has been killing peasants for eighteen years in Afghanistan, and the Taleban still controls major parts of the country, as much or more of it than when America started.

If you invade or attack someone without a clear and powerful purpose, you are condemning yourself to an unhappy future. It’s like trying to pour concrete without a mold. And the United States has done that time after time, confident just in its arrogant sense of overwhelming superiority. It is foolish, and absolutely no one is more subject to the illusion of American superiority and exceptional status than Donald Trump.

First, a war means Iran’s hurling fleets of missiles against Israel. It has the missiles. The missiles are very capable, as has been demonstrated several times. They are highly accurate. Iran has literally thousands at its disposal. Underground bunkers packed with them. So, unavoidably, the reason for starting a war against Iran, Israel’s intense and unwarranted hostility against Iran, will result in large-scale destruction of Israel.

The effort to build a deterrence has been one of Iran’s national projects, especially after the ghastly Iraq-Iran War, 1980-88, inflicted upon it.

That deterrent capacity is why Trump wants to strip Iran of its missiles, demanding, as he does, that missile technology be added to the terms of his notion of a new nuclear agreement. But that is like asking Iran to disarm itself and doing so at gunpoint. It will not happen.

Israel makes a rather compact target, meaning a determined opponent can saturate it. Iran can accurately target most of what is worth targeting in Israel. Israel’s anti-missile defenses would be overwhelmed. Besides past incidents demonstrated those defenses fail in part even under the highly favorable circumstances of a limited number of unsophisticated missiles.

Iran can also do the same thing to a number of American bases in the region.

Places like the Saudi oil facilities and the facilities of the Strait of Hormuz could quickly be rendered totally inoperable, bringing the world’s oil economy to a desperate crisis.

Iran several times has demonstrated how resourceful it can be at unconventional or guerilla operations. Any war with the United States would see these capabilities used fully.

Those and other hard facts do make starting a war with Iran an act of madness.

But if you put yourself into a bad situation deliberately, as Trump does, madness can easily happen.

John Chuckman

COMMENT TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP GIRALDI IN UNZ REVIEW

 

“America’s Unreliable Friends: Today’s Allies Are Tomorrow’s Enemies”

 

As usual, Philip Giraldi provides good writing and food for thought.

 “but the Alshamrani [Pensacola] incident suggests that there is more dissidence bubbling beneath the surface than is apparent from the rosy assurances about The Kingdom coming out of the White House and the Royal Palace in Riyadh.”

Indeed. It is a very conservative country dominated by a very conservative branch of its religion.

Those are real forces inside any society and things which do not evolve or change with any speed.

We have to think in terms of lifetimes.

And the country’s leadership, the House of Saud, is not part of the region’s ancient, stable history but a relatively new addition, going back only a decade or so before Israel’s founding. It really represents another interloper.

I am sure many ordinary Saudis are offended at the increased American presence in their country, representing, as it does to them, a sacred place like no other.

And the new close cooperation with Israel, acting much as allies, while largely kept secret, couldn’t help but offend some who would become aware of it.

Playing with fire? Quite possibly. There may already have been some unknown events in Saudi Arabia with the mysterious murder of the King’s faithful chief bodyguard and a fire at the new Jeddah high-speed rail station recently plus the sending of significant new American forces, likely as bodyguards more than as countering any (nonexistent) threat from Iran.

“In 2015, Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon explained how Israel might have to strike Iran hard to prevent a long war. He cited the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…”

I am reminded of a remark Hitler once made about whether anyone even remembered the Armenian genocide.

America is playing dangerous games with dangerous people.

Instead, it should be the one to represent and enforce the rule of law in the region.

But it cannot do so because Israel is something like an undeveloped Siamese twin attached in vital ways to America’s body.

Israel exhibits no respect for the rule of law, caring only for narrowly-defined interests of control and expansion. We must never forget for the long-term, no matter what Israel does for temporary advantage, those five or six million Palestinians aren’t going anywhere.

Of course, the relationship with Saudi Arabia derives in many ways from the relationship with Israel. The Crown Prince is seen in Israel as part of a new relationship with the region, almost a parody of making good neighbors out of old enemies.

The Crown Prince has done so many dirty deeds to ingratiate himself with Israel (and, ergo, the United States), from the horrors in Syria to the horrors in Yemen. He has earned Israel’s good will, so much so that it supported the sale of tens of billions in American armaments to the Crown Prince, something it would never have done in the past.

It’s the kind of sale Trump loves, believing he’s making America richer and spreading American influence in the region, all while crowing about his own incomparable “salesmanship,” but that’s a very superficial view.

Such weapons are nothing on which to build a future. They only increase overall uncertainty and risk. Just look at what they encouraged the Crown Prince to do in Yemen, earning himself surprise attacks and a very prominent black eye, adding to everyone’s sense of greater instability.

Without even touching on the unwarranted hostility against that major, ancient country of Iran, the United States is doing nothing helpful or creative in the region. It is building only the possibility for more war and destruction, a badly distorted mirror image of China’s efforts abroad to build infrastructure, promoting trade and prosperity for billions of people.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SOUTHFRONT

 

“IRAQI INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL: ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI [LEADER OF ISIS] IS HIDING NEAR PALMYRA, PLANNING TO ENTER IRAQ”   

 

I have long believed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually is associated either with Mossad or the CIA.

That’s why he’s had so many miracle escapes.

That’s why they never catch him and often don’t even know where he is.

And we know that his ISIS never, never attacks Israeli targets or fat Saudi Prince targets.

Those would in fact be the targets of choice for any genuine jihad movement. Not Syria or Iraq, which are two states Israel has wanted to harm or eliminate for years.

ISIS has always been a fraud, a very complex and deadly one, but a fraud.