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 ON STILL MORE LEAKS FROM FORMER BRITISH AMBASSADOR KIM DARROCH’S CONFIDENTIAL NOTES TO HIS GOVERNMENT

 

We have today yet more revelations in leaked documents written as advisory notes to the British government by Sir Kim Darroch, its recent former Ambassador to the United States.

Darroch called Trump’s tearing-up of the Iran nuclear agreement an act of “diplomatic vandalism.” Now, that is a characterization completely on the mark. It is difficult to see what anyone would even find objectionable in it, beyond the fact of its being leaked by someone unknown.

After all, every government in Western Europe and other major states like Russia and China and major world organizations publicly expressed their opposition to Trump’s rash action. All agreed that Iran had kept to its commitments and that the agreement had worked well for about four years.

Darroch went on to explain that tearing up the agreement was done to spite his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Yes, there is no question Trump has been out to destroy or undo everything that he can that was ever done by Barack Obama. He literally hates the man. We’ve seen that in a number of matters, including Obamacare.

But there is another reason for Trump’s dangerous blundering in Iran, a far more powerful one, one completely ignored by Darroch. I’ll come back to it after a few more words about Trump’s loathing for Obama.

I do believe Trump’s hatred for Obama is deeply tinged with racism. I can see no other explanation for it. There simply are no genuine liberal qualities in Obama for anyone on the political right to dislike, but there is the glaring fact of his being the first black president.

No one, examining the record of Obama’s eight years as president, can sensibly accuse him of being a liberal. In anything, except in the occasional vacuous and soon forgotten political speech. I know the Alt-right press regards Obama as a liberal, one of the most hated ever, but it’s a silly accusation from some extreme people. And that crowd, if you read through their stuff on the Internet, oozes with racism.

Obama led eight years of ugly American colonial wars, from invading Libya to getting the endless horrors of Syria going. From secretly supporting a coup to overthrow Egypt’s first-ever democratic government, one to which Israel had taken serious objection, to staging a coup against an elected government in Ukraine and pitching that country into turmoil, including civil war, all for the sake of intimidating Russia. From increasing ugly pressures on Venezuela to starting the tanks rolling up against Russia’s borders, there is no liberalism to be found in Obama’s activities abroad.

At home, we find the same thing. How can a man be regarded as liberal who passed no significant social legislation? And he did absolutely nothing to help his own people, the people to whom he appealed in the rhythms of a black preacher reciting the slogan, “Yes, we can!” He did nothing for the squalid, broken-down realities of vast stretches of urban America. His Obamacare legislation was a nasty, confusing, corporate-serving piece of work that a liberal can find just as hateful as a right-winger.

Further, Obama also did almost nothing to reform a financial system badly in need of reform, a system that had created a disastrous world-affecting financial crash. He signed off on all major military and security legislation. He actually started the shameful American system of extrajudicial killing abroad by hi-tech drone. And it was under Obama that the secretive NSA began expanding into an information-sucking monstrosity with its new constellation of secret buildings packed with super-computers and spying on literally everyone and everything.

Trump’s activities in Iran are about Israel’s interests, as they are communicated and pressed through the many channels of the American Israel lobby. Trump felt afraid and vulnerable about the future of his office at one period, and he turned to some extremely wealthy American oligarchs for support and money. These were men whose most burning concern is Israel, and several of them are on intimate terms with Netanyahu.

I am sure Trump got the support he sought, but all such support comes at a price. Trump’s price is readily seen in a whole series of acts, from putting the American Embassy into Jerusalem to recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights. From appointing a series of extremely ideologically committed men, genuinely fanatical men, like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to important posts to slashing support for a number of organizations whose work in any way supported the Palestinians.

It’s been a dramatic wave of events over a short period, and they reflect no authentic interests of the United States, and they certainly have nothing to do with Obama. They all increase tensions and hostilities and commit the United States to ignoring the rule of law. Matters in Iran are part and parcel of that activity.

Netanyahu has made years of insane claims about Iran and the security of Israel, all of them groundless, none of them supported by any evidence, and, indeed, in a number of cases, being directly contradicted by solid evidence. But he just continues his harangues and crusade against a country that has started absolutely no conflicts in its modern era, a fact, as it happens, totally the opposite of Israel’s own record of close-to continuous war.

Netanyahu has long wanted Iran to be hurt or reduced for the temerity of having some influence in the Middle East. Israel wants all of that influence with no one around to in any way oppose or question it. Netanyahu was intensely busy in just the same way during Obama’s time, but Obama ignored him, which is the only way he ever achieved the nuclear agreement.

Netanyahu also, like Trump, has a deep dislike for Obama. He showed this openly a number of times, coming close to expressions of public contempt. I assume his hatred is based on Obama’s ignoring him over Iran largely, although racism, too, could well play a role. Netanyahu’s Israel has been extremely hostile to black Jews from Africa and to black refugee claims. Netanyahu actually had a scheme to bribe some distant African states to take refugees off Israel’s hands.

At any rate, the shared distaste for Obama only makes the same years-old job of selling the threat Iran is supposed to represent, and there’s no need to sell it to those American oligarchs to whom Trump desperately turned for political help. They are onboard with about every outrageous claim Netanyahu ever made.

We should note that that nuclear agreement was signed by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and the United States – plus Germany and the European Union. They all still strongly support it, except, of course, for Donald Trump’s United States. Everyone, except Netanyahu’s Israel and Trump’s United States, agrees that it is a solid agreement and that Iran has conscientiously followed its obligations. All international technical experts and inspectors support that view too.

But along comes Trump suddenly to toss the agreement to the wind, ignoring everyone else. The only people with input and support for his rash behavior are Netanyahu and Trump’s American oligarch political supporters, close friends of Netanyahu.

Essentially, what we have is a man, Trump, who, in the interest of his campaign war chest for the 2020 election or against any attempt at his impeachment before that, is putting the entire world at risk of a serious war. He is threatening and economically crushing a law-abiding nation of more than eighty million souls for no other reason. Millions of ordinary Iranians are hurt by his severe and unwarranted sanctions. As is always the case with sanctions, they hurt mainly ordinary people. They are a blunt instrument, much like massive bombing.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CHRIS HEDGES IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom”

“The persecution of Assange is part of a broad assault against anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist news organizations.”

 

Wow, what an excellent piece of analysis.

I wouldn’t subtract or change a word.

I might add a point or two.

Chris Hedges includes the rot of money in American politics, but there is a lot more to be said about what is at the very heart of things.

The extent of it is not well understood by the average American and certainly not understood by observers abroad.

America has basically managed to create an elaborate political system with all the showy external trappings of democracy but almost none of its content.

America today is run by a relatively small number of people who control the levers in both parties because they control the money available, truckloads of it. These people are served by the American empire’s security-military apparatus and the politicians in Washington who are beholden to them.

The whole gang together, what I tend to call America’s power establishment, has an almost closed system serving themselves. That is why nothing beneficial or useful or even decent can get done in America anymore. And, of course, they do not like those who, like Assange, bring any light to the dark realities of American government.

The unquestioned power of that money-drenched American establishment is why there is now a continuous stream of wars which are not in the average American’s interest at all but are buried under thick layers, almost like stage make-up, of rhetoric about Patriotism and defending freedom.

There are almost no useful or effective rules governing the use of money in American politics. There are also no useful or effective rules governing the operations of America’s immensely powerful special-interest lobbies.

So, if I were a motivated young politician with some good ideas and intentions, I would virtually never stand a chance against the establishment candidate whose millions buy television ads, enable him to travel everywhere with elaborate support, and have the services of everything from a make-up man to pollsters and public relations flacks.

Of course, accidents do happen, and, once in a thousand times, a little guy does manage to win owing to some peculiar local set of circumstances, an event which will be jumped on by the establishment press as showing that things still work for the little guy in America. But such events are almost meaningless because their numbers are necessarily so small. They do not characterize the system because they cannot.

An individual little hero here or there, as a Bernie Sanders, means nothing in the big picture. Its just like a nice little bookstore trying to compete with Amazon or a local specialty soft drink maker trying to compete with Coca-Cola.

They can have their tiny local business, but they cannot dream of seriously competing with the monster corporation. And the truth is often that the monster corporation can put them out of business at any time it decides to do so, or it can buy them out, but it is usually not worth the effort.

Many people do not understand that marketing products has become a monstrous effort which includes everything from research and nonstop advertising to literally buying the shelf space for products from the local grocery store chains. You, as a small producer of anything, can often barely get space on the store shelves, will certainly not be able to get the favorable paid-for space at eye-level and easy-reach, and may indeed in some cases be closed out completely from getting space. That’s just part of the way corporate marketing works.

America has taken these proven practices from corporate business and applied them to politics. Every step in a modern political election campaign reflects the same kinds of efforts as Coca-Cola or Frito-Lay pushing their products, and it all costs a great deal of money. You need money just to recover from money spent on a tactic that proves not to work. And money itself acts as what economists call “a barrier to entry” against potential competitors. You are, in effect, not even allowed to play cards at the table without a very large stake.

The only way to stop this behavior in politics, so that candidates could have a fairer opportunity to talk about their actual ideas and views, would be to choke off the money, but no one with power is willing to do that because everyone of them benefits from the way things are run.

Note also that money not only closes off honest campaigning and exchange of ideas, it serves to discourage from running those who have sincerely-held independent views and a desire for changing something that is wrong. This way of doing things is responsible for pre-packaged candidates and lists of campaign phrases out of manuals. In those senses, too, it is closed system.

But the people putting up the large amounts of political campaign money – literally billions in every major American election – want things to be exactly that way. They don’t want surprises or significant change. They want what they want and what they pay for. It is easy to see the tendency for government to become plutocracy, no matter what nice words are written on pieces of parchment kept in museums.

When a country has become an international imperial force, such as the United States very much has, it is just not the money people who want things to remain as they are. It is the powerful groups running massive agencies like the Pentagon and CIA. They, too, spend vast amounts of money, most of it serving the interests of those same money people, and they do not want change.

Great bureaucracies always have a tendency to protect and perpetuate themselves. The values and intentions of huge forces like the Pentagon and CIA are not friendly to democratic principles, no matter what their charters may say. They are intrinsically authoritarian organizations, and the more they grow and influence a society, the less it becomes a free place, again no matter what the old words on parchment say.

They are, of course, the natural allies of the money people. They serve them abroad in the workings of empire and have a common interest in minimizing political change at home. It is easy to see why ordinary citizens come to feel politics is useless and unresponsive to them. It is.

Whether you vote for Democrats or Republicans, you get the Pentagon, the CIA, the money people, and a ruthless empire abroad, with just some differences in rhetoric. Here again the system operates much like great corporations with their promotional and marketing wars for McDonald’s or Burger King, Coke or Pepsi. Huge amounts of money are spent, and the result is a choice between products similar in most essential respects. Both corporations prosper and their vast walls of spending make it mighty hard for any new competitors to enter against them. That is pretty much what American politics is reduced to.

And this way of operating applies not only to political campaigns in America but to matters like major foreign policy. Take the example of the bizarre relationship America has with Israel, a country with a population the size of Ecuador’s. It is a relationship which causes great amounts of war and trouble in the world and truly works against the long-term interests of ordinary Americans, to say nothing of its spurning of all ethical principles.

The relationship is based on the same money-drenched methods which govern American politics. Israel, despite its insignificant size and greatly troubling behavior, is able to stay right at the forefront of things, to be on every politician’s lips, to be constantly mentioned (favorably) in the press, and to heavily influence American foreign policy through exactly the same mechanisms.

Some of its demands today are even going beyond foreign policy and into the internal affairs of the United States, as with the constant advocacy for laws making support for peaceful boycotts to influence Israel’s awful behavior illegal or the advocacy for laws in every state equating criticism of a powerful state actor like Israel with hate-speech. Just nasty, self-serving nonsense, but it goes on day after day with little attention paid.

Well, Washington’s establishment today just goes on and on about supposed Russian influence in America. It is unproved stuff serving powerful imperial establishment interests, but, even were there some bit of truth in the accusations, the underlying reality of Russian influence in America is a bad joke. Russia cannot even get a good word in the press and is treated unfairly in countless serious matters.

When I saw the silly Facebook stuff, about so many insignificant ads having been bought during the election by a few people in Russia, offered as evidence of influence, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Out of countless billions of dollars in advertising and advocacy on Facebook, the claim represented national concern about someone spitting into an ocean.

But here is Israel and its domestic advocates waging a vast and ongoing campaign to influence a great many matters inside America – from freedom of speech and peaceful protest action to foreign affairs and every national political campaign held – and we hear no complaints or concerns at all. And Israel’s influence in foreign affairs has been deadly, tumbling America into pointless wars time and again.

And it is doing so again, right now. Only recently, we have a recording leaked in Israel of Netanyahu bragging about how he is personally responsible for Trump’s destroying the Iran Nuclear Accord, an act opposed by every expert and most countries on earth, and an act causing dangerous tensions and threats of instability and hostilities.

Israel doesn’t have to worry because it is protected. But what about everyone else? The results of deliberately destroying a peaceful, smoothly-working international accord could be truly catastrophic.

A small country is able to leverage the United States in this unacceptable and dangerous way, against the wishes of almost every statesman and expert in the world, precisely because of the way America runs its national politics. Trump is looking to assure the success of his 2020 campaign, and everyone else on the planet is taxed with fear and threats so that he can feel secure politically. I think nothing better demonstrates the insanity of America’s laws about money in politics.

But we keep getting the silly distraction of what a threat to American democracy Russia is, simply an idiotic and unsupported idea. Meanwhile, Israel’s direct meddling in American politics threatens to bring an economic and military calamity down on our heads, and you will not find a word of criticism from politicians or the press.

Israel’s lobby in the United States is one of the best organized, best financed, and feared in existence. If you go along with it, you benefit with campaign money and good press and perhaps assistance from various experts and professionals. If you oppose it, those same resources will be applied to working against you and making you look bad in one way or another. It undoubtedly has information systems for tracking all political activities and attitudes that would be the envy of many large corporations.

It is easy to see that if the rules governing lobbies and campaign donations were changed, this would all come screeching to a halt. American policy in the Mideast could reflect fairness and decency and even most of America’s long-term interests. Wars and threats and terrible things like millions of desperate refugees created by those same wars would disappear.

But you will not see it changing any time soon in a country whose hideous Supreme Court – each member appointed by politicians benefiting from things just as they are – has ruled that money is “free speech,” just as it once ruled in favor of the rules governing slavery. No one with power in Washington wants change, just as the various estates (the great lords and churchmen) of the Ancien Régime in 18^th century France wanted no change affecting their personal situations and privileges. And their unblinking selfishness ultimately brought catastrophe to France.

The model for Israel’s influence in American politics is the model for the general operation of the American government. The same elements are at work in every important matter. And that’s why there is continuous war, massive security and spying systems, gigantic corporations with no limits on their size and influence, and no attention paid to the pitiful rot and poverty so easy to find in a thousand places in America.

Men like Assange – and there are few of them, just as there are always relatively few brave and intelligent people who work to change what is wrong in the world (after all, gifted people can make a whole lot more money by going with the flow of things and working for a corporation) – become effectively “the enemies of the people” under the system. His work shed light on the rot and served as real investigative reporting, while the corporate press just functions as part of the system, defending it, avoiding investigating it, and almost never publishing anything adverse about it.

The corrupt nature of America’s national politics is nicely symbolized by Obama, a man so often regarded (wrongly) as liberal and principled. He came to politics as a second-rate lecturer in constitutional law, the kind of work that earns a moderate middle-class income and maybe a pension. Yet, he just left the presidency as a man worth literally tens of millions of dollars. His new home alone cost more than eight million dollars.

Doing the establishment’s work – which in Obama’s case involved killing hundreds of thousands of people abroad and supporting massive new intrusions into the privacy of Americans – is very rewarding. And that is pretty well the story of every major American politician.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

No wonder The Guardian keeps running the smarmy words of the world’s greatest a$$hole, Tony Blair, against Corbyn. You really are trying to sink his candidacy.

By the way, it really is unfair for newspapers to make political recommendations.

It’s not part of legitimate journalism, although I grant it has a long tradition.

____________________________

Israel is reported as not happy about the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn.

And it has nothing to do with “anti-Semitism,” although without a doubt that now-tired canard will be used, or suggested subtly, yet again.

It has really to do with Corbyn’s independence of mind. And I would suggest The Guardian shares this view.

Right now, much of Europe marches in lockstep with America, and America’s foreign policy allows for almost no independence of mind, especially when places like the Mideast are involved.

America’s campaign contribution system – a disgrace which has close to eliminated effective democracy in the country – is at the root of the problem.

The American Lobby for Israel – not a figment of anyone’s fetid imagination but a hard reality documented by scholarly work – is the most well-organized and financed in the country, and Congressmen and Senators listen when it speaks.

Not only are substantial contributions at risk in opposing them, but there is always the threat of the major news sources going negative on such opponents in their local constituencies. Owing to unlimited corporate mergers, now only a half dozen mega-corporations control most of what Americans read and see on television. They are all friends of Israel if you judge by their words. The situation is very much like the Rupert Murdoch situation in Britain, only more so.

That is why freshmen Congressmen all dutifully attend the free trips for “information” Israel provides after every election. Declining to go is risky indeed, for you will be marked down as “not being a friend of Israel.”

That is why the American Congress today listens to the raging nonsense of Netanyahu’s violent government against their own elected President over an important international agreement. It is a scandal almost beyond describing for the government of the world’s greatest power to behave in this way.

And that is why Jeremy Corbyn can expect some rough treatment ahead. There is no allowance for independence of mind or, for that matter, ethical standards.

Tony Blair, as most readers know, has zero independence of mind, and he appears to have been born and educated without any ethical compass. He’s proved that scores of times. And being so had its rewards: amongst other prizes that tumbled into his lap after he helped kill a million Iraqis was the Israel Peace Prize, a one million dollar thank you for a job well done.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE NATIONAL POST

This article by Kelly McParland is rubbish propaganda.

Bob Rae introduces his statement about why he supports the Iran agreement with words “conceding that Iran is a repressive regime that can’t be trusted, hates Jews, represents a threat to the very existence of Israel, encourages terrorism, destabilizes the region….”

That is not so much a statement of conviction, I believe, as it is what it is absolutely necessary to say if you don’t want to be pilloried in the press and by many politicians for a view on an important issue which happens to be at odds with the one prevailing in Israel.

His “necessary” statement contains almost nothing but echoes of myths and propaganda repeated a thousand times in our corporate, and very biased, press.

Iran can’t be trusted? Where’s one scrap of evidence for that? So far as I am aware they keep all their agreements and obligations.

Iran hates Jews? There is nothing to support that. Tens of thousands of Jews live good lives in Iran. I guarantee that the Jews of Iran live far, far better lives than do the occupied Palestinians.

Iran encourages terrorism? I’m not aware of any such events. Iran lives at peace with its neighbors and has not started a single war in its modern history. Yes, it supports allies in the region, as do the United States and Israel, but I can’t accept they qualify as terrorists in quite the same fashion as America’s thuggish recruits now working to destroy Syria.

Contrast that with Israel whose brief modern history is one of continuous attacks on every neighbor it has, many more than once.

Indeed, the Six Day War was deliberately started by Israel to seize lands it still holds half a century later against the will of all those living on them.

It seized part of Lebanon too and occupied it for many years, until Hezbollah drove them out, Hezbollah receiving Iran’s assistance. But that was not terror, it was self-defence by any reasonable reckoning. Hezbollah, in contrast to Israel, never invaded and occupied any part of Israel.

If you want an example of genuine terror, look to the two recent invasions of that refugee camp called Gaza in which about a thousand children were killed, apart from thousands of adults. And look to an endless blockade of the same unfortunate people, a blockade which in its earlier days, before international intervention, actually included a calorie count for allowed imports just sufficient to keep the population alive. Even Gaza’s humble fishermen can only go a short distance into the sea before being shot at.

How about the Israeli bombings of Southern Lebanon in which a million horrible cluster bomblets were dropped where farmers and children could step on them?

Iran is a theocratic state, but it is not quite the miserable place so often glibly described in our corporate press. You may easily finds sites with lots of photos of these lovely people smiling huge smiles and doing a great variety of things you might expect to see in a free society.

Meanwhile Israel has not an imaginary but a genuine nuclear arsenal, something about which it daily lies. It is not a member of the nuclear proliferation treaty, as Iran is, and it allows no inspections around Dimona. And, speaking of proliferation, it is an historical fact that Israel conspired with apartheid South Africa to assist them in gaining nuclear weapons.

We are far, far freer of danger originating from Iran than we are from Israel.