The United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel, responsible for military fiascos, hundreds of thousands of deaths and innumerable war crimes in the Middle East, are now plotting to attack Iran.
Illustration by Mr. Fish — “Biden at Bat”
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com
The United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia are plotting a war with Iran. The 2015 Iranian nuclear arms accord, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Donald Trump sabotaged, does not look like it will be revived. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is reviewing options to attack if Teheran looks poised to obtain a nuclear weapon and Israel, which opposes U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, carries out military strikes.
During his visit to Israel, Biden assured Prime Minister Yair Lapid that the U.S. is “prepared to use all elements of its national power,” including military force, to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon.
Saudi Arabia, Israel and the U.S. function as a troika in the Middle East. The Israeli government has built a close alliance with Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks and has been a prolific sponsor of international terrorism, supporting Salafi jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and such groups as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.
The three countries worked in tandem to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who overthrew its first democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated and impoverished places on earth.
Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, has conducted an ongoing campaign of covert attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and nuclear scientists. Four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, presumably by Israel, between 2010 and 2012. In July 2020, a fire, attributed to an Israeli bomb, damaged Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. In November 2020, Israel used remote control machine guns to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist.
In January 2020, the United States assassinated Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, along with nine other people including a key figure in the anti-ISIS coalition, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. It used an MQ-9 Reaper drone to fire missiles into his convoy, near Baghdad’s airport.
Iranian Restraint
If similar attacks had been carried out by Iranian operatives inside Israel, it would have triggered a war. Only Iran’s decision not to retaliate, beyond lobbing about a dozen ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq, prevented a conflagration.
On July 7, Iran informed The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it is using IR-6 centrifuges with “modified subheaders.” The declared purpose of the enrichment process at its underground facility at Fordow is to create uranium isotope enriched up to 20 percent — far below the 90 percent enrichment levels necessary to create weapons-grade uranium. Under the JCPOA agreement, enrichment levels were capped at 3.67 percent.
Israel has allocated $1.5 billion for a potential strike against Iran and, during the first week of June, held large-scale military exercises, including one over the Mediterranean and in the Red Sea, in preparation to attack Iranian nuclear sites using dozens of fighter aircraft, including Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets.
The 2016 Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Barack Obama provides a 10-year, $38 billion military package for Israel.
Israel and its lobby in the U.S. are working to scuttle negotiations with Iran to monitor its nuclear program. The preparation for war mirrors the Israeli pressure on the U.S. to invade Iraq, one of the worst strategic decisions in U.S. history.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in testimony before the British Iraq war commission, offered this account of his discussions with George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002:
“As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.”
Saudi Arabia, which seeks to dominate the Arab world, severed ties with Iran in 2016 after its embassy in Tehran was stormed by protesters following Riyadh’s execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Saudi Arabia, with Chinese help, has built a plant to process uranium ore and acquired ballistic missiles. Saudi Arabia signed a series of letters in 2017 with the U.S. to purchase weapons totaling $110 billion immediately, and $350 billion over the next decade.
A war with Iran would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. It would spread swiftly throughout the region. The Shiites across the Middle East would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The two million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province; the Shiite majority in Iraq; and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would join the fight against the U.S. and Israel.
Iran would use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, rocket and bomb-equipped speedboats and submarines, mines, drones and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified gas supply. Oil production facilities in the Persian Gulf would be sabotaged.
Iranian oil, which makes up 13 percent of the world’s energy supply, would be taken off the market. Oil would jump to over $500 a barrel and perhaps, as the conflict drags on, to over $750 a barrel. Our petroleum-based economy, already reeling under rising prices because of the sanctions on Russia, would grind to a halt.
Israel would be hit by Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Hezbollah’s store of Iranian-supplied rockets that allegedly can reach any part of Israel, including Israel’s nuclear plant at Dimona, would also be deployed. Strikes by Iran and its allies on Israel, as well as on American military installations in the region, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, dead.
In 2002, the U.S. military conducted its “most elaborate war game” ever, costing over $250 million. Known as the Millennium Challenge, the exercise was between a Blue Force (the U.S.) and the Red Force (widely considered as a stand-in for Iran). It was meant to validate America’s “modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts.” It did the opposite. The Red Force, led by retired Marine lieutenant general Paul Van Riper, conducted a swarm of kamikaze suicide boat attacks and destroyed 16 U.S. warships in under 20 minutes.
When the war game was reset, it was rigged in favor of the Blue Force. The Blue Force was given access to experimental technology – including that which doesn’t exist such as airborne laser weapons. Meanwhile, the Red Force was told they weren’t allowed to shoot down the Blue Team’s aircraft, had to keep their offensive weapons in the open and could not use chemical weapons. Even then, the Blue Force could not achieve all of its objectives as Riper unleashed a guerrilla insurgency on the occupying forces.
The US-Saudi Tandem
President Joe Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz greeting at Al-Salam Palace in Jeddah, on Friday. (Saudi Press Agency/Wikipedia)
Why shouldn’t Joe Biden be feted by the murderous regime of Saudi Arabia and the apartheid state of Israel? He and the U.S. have as much blood on their hands as they do. Yes, in 2018 the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the assassination and dismemberment of my friend and colleague Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, Israel assassinated Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. But Washington has more than matched the crimes carried out by Israel and the Saudis, including against journalists.
The imprisonment of Julian Assange – who released the collateral murder video showing U.S. helicopter pilots laughing as they shot to death two Reuters journalists and a group of civilians in Iraq in 2007 – is designed to destroy Assange psychologically and physically. The corpses of civilians, including children, piled up by Israel and Saudi Arabia, who do much of their killing in Gaza and Yemen with U.S. weapons, don’t come close to the hundreds of thousands of dead the U.S. has left behind in the two decades of warfare it has perpetrated in the Middle East.
In 1991, a U.S.-led coalition destroyed much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including water treatment facilities resulting in sewage contaminating the country’s drinking water. Then followed years of U.S., U.K. and French airstrikes enforcing a “No Fly Zone” along with crushing sanctions they imposed via the U.N. From 1991 to 1998, these sanctions alone were estimated to have killed 100,000 to 227,000 Iraqi children under the age of five, although the exact figures have been the subject of much dispute.
The U.S. “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Iraqi urban centers during its subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003 dropped 3,000 bombs on civilian areas, killing over 7,000 noncombatants in the first two months of the war.
By one estimate, the U.S. has been responsible for directly or indirectly killing nearly 20 million people since the end of the Second World War.
Israel and Saudi Arabia are gangster states. But so is the United States.
“There are few of them,” Biden, reacting to Democratic lawmakers who have criticized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, told Israel’s Channel 12 news. “I think they’re wrong. I think they’re making a mistake. Israel is a democracy. Israel is our ally. Israel is a friend and I make no apologies.”
The angst about Biden’s not holding the Saudis and the Israelis to account on this visit is risible, as if we have any credibility left that allows us to arbitrate between right and wrong.
The idea that Biden and the U.S. are brokers for peace was eviscerated long ago. The U.S. offers shameless support for Israel’s right-wing government, including vetoing U.N. resolutions that censor Israel.
It refuses to condition aid on a respect for human rights even as Israel launches repeated murderous assaults against the civilian population in Gaza, labels Palestinian NGOs as terror groups, expands illegal Jewish-only settlements, carries out aggressive housing evictions of Palestinian families and mistreats Palestinian and Arab-American citizens at points of entry and within the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The idea that the U.S. represents and promotes virtue illustrates the self-delusion that accompanies America’s moral and physical degeneration. The rest of the world, which recoils in repugnance at what the U.S. has become, does not take it seriously. They fear U.S. bombs. But fear is not respect.
They no longer envy America’s hedonistic mass culture, tarnished by mass shootings, social inequality, the decay of infrastructure, dysfunction and a Grand Guignol-style of politics that has turned civil and political discourse into a tawdry burlesque.
America is a grim joke, one about to be made worse when the Christian fascists, bigots and conspiracy theorists take control of Congress in the fall, and I expect, the presidency two years later.
The U.S., along with Israel, makes war on Muslims who, with an estimated 1.9 billion adherents, comprise nearly 25 percent of the world population. The U.S. has turned many in the Muslim world into its enemies. The Muslim world does not hate the U.S. for its values. It hates its hypocrisy. It hates its racism, its refusal to honor their political aspirations, its lethal attacks and military occupations and its crippling sanctions.
Muslims express the rage felt by Guatemalans, Cubans, Congolese, Brazilians, Argentines, Indonesians, Panamanians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Filipinos, North and South Koreans, Chileans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans – those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” They too were slaughtered by the U.S. high-tech military machine and subjugated, humiliated, forced to accept U.S. hegemony and killed in American clandestine torture centers or by C.I.A.-backed assassins.
No one is held accountable. The C.I.A. blocked all investigations into its torture program, including destroying videotape evidence of interrogations involving torture and classifying nearly all of the 6,900-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that examined the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 program of detention, torture and other abuse of detainees.
Biden goes to Saudi Arabia and Israel as a supplicant. As a presidential candidate, he called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and vowed to make it “pay the price” for Khashoggi’s murder.
But with the rising price of oil, Biden is whitewashing the murder, along with the humanitarian disaster the Saudis have caused in Yemen, imploring the Saudis to increase output, a plea Prince Salman has rejected.
Similarly, Biden is weak in Israel, powerless against the expansion of Jewish settlements and assaults on Palestinians, and unwilling to move the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, a move by the Trump administration that violates international law.
Biden’s staff was reduced to pleading with the Israelis not to embarrass him as they did during his 2010 visit as vice president. During his 2010 visit, Israel announced it was building 1,600 new Jewish-only houses in illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. The Obama White House angrily condemned “the substance and timing of the announcement.”
How can the U.S. bar Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from a summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and embrace the Saudi regime and the Israeli aparatheid state? How can it decry the war crimes of Russia and unleash industrial violence on the Mulism world?
How can it plead for the 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, and ignore the Palestinians? How can it justify another “preemptive war,” this time against Iran?
The duplicity is not lost on most of the world. They know who the U.S. is. They know that in American eyes they are unworthy. The inevitable demise of the U.S. on the world stage is cheered by the majority of the planet. The tragedy is that, as it goes down, it is determined to take so many others down with it.
AUTHOR’S NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
When will our champions of journalism, such as you Mr. Hedges, really take a good look at the Israeli, not the Saudi connections to the attacks of September 11th. The lease holder of the World Trade Center, which was privatized just months before the attacks in a deal by friend of Israel Max Greenberg and fighter for Israel’s establishment Frank Lowey, Larry Silverstein had Sunday phone calls with his dear friend Bibi. Lucky Larry invested a mere $14 million to reap his almost $4 Billion return, after insuring each tower for seperate terror attacks, and suing both airlines. Funny how Lucky Larry didn’t have his breakfast on the Top of the World like he did every other morning. He just happened to have a skin doctor’s appointment that day…some guys have all the luck. Who benefits? This is the first question in any crime investigation. Bibi boasted a few months after the attacks, ‘we are benefiting from one thing, the attacks on New York and the Pentagon’. Also, who had the means, motive and opportunity? As with JFK, everyone wanted the Towers to come down. And so they did. (Source: wikispooks 9/11- Israel Did it)
Starting a war with Iran would devastate the oil supply and wreck what is left of the Biden economy. Could he or the people pulling his strings be that bereft?
I wonder if some kind of war with Iran would be considered part of u.S. “constabular duties… to shape the security environment in key regions of the world”? That’s per the Project for a New American Century study called Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Or maybe an Iran conflict would count towards another primary goal (outlined in the same study) of “developing capacity to fight multiple, simultaneous, major theater wars”?
All that plus much more in the neocon playbook dating back to Sept. of 2000 on how to maintain sole superpower status as the world’s preeminent military force: Maintaining nuclear superiority (hello, Obama’s trillion dollar nuclear upgrade); redeploying forces to Southeast Europe and Asia (hello, Obama’s Asian pivot plus NATO’s eastward advance toward Russia); developing global missile defenses (check); controlling space & cyberspace (hello, Space Force) & continuously increasing defense budgets (check).
Some might say the study is defunct & PNAC no longer exists. Why should it when its goals are so thoroughly internalized in ongoing u.S. military policy?
As to what a war against Iran bythe trio of US,/Israeli and Saudi I see much more than three(3) belligerantsI would add in Egypt, Jordan, all of UAE possibly France, and military from Columbia, and El Salador with a few smaller nations adding minor aid as well.
Australia is chomping for war, Brits willbgadly add troop, planes and armor.
Jordan has a special NATO designation and now have a very large NATO/US air infantry helicopters and VTOL pads, airstrip and supply depots.
A massive First Strike against Iran by all and not just conventional but tactical nukes that estimates place Israel with max of 200.
Timing, there would notbe one attack,wait a bit then another, no it would be at least a 72 hours of constant hell; take a look and clean out least vintages of Iran military and infrastructure.
The threat of Iran is and always has been if even a moderate attack such as we see in Ukraine AND OF OLD IN Iraq and Afghanista, Iran at first will immediately strike with every weaponn they have and not stop until they run out of firepower.
It has but conventional weaponry atop their missles,.a nd they are not all accurate.
Iran could launch 7 or 8 maybe 10,000 such warheads and not destroy Israel.Iran air be gone inbfirst few hours and it’s thousands of boats could only find a hundred or two targets as an inshore Naval fleet, not an open sea at all.
It will be a short and sweet war with genocidal effects.
Iran two manpower are large but no one will see need to boots on ground and any mass of troop would be eliminated. By tactical nukes, yes eliminated completely.
I know an Iranian immigrant who travels back twice a year. She says the people of Iran say the assassination of the Iranian General Soleimani was ordered by the the President of Iran, as he was fearful of this general overthrowing him due his increasing power. He asked Trump to kill this general and then stage a weak missile retaliation on the US forces that did little. Once this was over , there was a reduction of US sanctions on Iran which went unreported by Western media.
Iran has applied to be a BRICS member. That is, I believe, the reason the US wants to go to war with Iran – that is kill millions of innocent Iranian men, women and children.
Why will things be “much worse” if we see a Republican in the White House in 2024?
Trump managed four years in office without starting a new shooting war. Biden has got us in a proxy war wirh Russia, the stupidest act of any US president in my lifetime. Now he’s gunning for Iran.
Can we please accept that the Repugs are to the left of the Dems on foreign policy and that Republican victories in 2022 and 2024 may be a good thing, at least as far as avoiding nuclear armageddon is concerned?
I don’t know if things will be worse if Trump gets back in the White House in 2024, but they probably won’t get better. It’s not like Trump didn’t try to get us in a shooting war, with tearing up the JCPOA and the assassination of Solemani. He also started sending weapons to Ukraine.
There is no Democrat or Republican Foreign Policy, it’s all the same policy with some cosmetic variations.
BAZINGA!?
Hopefully, Israelis know that in the long run, there are three consequential nations in their neighborhood they must account for: Turkey, Egypt and Iran. To make one of the three, especially the one most likely to be a long term friend due to cultural affinities (if current imperial currents could be passed), would be idiotic.
An attack on Iran would be unforgivable and unforgiven by future Iranian generations and would be the one sure way to force them to commit to nuclear weapon development, which Iran has avoided thus far. This is a part of the world with long memories. Israel’s leaders don’t seem like fools to me so I think/hope this is merely further sabre rattling and pressure.
Iran does not need nuclear weapons. Consider the high possibility that they have unstoppable hyper-sonic missiles from Russia or China. Israel will buried in its own nuclear dust.
The world lives in constant fear of U.S. retaliation. If Saudi Arabia pisses off Washington too much, the U.S. government will simply order their military to seize Saudi oil fields. If Canada even proposed reducing its oil production to save the planet, “regime change” would follow immediately. If Venezuela made an agreement to allow China to have a small naval base in Venezuela in return for building and expanding vital infrastructure programs, the U.S. would invade.
This all comes down to the inability of average Americans to rein in their pro-war government. When it comes to supporting apartheid in Israel, ending the Saudi genocide in Yemen or defunding the Nazis in the Ukraine, the American public is not even consulted as corporate America believes they can sell Americans whatever falsehood they want with their iron grip on the mainstream media. Every MSM outlet frames every argument between the Democrats and the Republicans even though the vast majority of Americans despise both Party’s for an endless litany of broken promises. From universal healthcare to defunding the military and from cancelling student debt or raising the minimum wage, the oligarchs of Wall Street refuse to allow even a smidgeon of democracy in the federal government. In rare moments when an American votes for a non-corporate candidate who is not associated with he right wing Democrats or Republicans, the voter is “shamed” by corporate media for producing yet another ‘monster’ (i.e Trump, Biden, Bush) by tipping the scales in a rigged election. The ‘lessor of two evils” is the only tool left to drag people to voting stations on Election Day and too many fall into the trap set up by the MSM’s campaign of endless disinformation.
The “Great Awakening”, the moment when a majority of Americans finally realize that both corporate Party’s and their corrupt system must be permanently retired may be coming, but with global warming requiring an immediate solution and with a nuclear war becoming a real possibility, we may not even have a planet left to govern in our lifetime.
“The United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia are plotting a war with Iran.” AND, Joey’s up @ bat, “The wars they will be fought again. The holy dove, she will be caught again. Bought and sold; and, bought again. The dove is never free.”
Therefore, The $how, “A Parasite Cannot Live Alone,” rolls on! “A C T I O N!” Take, One: Joey “the Grim Reaper” Biden posing as POTUS masquerading as Human, reveling in the spotlight, meets & greets Jamal Khasoggi’s Assassin, Mohammed bin Salman aka MBS w/a ….. “you know the thing.”
Take, Two: An “Open Door” meeting behind Closed Doors. POTUS exits, the same way he went in, w/o a Soul. W/o Genuine Empathy. W/o a Plan for Peace. Hate. Hate. Hate; and, War, is all POTUS’ got!
Take Three: “Color it G R I M!” Hedges “got” GRIM, d o w n pat: “The idea that Biden and the U.S. are brokers for peace was eviscerated long ago.”
It’s a Wrap. “We” will NOT be rendered unconscious with Biden’s-Harris’ “chloroform.” “The idea that the U.S. represents and promotes virtue illustrates the self-delusion that accompanies America’s moral and physical degeneration. The rest of the world, which recoils in repugnance at what the U.S. has become, does not take it seriously. They fear U.S. bombs. But fear is not respect.” (Chris Hedges).
“I can’t run no more, with that lawless crowd. While the killers in high places say their prayers out loud. But, they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up a thundercloud. They’re going to hear from me. Ring the bells that still can ring.” (Anthem, Leonard Cohen)
TY, Chris Hedges, Mr. Fish, CN, et al…”KEEP IT LIT!”
I am almost in despair when I see what Biden is doing, and not doing. Why the heck do we support these tyrannies? Why are we so opposed to peace and the rule of law? This empire cannot die too soon for me. I just hope the people who live in it will be okay. For the most part, they don’t even know what’s being done in their names. They don’t know for many reasons, but one is that, as often as not, they are not told.
“Israel is a democracy.”
Israel is not a democracy, it is a theocracy – more accurately, it is an apartheid theocracy.
“Israel is a friend.”
Israel is no one’s friend Israel’s only friend is Israel.
Biden is “powerless” to stop Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians because he chooses to be powerless. Cutting off all US aid to Israel would change its behavior. Unfortunately, neither political party has the backbone or the desire to do that. This is just another example of US duplicity and hypocrisy.
“The duplicity is not lost on most of the world. ”
And it is not lost on KSA. Freezing hundreds of billion in accounts and hunting the properties of “billionaires connected to the regime” may happen to KSA, UAE etc. too, and Trump threatened Iraq in that way already. Are there any limits on USA led banking terrorism and blackmail? In that context, vilification of KSA in which Biden indulged is ominous.
For this reason, oil prices go down without help from KSA and other OPEC countries in a standard way: the specter of recession, probably more than a mere specter.
On domestic side in USA, millions of American women lost their right to safe and reasonably priced abortion. SCOTUS was packed with conservatives for years, but there was a concern among highly political conservative judges that the backlash from revoking this right could hurt GOP. Now inflation is the top concern, Democrats will take the blame, and pocketbook issues are swaying the independents. Congress will safely go to GOP this Fall. Of course, the genius of manipulating Biden into presidency when he is well past his “best if used before” date will backfire too.
I am somewhat sanguine about prospects of war with Iran and “$500 oil”. At some point, folks will have trouble with food bills and will have to economize on gasoline, factories will start to shut down etc., and in Europe, we are past that point already. There was strong market resistance at $150 before… But the recession may be savage, so it is indeed an economic, political and strategic suicide. One could hope that better folks will pick up the pieces, but for every FDR there are several less attractive figures too.
Larry Johnson just amplified some of your theses on REDACTED: hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5s-73H2aMI
Good luck with all the $$ concerns. I just learned, after $100s of un-covered Medicare tests, that the ‘fact’ of ‘cryptic cirrhosis’ was only a false hypothesis. So I’ll be around for a while to continue to bother everybody….
Will chip in a variant on the Jake Sullivan ‘drone’ BS. A PERSONALS ad, let’s say in Jerusalem Post. ‘Nice Jewish boy ISO new country. Might have betrayed the Boss, and/or paved the way to Har Megiddo. But….’
Netenyahu has been ranting ” Nuclear Iran ” since 1994….By Deception we shall wage war
Iran isn’t Iraq. Russia sold them Yakont anti ship missiles. Mach 3. My company invented the The Aegis Combat System.
Putin will nuke Tel Aviv and go back to bed.
so in essence, the real “Axis Of Evil” as far as most of humanity are concerned is the U>S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Hedges, if the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia start the war that you say they have planned (and I have no reason to doubt you or trust them), a war that will immediately escalate into a worldwide conflict dragging China, Russia, Iran and the USA all into the milieu, it will be just as much a war against the average working/middle class civilian of every industrialized state in the world from Lisbon to Vladivostok and from Stockholm to Sri Lanka, since it will instantly destroy the economies of all those countries throughout all Eurasia and the Americas, as well as their sources of or essentials to produce food, water, medicines, transportation, petrol, heating oil, mass communications, electrical power and all else moved via supply chains essential to free markets and open commerce. Plus all these countries will start to incur battle damage, loss of housing, manufacturing facilities, essential infrastructure and “collateral” deaths from attacks and invasions both deliberate and fortuitous. Millions will die, become maimed, homeless and deathly ill from such actions. It will become the ultimate crime against a humanity that will be largely wiped out, if not exterminated, should nuclear weapons be employed. Remember the percentage of deaths during WWII, a war that was still nearly entirely “conventional,” in places like Russia, China and Poland.
Frankly, I see nothing in the body of logic or what passes for an honor code by the United States, Israel or Saudi Arabia to preclude such an eventuality. The leaderships of all these virtual military dictatorships are so full of unwarranted arrogance and pompous self-righteousness that they are incapable of ever backing off or standing down and entirely capable of justifying anything they might do, including global genocide using nuclear weapons. How ironic that will be when America destroys the world with nukes in order to prevent Iran from acquiring its own nukes to protect itself from America and its thuggish allies, an acquisition that could have been easily precluded, just as the war in Ukraine could have been precluded with the right fair and just peace agreements acceded to by Washington. Only Washington’s unbounded hubris and lust for power, wealth and absolute control prevents this.
It’s clear there will be war with Iran, part of the move towards world war: the West facing a Sino-Russian front. Humanity managed to avoid nuclear holocaust for half a century. But eventually every empire gets the war it is trying to avoid. The warning from history that the powers do not heed. Read more, search:
A free ebook: The Pattern Of History and Fate of Humanity
I believe Iran has applied to be a BRICS member. That makes a Russia/China intervention possible. China would not be happy over an attack on Iran, which supplies a good percentage of its oil. Such a move would be highly irrational, but then, that is what is going for foreign policy these days.
BRICS is NOT a defensive organisation but an ECONOMIC one. So how someone can think otherwise is beyond my understanding. Funny too, how these days so many people automaticly expect Russia and China to step in and do their dirty work. How many of these countries expecting such an outcome, are supporting Russia and China in their times of need ??????? Quite simply, it has been said many times in the past, “if your not prepared to FIGHT, to preserve what you have, you deserve to lose it”, and so it will be.
All of these things are happening under the so called “international rules based order” which stands in stark contrast to international law.
Chris, didn’t America’s neocons, now running the government, say
that “real men go to Iran”?
America’s war pathology deepens with its Middle East alliances,
“slice’n dice” journalists Saudi Arabia, and Israel’s apostasy.
Worse, Iran can’t fight back against the triad of evil, it will be
bombed into a failed state, left powerless to compete with Israeli power.
That would leave Israel to freely pursue thier stated goal of expanding to Euphrates river. This scenario predicted 1,400 years ago is coming true in front of our eyes..
The new Saudi open skies agreement announced by Biden allowing Israel to overfly Saudi Arabia is a guaranteed the Israelis military will attack Iran this autumn or winter, thereby throwing the world into the deepest economic turmoil it has ever experienced as Middle East oil supplies halt.
The Saudi have agreed to an open skies policy that now permits Israeli aircraft to fly in Saudi space. They say this just involves civilian aircraft but likely means Israeli jets will be allowed to fly through Saudi airspace to attack Iranian nuclear sites, and thus lead to a big war that will halt Middle East oil supplies from reaching the rest of the world, thereby causing not only big battle casualties on all sides, but pushing global economies into an economic depression the likes of which have not been seen before. And you can bet the Israeli air force and military is eager to attack and this new Saudi open skies policy is seen as their green light to attack, possibly just about the time the Northern Hemisphere enters late autumn and early winter when fossil fuels are in most demand: open skies to war.