War with Iran YES/NO

A debate has broken out in the shadow blogo-video-sphere over whether the U.S. and Israel are/are not headed for a shooting—or, more accurately, bombing—war with Iran.

On the NO side, experts point to the multiple reasons why neither side should want a major blow-up in West Asia.

—Iran has steadfastly avoided war despite repeated provocations. Its economy is in the crapper already,  and the Iranian leadership knows the terrible destruction a full-scale attack could inflict on the country. 

—The U.S. under the new regime is trying to get out of one war and hardly needs another. The economic fallout of a disruption of Middle East oil supplies is scarcely imaginable. 

—Despite hot-headed rhetoric on both sides, diplomatic feelers are being extended, according to consistent reports (including from Steve Witkoff, Trump’s personal envoy). Trump’s bombast is so familiar that people tend to dismiss it as carnival barking. Iran’s head mullah is dismissive but always leaves the door slightly ajar. 

—Russia and China absolutely do not want a blow-up, which would cause them great harm. China would face severe energy shortages without its supplies from the Gulf. Its brokering of the 2023 Saudi-Iranian reconciliation was designed to cool everyone’s jets for the same reason. War is the last thing they want. 

Noteworthy among all these reasonable arguments is the fact that they are, well, reasonable. Since when has reason played a leading role in our world and especially that part of it? Much more dominant are zealotry, sectarian rage, imperial meddling, and plain bloody-mindedness.

Trump already has started his own personal war, the one in Yemen, that he promises will last “a long time.”  The Signalgate kerfluffle around the stupid leaking of real-time war plans to a reporter obscures the more important fact that once again the U.S. has embarked on an undeclared war. 

For decades Iran has been the prize boogeyman and target of the U.S. neocon cabal and their Israeli buddies. Gen. Wesley Clark told a now-notorious story in his memoirs about being shown secret Pentagon war plans to attack seven Muslim states in the region after 9/11: Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan. A quick review of the list shows that at least five of these planned wars have occurred. (Sudan is locked in a civil war, so maybe that counts as well.) Why not go 7 for 7?

Israel’s enemy countries list always featured Iran above all others. Many war-loving officials in both Washington and Jerusalem think this is their big chance.

Religious fervor doesn’t intersect with prudent decision-making. Trump’s considerable base among Christian fanatics think wars in Israel will usher in the Apocalypse, the return of Jesus Christ, and the Rapture. If you see piles of unattended clothes scattered in the streets, it’s time to convert! 

Israel has its own religious nutbags. According to former U.K. diplomat Alistair Crooke, many Israelis believe world Jewry must suffer through severe tribulations before the Messiah touches down. War with Iran fits their eschatological worldview. 

Sober thinking about what might be in a country’s self-interest presumes facts not in evidence—that people aren’t drunk on their belief systems. Overheated rhetoric emanating from the White House could be “good television,” as Trump likes to say. Or, it could be taken seriously with drastic consequences. Some historians think Egyptian President Nasser’s florid rhetoric provided Israel with the needed excuse for the 1967 attack that redrew the region’s boundaries.

Wars often start from accidental triggers, lit matches tossed onto dry kindling. That’s why real diplomats worry about things like military buildups on sensitive borders, cheap verbal belligerence, or reneging on agreed deals. Provocative military preparations and demagogically ratcheting up tensions to play to the domestic audience can unintentionally spark fanatics on either side to take fateful steps that unleash real shit.

We can think that cautious heads will prevail, but there's no guarantee of that. Bluster and public wand-waxing are great fun as long as there are no consequences, but they prepare the ground for nasty surprises. And wars are much easier to start than to stop.

Many experts agree with former Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar that “talk of a US-Iran war is all a load of baloney.” How many deadly wars have been preceded by just such confident dismissals?

 

The Ukraine delusions finally dissipate

While it’s premature to announce the end of hostilities in Ukraine, some important changes are afoot.

Trump has decided to reopen lines of communication with Russia given that it remains a nuclear power. In the bad old Cold War days, our leaders thought staying in touch to avoid ending life on earth was a prudent choice. That went out of style with Biden, but talking is back. Good.

Despite Trump’s usual gloating about his “highly productive” 90-minute phone call with Vladimir Putin—everything always goes great in Trumpland—, the two sides remain miles apart. Today’s preparatory meeting in Saudi Arabia will provide an opportunity shorten the distance. 

While the U.S. readout on the preceding phonecall highlighted Trump’s commitment to finding an end to the conflict in Ukraine, the Russians’ version displayed no particular urgency on that topic and instead drew attention to what it called the root causes of the conflict.

While Russia welcomed the open channel of communication that ended 3 years of silence, its statement emphasized the barriers to healthy interstate relations inherited from the previous US administration with particular attention to the seizure of Russian diplomatic properties by Obama. For them, Ukraine is only one of several key international issues, including developments in Palestine. Ouch.

The Russians also made a point of noting that the call came at the initiative of the American side. This is a standard diplomatic signal to reflect frigidity that says, “You guys—not us—needed to talk. So, wazzup?”

The Russians also added a telling paragraph at the end of their statement: “The U.S. President assured the President of Russia of the American side’s commitment to fulfill all the agreements reached.” English translation: Why should we believe anything you say since you constantly renege on every promise? (Minsk I, Minsk II, the ABM treaty, the INF treaty, and—let’s go back further—the solemn assurances of no NATO expansion offered 3 decades ago).

What can we expect of the talks about Ukraine at this point? Much ink has been spilled over various statements and speeches by U.S. officials that included serious canings of the Europeans. Defense Secretary Hegseth dropped the first bomb at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, informing them that Ukraine’s eastern provinces are lost for good, that there would be no U.S. peacekeeping troops anywhere near the place, and that they could forget about adding Ukraine to NATO. 

Although Hegseth was contradicted by others, VP Vance then showed up to bat the EU’s top leadership around like a whiffle ball. Although Vance didn’t say much about Ukraine, he pointedly questioned whether defending “democracy” against Russia included overturning an election result (in Romania) because the winner wasn’t the EU’s favorite.

Russia isn’t a threat to Europe, Vance told them MAGA-style. You yourselves are, abortion, immigrants, blah blah. He then had a meeting with the right-wing party standing in Germany’s imminent elections, demonstrating once again that the U.S. will intervene in other people’s elections, but don’t interfere in ours.

Americans can indulge in arrogant sermons in front of their vassal subalterns like France and Germany, but chest-thrusting is not going to work so well in the upcoming chats with the Russkies. After 3 years of war and roughly 100,000 dead soldiers, the Russian diplomats will reflect their country’s mood, which is not a forgiving one. Talk of a ceasefire in place so that Ukraine can rearm and restart the fighting in a few years will go nowhere.

It's not at all clear whether the Trump people have access to accurate information about what has been happening on the ground in the Ukraine given the blockade of any dissident views on the topic in our media landscape and, presumably, within the walls of the state itself. Trump himself parroted some foolishness about casualty numbers, probably fed to him by professional liars at the CIA or even directly from Ukrainian cartoonists. Maybe Tulsi Gabbard will make sure he gets some facts.

EU poohbahs are hopping mad about being left out of the talks, which was pretty clearly a condition of the Russians for having a meeting at all. That’s the meaning of the RF ministry’s statement on the call about “key international issues,” of which Ukraine is merely one. The Russians want to see progress on how to restructure the security environment on their western border, and they want to discuss it with the only player that really matters: the USA. The Europeans are spoilers. 

Europe hitched its wagon to the neocon vision of dealing Russia a strategic defeat, getting Putin ousted, and then carving up the remaining Russian assets in a rerun of the great fun they had in the post-Soviet period when Russian life expectancy plummeted and the West got rich along with the oligarchs.

Alexander Mercouris pointed out on his YouTube channel that he witnessed the glee with which the Europeans and Americans both saw the Ukraine war coming and could hardly wait to launch their inevitable victory over the “gas station parading as a country,” “Nigeria with snow,” etc.

We Americans are experts at selling a narrative, peddling emotionally persuasive versions of reality to sell products. Our politics are advertising battles to get people to feel good about a convincing story line, and we’re damn good at it. However, relying on expert messaging at the expense of facts has deeply corrupted our politics and our leadership.

We do such a good job at propaganda that we eventually convince ourselves that our visions have taken physical form. A future Ph.D. history student should dig into the archives and document how deeply convinced everyone was that the Ukrainians would make short work of the incompetent, backward, unmotivated, etc., Russian armed forces while the all-out assault on Russia’s economy would “turn the ruble into rubble” in Joe Biden’s memorable phrase. 

Reality is a bitch. Even Trump will have to deal with it.

Celebrating Ronald Reagan’s liberation of Auschwitz

It was exactly 80 years ago this week—HAHA, not really. But Reagan told the tale of his presence in the liberated camps so often that he probably convinced himself of it as lifelong mythmakers often do. When you bamboozle people for a living, it must get easier over the years.

But while the Americans were there to indulge their versions of history, the Russians again weren’t invited to the Auschwitz memorial even though Red Army troops liberated the place (not George C. Scott).

But that’s because Russia launched what we must always call its “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine 3 years ago out of unjustified squeamishness over NATO creeping eastward. No one understands why they’re so nervous about NATO even as the new head of EU foreign policy, Kaja Kallas from Lilliput, er Estonia, calls for Russia to be broken up into smaller pieces.

Nor should they worry about Chrysta Freeland close to taking over as PM of Canada. She’s the ex-foreign secretary whose grandfather was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator. We recall that Canada is the country where the entire parliament stood up to cheer a veteran of a Ukrainian Nazi brigade. 

Of course, we can’t criticize much since our entire Congress roared with approval not at a former fascist but an active-duty one just last year.

Speaking of that guy, Poland offered to suspend fulfillment of the ICJ arrest warrant on Benjamin Netanyahu so that today’s genocidaire extraordinaire could show up to the Auschwitz memorial to mock the dead. Turns out in our upside-down world it’s possible to express horror at a past slaughter while carrying out one of your own.

We don’t pay a lot of attention to how the other side views us. We should. It may come as a surprise to know that the Russians think World War 2 hasn’t yet ended and that they’re now fighting clean-up battles against the Azov brigade and other 40s-nostalgic ideologues in Ukraine. The sight of German tanks heading toward Russia from the plains of Ukraine didn’t help.

Nor did the spectacle of German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock praising her active-duty Nazi soldier-grandpa at the Auschwitz memorial. 

In his usual sensitive way, Trump reinforced the insult by claiming that the USSR “helped us” win the war against the Nazis. Russians mostly think it was the other way around given the 11 million deaths of Red Army soldiers (plus 16 million Soviet civilians).

But the spirit of Ronald Reagan hovers above. Some of Trump’s incoming team remain trapped in Reaganite-Disney version of the battlefield in which just a few more armaments and a couple more forays will set things up for a Korean-style armistice and another 8 decades of hostilities on Russia’s western border. I guess Fantasyland has all the best rides, but those tickets cost a lot. 

Helping Ukraine get a foothold in pre-2014 Russian territory via the Kursk incursion hasn’t worked out so well given the estimated 55,000 Ukrainian dead on that front alone (almost exactly the total U.S. deaths in Vietnam over a decade). The attempt to carry the war to Russian lands is ending in defeat, but Trump’s people think the next attempt will succeed at last. Then we can all go on Space Mountain!

Trump also threatened more sanctions to wreck the Russian economy even though the first 12 rounds didn’t. Maybe he’ll include an import ban on the enriched uranium Russia supplies to U.S. nuclear power plants—that should hurt somebody. The Russians are unlikely to weep over the remaining $3 billion of annual commerce with the U.S. (down from $35 billion in 2021). 

Soviet Marshall Zhukov made a famous wisecrack after leading the Red Army's destruction of the Nazi regime: "We liberated Europe from fascism, and they will never forgive us." Given the record of the last 80 years, he wasn't far off. 

Will Russia be worried at the prospect of more U.S./NATO weapons supplies to sustain the Ukrainian army now that it’s lowering the draft age to 18? In any case, those kids will have plenty of training time since the shipments won’t be ready until somebody figures out how to produces it. Since the U.S. industrial base was shipped off to China and other cheap-labor countries since the 1980s, Ukraine will have to hold off Russian advances until someone scrambles it back together.

Yeah, sorry, the war is lost. No wonder Trump & Co. are starting to downplay it and subtly moving the whole business off the front pages. Maybe they'll pretend it never existed.

Years ago, Karl Rove said Republicans would reframe reality, and they did. We have the greatest fighting force in history, we defeated Nazi Germany in 1945, Ukraine will overthrow Putin, and nobody needed that Arctic ice sheet anyway. What’s important is that Americans feel good about themselves and stop apologizing. 

Reagan’s smiling belief in his own weird, private world is still the dominant political-informational mode we live under. You assert a thing, repeat it relentlessly, denounce nay-sayers, and little by little everyone gives in. Trump is the direct descendant of RR as the proud modern practitioner of the Make Shit Up style of governance. It works until it doesn't.

And now, back to Auschwitz to see how Private Reagan dismantled the gas chambers.

Should our presidents be nice?

 

Jimmy Carter was apparently a genuinely nice fellow.

Donald Trump isn’t famous for that. Neither was FDR.

In our media-mediated age, we’re taught to think that our leaders should be guys we’d fancy having a beer with. Or ladies. Hillary was dinged as unable to project empathy even though she liked to swill whiskey with army generals.

John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was said to do well because he wore workingman’s clothes and made voters feel they could “relate.”

For my part, I don’t relate to any of these guys and don't want to. In my old-fashioned way, I want them to do good things even if they’re raging assholes.

But let’s have a look at what nice President Carter did for us.

It’s easy to forget what a disaster Jimmy Carter’s presidency was and not for the reason given at the time--that he was too idealistic and therefore weak and let the Soviets and the Iranians take advantage.

Carter wasn’t weak at all when it came to his policy goals, led (by the nose perhaps) by his eminence gris, the Russia-hating Polish immigrant Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski saw no evolutionary nuances in the Soviet system like the proponents of the Nixon-Kissinger détente did, and he set about dismantling it.

Carter did his bidding by signing off on support for Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan well before the Soviet invasion (with some unfortunate boomerang results).

He also dug in with the Shah of Iran while ignoring reports that the shah’s rule was shaky. He ignored further advice not to admit the shah into the U.S. after his overthrow, leading directly to the hostage crisis that collapsed his presidency.

Carter had a star turn as a peacemaker between Israel and Egypt culminating in the Camp David Accords. That set the stage for further Israeli intransigence and gleeful destruction of the Palestinians.

Carter had nothing to say about the relentless Israeli settler project, which led to the hardening of  Israel's colonizing ambitions since it no longer had to worry about 100 million Egyptians on its borders. In addition, as Michael K. Smith wrote in Counterpunch,

His much-praised Camp David accords were the death warrant for Lebanon as Israel was freed to concentrate undivided attention on a long-planned invasion across its northern border. It was this invasion (June 1982) that convinced Osama bin Laden that only mass murder of Americans could ever change U.S. foreign policy.

Fifty years later, we can see the outcome: Carter got the Nobel while undermining chances of a long-term peace. 

Of course, as an ex-president he did courageously denounce the Israeli state for practicing apartheid. Too bad he hadn't noticed when he could have done something about it. 

Like his “peacemaker” reputation, Carter also is remembered for highlighting “human rights” as a cornerstone of U.S. relations with the world. It’s easy to forget—or not know given our PR approach to history—that the U.S. had sunk into acute disrepute over its decade of atrocities in Vietnam and its shameless promotion of vicious military dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere. 

Carter, a nice fellow with a humanitarian impulse, was a convenient antidote for regaining the lost moral high ground.

As we have since seen, “human rights” was quickly turned into an excuse to continue America’s expeditionary imperialism. Convenient accusations of “human rights” abuse popped up anywhere the U.S. wanted to stage its next invasion.

We heard about Saddam Hussein’s crimes, Khaddafy’s brutality, and al-Assad’s nastiness just as the U.S. needed them demonized. If a foreign enemy had to be undermined or unseated, moralizing over “human rights” was ever-ready as a spearpoint.

Conversely, problems with “human rights” among our allies never quite made it to the front pages or the TV news segments. Even Saddam Hussein’s use of poison gas against his Kurdish population was excused while he fought a war against Iran, only to be resuscitated later when it was time to invade Iraq and restore “human rights.”

Carter chided Duvalier for his dictatorial rule in Haiti while deporting Haitian refugees back there. He winked at the South Korean military dictatorship and defended the CIA’s role in installing Chile’s Pinochet.

Nice Jimmy Carter could also launch the rollback of the New Deal that might have been resisted had some post-Nixon conservative attempted it too early. Under Carter, we had mass deregulation of a slew of industries including airlines, trucking, telecommunications, and railroads, ushering in the neoliberal era.

Carter delivered the goods for Wall Street though not quickly nor thoroughly enough and was shoved aside by the Reagan Revolution, which he arguably initiated.

It's true that Jimmy Carter did great things for world health, like eliminating guinea worm disease. He acted to protect the ozone layer by banning CFCs. Good! No doubt he thought the planet worth saving, and maybe you have to be kinda nice to feel that.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, isn’t likely to go down in history as nice, compassionate, humanitarian, or a fun guy on the next barstool. He’s an arrogant prick, a narcissistic scammer, and as empathetic as a scorpion in your shoe.

Maybe that’s why he could send his real estate buddy Steve Witkoff to Israel and tell Netanyahu that he didn’t give a rat’s ass whether it was the holy Shabat or Hallowe’en. I’m coming for your signature on this deal, said Witkoff, so get your inkstand out.

Would Kamala Harris have done anything like that? No. Is she nicer? Probably.

Who knows if this means the slaughter of Gazans will end or what new horror Trump’s Zionist billionaires has planned for them. For now, however, Trump turns out to be the lesser of two evils on genocide, and that’s true whether he or anyone around him is nice.

It’s time to put “niceness” to sleep as a political category, alongside “sincerity.” As my late friend Gabrielle always used to say, referring to her escape from the Nazis at age 14, “Hitler was sincere. So what?”