Think about this. There is no one in my life to whom I can say, "My God, isn't
this horrible!" Not that there's anyone in my life, exactly, but no one in my
family has even commented on what is going on. I suspect that they're typical.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, January 04, 2020 3:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: War With Iran
Our foreign policies in Iraq and Iran are very similar to the policies that led
up to WW I and WW II. If the American Empire and its supporters can jockey
events around to where the Empire can declare open war on Iran, it could well
signal the end of what we call, Western Civilization.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/4/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
War With Iran
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The assassination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the
head of Iran's elite Quds Force, near Baghdad's airport will ignite
widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who
form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias
and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East.
The existing mayhem, violence, failed states and war, the result of
nearly two decades of U.S. blunders and miscalculations in the region,
will become an even wider and more dangerous conflagration. The
consequences are ominous. Not only will the U.S. swiftly find itself
under siege in Iraq and perhaps driven out of the country-there is
only a paltry force of 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq, all U.S. citizens in
Iraq have been told to leave the country "immediately" and the embassy
and consular services have been closed-but the situation could also
draw us into a war directly with Iran. The American Empire, it seems,
will die not with a whimper but a bang.
The targeting of Soleimani, who was killed by a MQ-9 Reaper drone that
fired missiles into his convoy as he was leaving the Baghdad airport,
also took the life of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of
Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces,
along with other Iraqi Shiite militia leaders. The strike may
temporarily bolster the political fortunes of the two beleaguered
architects of the assassination, Donald Trump and Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is an act of imperial suicide by
the United States. There can be no positive outcome.
It opens up the possibility of an Armageddon-type scenario relished by
the lunatic fringes of the Christian right.
A war with Iran would see it use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship
missiles, mines and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of
Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20% of the world's oil supply. Oil
prices would double, perhaps triple, devastating the global economy.
The retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel, as well as on American
military installations in Iraq, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands,
of dead. The Shiites in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan,
would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The 2
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 turn in fury on us and our
dwindling allies. There would be an increase in terrorist attacks,
including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production
in the Persian Gulf. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would renew attacks on
northern Israel.
War with Iran would trigger a long and widening regional conflict
that, by the time it was done, would terminate the American Empire and
leave in its wake mounds of corpses and smoldering ruins. Let us hope
for a miracle to pull us back from this Dr. Strangelove self-immolation.
Iran, which has vowed "harsh retaliation," is already reeling under
the crippling economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration
when it unilaterally withdrew in 2018 from the Iranian nuclear arms
deal. Tensions in Iraq between the U.S. and the Shiite majority, at
the same time, have been escalating. On Dec. 27 Katyusha rockets were
fired at a military base in Kirkuk where U.S. forces are stationed. An
American civilian contractor was killed and several U.S. military personnel
were wounded. The U.S.
responded on Dec. 29 by bombing sites belonging to the Iranian-backed
Kataib Hezbollah militia. Two days later Iranian-backed militias
attacked the U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad, vandalizing and destroying parts of the building
and causing its closure. But this attack will soon look like child's play.
Iraq after our 2003 invasion and occupation has been destroyed as a
unified country. Its once-modern infrastructure is in ruins.
Electrical and water services are, at best, erratic. There is high
unemployment and discontent over widespread government corruption that
has led to bloody street protests. Warring militias and ethnic
factions have carved out competing and antagonistic enclaves. At the
same time, the war in Afghanistan is lost, as the Afghanistan Papers
published by The Washington Post detail. Libya is a failed state.
Yemen after five years of unrelenting Saudi airstrikes and a blockade
is enduring one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters. The
"moderate" rebels we funded and armed in Syria at a cost of $500
million, after instigating a lawless reign of terror, have been beaten
and driven out of the country. The monetary cost for this military
folly, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, is between
$5 trillion and $7 trillion.
So why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement
that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the
mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other jihadist groups,
including al-Qaida and Islamic State? Why shatter the de facto
alliance we have with Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why further
destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?
The generals and politicians who launched and prosecuted these wars
are not about to take the blame for the quagmires they created. They
need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The hundreds of thousands of dead and
maimed, including at least 200,000 civilians, and the millions driven
from their homes into displacement and refugee camps cannot, they
insist, be the result of our failed and misguided policies. The
proliferation of radical jihadist groups and militias, many of which
we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide
terrorist attacks, have to be someone else's fault. The generals, the
CIA, the private contractors and weapons manufacturers who have grown
rich off these conflicts, the politicians such as George W. Bush,
Barack Obama and Donald Trump, along with all the "experts" and
celebrity pundits who serve as cheerleaders for endless war, have
convinced themselves, and want to convince us, that Iran is
responsible for our catastrophe.
The chaos and instability we unleashed in the Middle East, especially
in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region.
Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its
mistake other than to attack Iran.
Trump and Netanyahu, as well as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman, are mired in scandal. They believe a new war would divert
attention from their foreign and domestic crises. But they have no
more rational strategy for war with Iran than they did for the wars in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria. European allies, whom Trump
alienated when he walked away from the Iranian nuclear agreement, will
not cooperate with Washington if the U.S.
goes to war with Iran. The Pentagon lacks the hundreds of thousands of
troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran. And the Trump
administration's view that the marginal and discredited Iranian
resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside
Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is seen by most Iranians as
composed of traitors, is a viable counterforce to the Iranian
government is ludicrous.
International law, along with the rights of 80 million people in Iran,
is ignored just as the rights of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The Iranians, whatever they feel
about their despotic regime, would not see the United States as allies
or liberators.
They do not want to be occupied. They would resist.
A war with Iran would be seen throughout the region as a war against
Shiism.
But these are calculations that the ideologues, who know little about
the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they
seek to dominate, cannot fathom. Attacking Iran would be no more
successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which
failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that
militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese.
What will happen if we begin to pound a country of 80 million people
whose land mass is three times the size of France?
The United States, like Israel, has become a pariah that shreds,
violates or absents itself from international law. We launch
preemptive wars, which under international law is defined as a "crime
of aggression," based on fabricated evidence. We, as citizens, must
hold our government accountable for these crimes. If we do not, we
will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that
would have terrifying consequences. It would be a world without
treaties, statutes and laws. It would be a world where any nation,
from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, would be able to
invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. Such a
new order would undo five decades of international cooperation-largely
put in place by the United States-and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare.
Diplomacy, broad cooperation, treaties and law, all the mechanisms
designed to civilize the global community, would be replaced by savagery.
Chris Hedges, an Arabic speaker, is a former Middle East bureau chief
for The New York Times. He spent seven years covering the region,
including Iran.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by
Rutgers.
Chris Hedges
