A Bad Idea Whose Time Should Never Come: A U.S. War on Iran |
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The U.S. and Israeli regime-change op in Iran flopped in January, to the shock of Washington and Jerusalem. Tehran was reportedly on the brink of executing over 800 traitors – CIA and Mossad spooks presumably – when Donald Trump claims to have stepped in and menaced the Iranians into ditching these plans. But, per Lawrence Wilkerson on Judging Freedom, Iran’s back is up against the wall. The Iranians know full well what the Western Empire just tried to do to them, and they also know that, under Trump, that Empire will try to do it again and again and again.
So this time it’s different. It’s worse. And one casualty, as Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu knows quite well, could be his country, because Iran has enough ballistic missile firepower to obliterate the postage-stamp-sized acreage of Israel. Perhaps with this in mind, Netanyahu recently indicated that maybe this assault on Iran wasn’t such a great idea. In short, he blinked. But bad things have a way of snowballing, and with an American armada pugnaciously steaming toward the Persian nation, this time the lousy momentum could be unstoppable.
What that means is lotsa U.S. navy ships get holes shot into them, multitudes of ordinary Iranians die, numerous U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf die, Israel gets wiped out and Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, tanking the West’s economy – and don’t think for a minute that that closure will stop Persian oil from flowing to China. It won’t. The closure will be selective. The current Iranian regime may not survive, but in all likelihood the country will: it will not be balkanized per the fever dreams of its Israeli adversaries. And it’s also likely that any replacement regime will still champion the Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese who resist Israeli domination.
‘“This isn’t about the nukes or the missile program. This is about regime change,’ said a former U.S. official,” Drop Site news reported January 30. “He told Drop Site that U.S. war planners envision attacks that........