When Trust is Dead, Nothing Counts
The Israeli attack on Iran succeeded in deflecting world attention from the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The stories are utterly horrific, as those who try to follow this ghastly tragedy know only too well. Adding insult upon insult, cruelty upon cruelty the Israeli colonizers try to blame some of their murderous atrocities and those of the partly US-backed GHF forces on to gangs that they themselves help finance and profit from.
Hamas is clearly ready to “negotiate” but, as we have learned only too well from the saga of US “negotiations” with both Iran and with Ukraine, you cannot negotiate in emergency or in any situations with people who act in utterly bad faith and who are equally lacking in sufficient integrity for their word ever to be trusted. Yes, sure, sometimes it is a question of doing it anyway but insisting on “verification” of each parties’ compliance with the terms of agreement. But if there is no penalty for the side that violates the agreement, what’s the point?
We can rightly suspect that the numbers of dead in Gaza are far, far higher than simply the bodies that are recovered from buildings or the sites of massacres numbering as high as nearly 400,000 in the estimation of a recent university study of the decline in population of Gaza from before the conflict and now. The starving population is being squeezed into less than 20% of the original land of Gaza, forced to seek food from GHF-controlled food-distribution centers close to IDF positions and every day we receive stories of mass shootings of starving people attempting to obtain miserable rations from these killing fields.
It seems that either Israel is being allowed to proceed with the annihilation of two million people or to pushing them into Egypt without the consent or willingness of Egypt to receive them, where their fate will be equally dire.
There are no words to describe the callousness and selfisness of the Gulf States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey for their failure to take meaningful action against the imperial incubus (the US, Israel and, of course, imperial Britain) that is the ultimate culpable party for this depravity and catastrophe. Only the Houthis have stood up to the infernal imperial cabal, and with a great deal of credit.
There was a moment there, just a few days ago, when a ray of light appeared - the thought of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz in partnership with action from the Houthis to reassert their control over the Red Sea. I have every sympathy for the predicament of Iran, for the scale of their totally undeserved losses, but I have great, great fear that by ageeing to a ceasefire with an entity, the US and its vassal, Israel that is wholly, totally, perpetually incapable of integrity and trust, Iran has wasted an immensely important opportunity - has given Israel, on the ropes, a respite, a chance to rearm, a chance to cause ever further mischief and to continue to damn with impunity the Palestinian people.
The American action solved absolutely nothing. Iran retains its right and capacity to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes; its retains at least 20,000 ballistic missiles and probably more; its relations with Russia and China are certainly good enough so as to expect support in terms of air defense and other aid, provided Iran does not reach for a nuclear weapon. And this, by the way, is a measure of the short-term, selfish thinking on the part of Russia and China that they are perfectly OK with India, Pakistan, North Korea having nuclear weapons but not Iran - sorry, but the usefulness and integrity of that kind of calculus is now zero. Either there are no nuclear weapons, by far the most preferable direction, or everyone has them. There is no equality, no respect on the international plane in a world of nuclear hierarchies.
Not only was the American action ill-advised, not only did it violate international law - the law that our grandfathers fought and died for through two world wars - not only was it insanely duplicitous, not only did it kill the chance of diplomacy by killing diplomacy itself, not only did it seriously discredit the integrity of international regulatory institutions such as the IAEA for being wholly pliable Western spies within the UN system, not only was it ineffective, totally, in destroying Iranian capacity, and, even more so, bringing about regime change in Iran (which would have done what - sucked up to the genocidal monster that calls itself Israel?)…….Not only, but it has actually made things worse for itself by forcing Iran into the dark, where its secrets will not be exposed to the IAEA on behalf of Western and Israeli intelligence and, therefore, ensuring that Israel will continue to thrash around in a frenzy of self-inflicted panic until the war with Israel and, possibly, World War Three is resumed.
Nefariously pathetic as they are in their response to the Palestinian plight, the Gulf States at least have sufficient neurological energy to begin to worry that it is not Iran that is a “nuclear threat” to their safety but, of course, it is Israel and, behind Israel, the US and its flatulent vassals.
To put it bluntly, Iran, at this juncture needed to follow through and to force Russia and China to follow with it and to pursue victory in war not just for the permanent safety, dignity and prosperity of Iran, but also for the freedom of Palestine and the establishment of a state of Palestine, a war that would be victory for the BRICS and for the Global South/Global Majority. A threat of World War Three? Yes and whenever is there not this threat for so long as an imperial, pampered, entitled Western cabal lunges left and right in angry, wrathful defense of a wealth that was built upon the bodies of millions upon millions of slaves and coolies for the past five hundred years?
Western civilization? A good idea but…..
That is the background to the fawning and sychophancy that we saw in The Hague and the hailing by NATO’s leader Marc Rutte of the big “Daddy’ Trump and little Marc’s celebration of Daddy’s oh-so-immensely thrilling victory over Iran, and his stern warning to Ursula vondermentally Lying and his other little European toddlers that they must spend, spend, spend more on weapons (US weapons in the main, of course), so that Daddy can spend their pocket-money in bravely facing up to those annoying yellow people in the east who insist on making Big Daddy look like, well, rather non-serious trash.
So Zelenskiy didn’t get any money after all, although there’s quite a lot of seized Russian assets lying around to help him force Ukrainian girls aged 18-27 to stay in Ukraine so they, in turn, can run what is left of Ukraine’s economy or find space enough to die on the battlefields, while Zelenskiy fights his war to the last Ukrainian, and at the end of that war, Zelenskiy will go to the polls and find no voters still alive to vote either for or against him. He will, finally, be legitimate.
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