The US doesn’t benefit from a war with Iran in any way, but you know who does?
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/tarik-cyril-amar/
ByTarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/tarik-cyril-amar/@tarikcyrilamartarikcyrilamar.substack.comtarikcyrilamar.com
© Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Israel and its US auxiliaries have attacked Iran.
In terms of international law and elementary justice, things are clear
beyond the slightest doubt: the attack is a war of aggression – but to
be fair, in Israel’s case that hardly makes a difference anymore.
With ‘highlights’ including apartheid, ethnic cleansing, unlawful detention, torture, sexual violence, and genocide, Israel has such an extensive and constantly growing record of, literally, every
crime under international law, including human-rights and humanitarian
law (or the law of armed conflict), that one more or less hardly seems
to matter anymore. This state is a monster, and monsters will monster as
long as they can.
The US, of course, is no spring chicken either
when it comes to treating international law – really, any law – as a
doormat and brutally, gleefully violating the most basic ethics, the
kind of simple rules normal people intuitively recognize, such as “don’t murder, lie, or steal.”
Indeed, while Israel can easily claim to be the single most criminal, indeed evil country in the world, the US wins the most-powerful-rogue-state
prize hands down. There is – empirically, quantifiably – no other
country that combines such ingrained and increasingly explicit scorn for
law and morality with such brute power and perpetual violence. Before
the current assault on Iran, the kidnapping of Venezuelan President
Nicolas Maduro was just the last proof of that fact, so glaringly
obvious that it woke up even some Western commentators.
If some things are too obvious to merit further discussion, others
are more intriguing. Let’s start with the greatest mystery: Why is the
US joining – really, obeying – Israel and its powerful American lobby
once again in going to war in the Middle East? Was Iraq 2003 not enough
of a disaster? Are the American elites really congenitally unable to
learn?
In terms of actual US interests, war against Iran makes no
sense at all. Iran is not close to a nuclear bomb and, as a matter of
fact, has a religiously and ethically based (hard to grasp in
Washington, I know) explicit policy against acquiring one. And even if Iran were building such weapons or seeking a state of being “latently”
able to do so as urgently needed insurance against permanent Israeli
and US aggression, Washington would gain nothing and risk very much by
going to war.
On the other hand, it was precisely the JCPOA
agreement with Iran, destroyed by the US during the first Trump
presidency, that proved empirically that the issue of Iranian nuclear
energy use can be resolved well by compromise. As to recent, hysterical
US claims about other types of WMDs and “intercontinental missiles,” it is time to no longer give such crude, dumb lies the time of day. Enough with the propaganda already.
Regime change? So, please could someone explain why installing a washed-out Pahlavi princeling
– if it ever were to work, that is – in Tehran is good for Americans?
Spoiler, no one can. At least not honestly. Do I hear someone say
geopolitics? Oh, that would mean the “genius” geopolitics of
risking a long war with great damage to the US and its regional allies?
Then, perhaps it’s all about plunder? Yes, true, the US simply loves
plundering. Historically speaking, the whole country is built on it,
just like Israel. But even plunder on its own despicable terms only
makes sense if you turn a profit. Good luck with that while sinking more
gazillions into war-for-Israel.
And that brings us to the only explanation that does make sense, even
if in a very grim way: The US, as in almost all Americans, has zero
interest in war with Iran. As little as in a proxy war with Russia and a
Cold War with China, both strategies, by the way, doomed to fail. In
all three cases, the vast majority of Americans would only stand to
benefit from peaceful and cooperative relationships.
But
Washington chooses permanent conflict and war against Iran anyhow. The
reason is that US policy in the Middle East – and not only – has been
captured by Israel and its lobby. As John Mearsheimer, both doyen of
explaining international relations by national interests (the theory of
Realism) and co-author of the standard work on the Israel Lobby, has long acknowledged,
Israel’s influence on the US is real, contradicts American interests,
and forms an exception to the theory of realism in that Washington is
constantly hurting its own country.
For reasonable observers, this
case is closed. When devastating the Middle East, the US is acting not
in its own genuine national interest but the perverse conception that
Israel has of its national interest: subjugating and, if
needed, destroying all sovereign states in its neighborhood so as to
create and preserve Israeli domination and even ‘Greater Israel’, a nightmare of ‘Lebensraum’ for Zionist settlers from, at least, Egypt to Iraq.
But,
again, why? This is where the Epstein scandal makes a difference – or
should do so – to unbiased minds. We must acknowledge that Jeffrey
Epstein was not “merely” a very rich and perverse criminal with far too many friends in high places but an agent of Israel,
whether with a direct affiliation to its dreaded Mossad service of
spying, murder, and subversion or not. His core operation served to
gather extremely compromising blackmail material on large swathes of the
elites of the US and the West more generally. FBI agents, we now know,
assessed that Trump himself
is among those trapped in this manner. If anything, frantic – and also,
again, criminal, efforts – by Trump’s Department of Justice and his
head of the FBI to purge the files of references to the current
president and his friends only provide further corroborating evidence
that Trump is under Israel’s control.
Remember ‘Russiagate’ (really, of course, Russia Rage)? The irony!
Russia was never remotely close to (or even trying) to having a US
president under its thumb. That was all BS. Yet, in the end,
‘Russiagate’ did do two things: it gave Trump a (fundamentally realistic
if exaggerated) sense of having been a victim of a smear campaign and,
among voters, it helped Trump make his furious comeback, without which
he would not now be in power. The delusion and mass hysteria of
‘Russiagate’ – which was that famous American thing, a nothing-burger –
paved the way for the power that really controls Trump and really does
enormous damage to America: Israel and its lobby.
Will Americans
ever free themselves from the one state and network that have really run
history’s most successful subversion and state-capture operation on
them? Who knows? We know that it would take more than putting an end to
Epstein-like blackmail. If anything, Trump’s bitter enemies, Joe Biden
and Kamala Harris, have only recently shown us that the American “elite”
is enthralled to Israel and its crimes also for reasons ranging from
being bribed to sharing the vile insanity of Zionism. If the US ever
wants its independence back from Israel, all of that will have to go.