There are good reasons why Iran won’t fold to U.S. extremism

By Martin Love

TEHRAN - President Donald Trump claims the vast Military Industrial Complex, otherwise known as the MIC, which has become everything Eisenhower in 1960 warned against, is somehow “pressuring” him in to war on Iran.

One would imagine, however, that it’s not so much the MIC (or the Pentagon per se), but rather malign if not psychopathic individuals in the administration like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton who have had the President’s ear for the past year who began with urging Trump to can the JCPOA and reimpose economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic, along with the Zionists who have been trying to drum up a U.S.-led war on Iran for decades.

 Additionally, there are figures like Patrick Shanahan, the acting “defense” secretary, who knows next to nothing about the military but quite a bit about corporations like Boeing which are part of the corporate gravy train standing to profit from military action anywhere. And even Bolton is apparently working out of the Pentagon mostly, not the White House, as National Security Advisor to Trump.

The provocations against Iran have become increasingly intense, and already there have been alleged attacks on an Aramco facility in Arabia and some damage to three ships in the Persian Gulf – attacks blamed on Iran. But even a moron knows, given history since the Vietnam War, that these are false flag ventures. The mere thought Iran, at this point, would be inviting U.S. military action has to be entirely unbelievable.

 Iran is postulating some kind of non-aggression pact between countries on the Persian Gulf, and Iran’s leadership has stated clearly that it does not want further hostilities with the U.S. And more importantly, on national television in the U.S., Trump has also stated he does not want to fight Iran, at least militarily. He seems largely opposed to stupid wars, including the war on Iraq in 2003 – perhaps the greatest single mistake since the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

But Trump is not all that attentive as any kind of chief executive and he has Bolton and others around who seems to exist for nothing but war, and to them it may not even matter where war may be – just that the U.S. is throwing its military power around and trying to prove forevermore that the U.S. is THE hegemon and intends to remain so.

 It really is a terrible situation for Trump, because if he wants to avoid igniting another war in the Mideast, he almost MUST fire both Pompeo and Bolton and this just for starters. And this was or is a real estate tycoon, and not a very good one with a trail of bankruptcies, who was alleged to be completely surprised that he won the 2016 election and may have not wanted the Presidency all that much given his lifelong primary interests around the accumulation of lucre and female “conquests” in or outside of marriage.

The fact is that if the U.S. bombs Iran, it won’t “work” if the expectation is that Iran is suddenly going to do whatever the warmongers want. Iran, it appears, is going to be well prepared and focused in retaliation, and will prove it if necessary. What then? A U.S. invasion of Iran? The U.S. public, one can be certain, won’t have it, nor will most of the rest of the world.

 The U.S. will NOT be able to muster, as it did almost 20 years ago with Iraq, any kind of remotely credible coalition, although its likely that the Saudis and the Zionists will be involved. An invasion of Iran, smart observers have noted, will end the U.S. role in future in the Middle East, and may even finish off the U.S. globally and destroy the so-called “empire” the U.S. has stitched together since World War 2. And one must not downplay Russian and Chinese pledges NOT to permit Iran to be destroyed.

On this latter possibility, that the U.S. could wreck itself, and on this alone, one has to wonder that some of Iran’s hardliners may not be entirely averse to a military tangle with the U.S., although they won’t likely do anything to provoke it directly, unless one imagines that defensive preparation is provocation. Indeed, it’s not difficult to put forward the notion that after almost 70 years of U.S. meddling or hostility to Iran, some Iranians might be willing to serve a sacrificial role to get the U.S. off Iran’s back once and for all time.

During the revolution in Iran 40 years ago, angry Iranians erected a poster in Tehran directed at the U.S. that read in English: “Vietnam wounded you; Iran will bury you!” Of course the warning was hyperbolic. Justifiably angry people anywhere tend to hyperbole. But consider:

A wise mother once told her several children: “If you catch a bird in your hands and grip it too hard to keep it (as the U.S. is trying to hold on to its worldwide hegemony), you will kill it. But if you let it fly free, it will probably fly back to your hands.” So now we see the U.S. doing everything possible (desperately) to maintain the economic and military disparities between itself and other nations.

 This is the primary objective behind American-instigated trade wars, economic sanctions and military threats wherever they have occurred. But screwing other nations is not a productive game longer term, and most of the world understands this. The best hope is that the people who make decisions in Washington wise up. Meanwhile, let’s also hope Iran’s proposed non-aggression pact with its neighbors bears fruit.

Iran’s potentials despite economic sanctions must be realized eventually

By Martin Love

NORTH CAROLINA - From afar one can’t help thinking about how lucky Iran really is in many respects. I mean this sincerely.

Sure, the economy over the past year has dropped nearly 10 percent, according to some economists, and Iran’s people are hurting as they watch whatever standard of living they had decline while inflation has taken a toll and put out of reach many of the goods, especially luxury goods, average people want, even if – probably – the economic problems have not much impacted Iran’s elite.  And the reasons for the declines over the past year have mostly but not exclusively been attributed, and rightly so, to the harsh economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. in the wake of the abnegation of the JCPOA for no good reason.

But there is a different way Iranians might think about all this, taking a longer-term view.

First, consider how utterly rich Iran really is compared to maybe four or five other countries in the world, even if Iran can’t currently sell nearly as much of its riches – mostly petroleum – as was possible a year ago. Also consider what it was mostly selling its riches for what will ultimately be worthless paper.

 And further consider these factors: even with a population of some 83 million people, it will be generations, if Iran could never sell much if any of its oil any longer before Iranian citizens would ever be without more than enough subsidized energy resources for transportation and heating and the myriad other uses for oil. You can’t say this about more than a handful of other countries. Moreover, Iran has a relatively educated population, and the gene pool might be labeled “SMART”. No one else likely could have invented chess!

One might imagine that the U.S., with five percent of the world’s population (but burning up nearly 30 percent of the world’s energy resources annually) and living relatively “high on the hog”, is eventually going to suffer worse than Iran ever has or will. Yes, the U.S. is allegedly generating over 10 million barrels of oil a day where a few years ago the figure was maybe 6 million BPD. This is because of the recent discoveries of shale oil in the Dakotas and in the Southwest of the U.S.

Shale oil, however, has not proven to be an economic bonanza. For one thing, it’s not a cash flow positive enterprise, and also the wells pumping shale oil rapidly deplete. The various companies doing it are deeply in precarious debt. It has been estimated that 75 or more percent is gone from shale wells within two or three years. (No one can say that about Iran’s oil or gas fields, or for that matter, Arabia’s, such as the granddaddy of them all onshore, Ghawar, or the offshore Safaniya field to name just two.) 

Part of the reason (when energy resources really begin to taper worldwide) the U.S is hit harder is because it has been such a profligate user of oil, and wasted so more of it by subsidizing the oil industry and not using those funds to turn strongly to alternative energy such as wind and solar, or even geothermal and oceanic tidal or current sources. (And of all countries, Iran has an abundance, too, of sunshine and wind to make energy, if it ever wants to exploit that route.) Iran can be energy independent virtually forever, but the U.S.? No way at anywhere near today’s levels of greedy usage.

Indeed, according to economist and writer James Howard Kunstler, one must look at both China and the U.S., the world’s two largest economies. He compares the two countries to passengers on a sinking ship drifting beyond the reach of salvation on a powerful historical current. “That current,” he writes, “is the one telling nations quite literally to mind their own business, to prepare to go their own ways, to strive to somehow become self-sufficient, TO FINALLY FACE THE LIMITS OF GROWTH, TO SIMPLIFY AND DOWNSCALE THEIR OPERATIONS.”

In fact, Iran already has a head start in these directions, thanks or no thanks to the imperial U.S. And not having an especially strong economy for now, despite the petroleum riches, Iranians are accustomed to hardships and the necessity for simplification, and probably can survive and deal with hardships in future far better than, for examples, either China, with its huge population just recently enjoying a “middle class” existence or the U.S. with its insatiable greed.

And look at Russia. Russia has also been under the lash of U.S. sanctions and even though it supplies Europe with at least 35 or more percent and growing of its energy needs, and outside of Venezuela may have the largest oil reserves of any country, Russia has begun to prosper increasingly by attempting to develop industry and agriculture that makes it possible to reduce dependency on energy sales. Russia has just begun to supply China with soybeans, for one example, to the horror of American farmers, given the extant and growing trade war between the U.S. and China.

Iran’s leaders, whoever they are or may become, can over time chart Iran’s own way with the same general course Russia is on today: less dependency on a natural resource economy and more on diverse ways to meet the needs of all Iranians and overseas customers in a world that is being forced to do what James Howard Kunstler knows makes sense.

Quds Day Rallies More Important Than Ever

:Ayatollah Khamenei

Kayhan Int’l 

TEHRAN – Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday Qud Day rallies this year are more important than ever in order to defend the Palestinians against U.S. President Donald Trump’s much-touted "deal of the century”.
"Some sycophants of America are trying to popularize the deal of the century, but both America and its sycophants will fail in this case,” the Leader told a group of university professors and researchers.
Ayatollah Khamenei said defending the Palestinian people is a must both from a humanitarian perspective and a religious and Islamic perspective.
The International Quds Day is an annual event during which demonstrators take to the streets to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people and opposition to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
The day is seen as the legacy of the late founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Imam Khomeini, who officially declared the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan as International Quds Day back in 1979.
Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner is leading a U.S. delegation to the Middle East this week seeking support for a late June workshop aimed at selling the American plan.
Kushner, Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook, and Kushner aide Avi Berkowitz began their trip in Rabat and were to travel to Amman and Jerusalem Al-Quds, arriving in Israel on Thursday.
The trip is similar to one that Kushner and Greenblatt took in February to Persian Gulf states to drum up support for the Middle East plan they have been developing on behalf of Trump.
A White House official said one reason for this week’s trip is to bolster support for a June 25-26 conference in Manama, Bahrain, in which Kushner is to unveil the first part of Trump’s long-awaited plan.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have said they will participate, and a senior U.S. official said officials from Qatar have said privately their country was expected to attend as well.
The Russian foreign ministry took a dim view of the conference in a statement on Tuesday, saying the United States was attempting to "impose an ‘alternative vision’ of the Palestinian-Israeli settlement.”
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Wednesday, "We urge all Arabs who have accepted to go to Bahrain to reconsider out of respect for the Palestinians.”
 "We didn’t mandate anyone to negotiate on our behalf, and if anyone wants to trade the interests of the Palestinians for their own benefit, let them do it out of their own pockets,” he told Reuters.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Ayatollah Khamenei rejected Western calls for negotiations with Iran.
"We do not negotiate on honor issues of the revolution; we do not negotiate on the military capability. Negotiation here means bargain which wants us to concede our defensive capability,” the Leader said.
"We have already said we do not want negotiation because it is not only useless but also harmful,” he added.  

Resurrecting the PLO is Palestine’s Best Response to the ‘Deal of the Century’

by Dr Ramzy Baroud

Palestinian groups, Fatah, Hamas and others should not confine themselves to simply rejecting the Trump Administration’s so-called ‘Deal of the Century’. Instead, they should use their resistance to the new American-Israeli plot as an opportunity to unify their ranks.

Leaked details of the ‘Deal of the Century’ confirm Palestinians’ worst fears: the ‘Deal’ is but a complete American acquiescence to the right-wing mentality that has ruled Israel for over a decade.

According to the Israeli daily newspaper, Israel Hayom, a demilitarized state, ‘New Palestine’ will be established on territorial fragments of the West Bank, as all illegal Jewish settlements would permanently become part of Israel. If Palestinians refuse to accept Washington’s diktats, according to the report, they will be punished through financial and political isolation.

This is certainly not an American peace overture, but an egregious act of bullying. However, it is hardly a deviation from previous rounds of ‘peace-making,’ where Washington always took Israel’s side, blamed Palestinians and failed to hold Israel to account. Washington has never refrained from supporting Israeli wars against Palestinians or even conditioned its ever-generous aid packages on the dismantling of the illegal Jewish settlements.

The only difference between the US ‘peace process’ of the past and today’s ‘Deal of the Century’ is in the style and tactics as opposed to the substance and details.

Undoubtedly, the ‘Deal’, championed by Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, will fail. Not only will it not deliver peace – this is not the intention – but it is most likely to be rejected by Israel. The formation of Israel’s new government under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership is centered round far-right and religious parties. It is no longer politically correct in the new Israeli lexicon to even discuss the possibility of a Palestinian state, let alone agree to one.

Netanyahu, however, is likely to wait for Palestinians to reject the deal, as they certainly should. Then, with the help of pro-Israel mainstream western media, a new discourse will evolve, blaming Palestinians for missing yet another opportunity for peace, while absolving Israel from any wrongdoing. This pattern is familiar, highlighted most starkly in Bill Clinton’s Camp David II in 2000 and George W. Bush’s Road Map for Peace in 2003.

In 2000, the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, rejected then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak’s ‘generous offer’, an entirely manufactured political hoax that, to this day, defines official and academic understanding of what had transpired in the secret talks then.

All Palestinians must reject the ‘Deal of the Century’, or any deal that is born out of a political discourse which is not centered on Palestinian rights as enshrined in international law, a political frame of reference that is agreed upon by every country in the world, save the US and Israel. Decades of fraudulent American ‘peace making’ prove that Washington will never fulfill its self-designated title as an ‘honest peacemaker.’

However, rejection per se, while going back to business as usual, is inadequate. While the Palestinian people are united behind the need to resist the Israeli Occupation, challenge Israeli apartheid and employ international pressure until Israel finally relents, Palestinian factions are driven by other selfish priorities. Each faction seems to rotate within the political sphere of foreign influence, whether Arab or international.

For example, Fatah, which is credited for ‘igniting the spark of the Palestinian revolution’ in 1965, has been largely consumed with the trappings of false power while dominating the Palestinian Authority, which itself operates within the space allocated to it by the Israeli military occupation in the West Bank.

Hamas, which began as an organic movement in Palestine, is forced to play regional politics in its desperation for any political validation in order to escape the suffocating siege of Gaza.

Whenever both parties verge on forming a united leadership in the hope of resurrecting the largely defunct Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), their benefactors manipulate the money and politics, thus resuming disunity and discord.

The ‘Deal of the Century’, however, offers both groups an opportunity, as they are united in rejecting the deal and equally perceive any Palestinian engagement with it as an act of treason.

More importantly, the steps taken by Washington to isolate the PA through denying Palestinians urgently needed funds, revoking the PLO’s diplomatic status in Washington and shunning the PA as a political ally provide the opportunity to open the necessary political dialogue that could finally accomplish a serious Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.

Israel, too, by withholding tax money collected on behalf of the PA, has lost its last pressure card against Mahmoud Abbas and his government in Ramallah.

At this point, there is little else that the US and Israel could do to exert more pressure on the Palestinians.

But this political space available for Palestinians to create a new political reality will be brief. The moment the ‘Deal of the Century’ is discarded as another failed American scheme to force a Palestinian surrender, the political cards, regionally and internationally, will be mixed again, beyond the ability of Palestinian factions to control their outcome.

Therefore, it is critical that Palestinian groups at home and in the diaspora push for Palestinian dialogue, not simply for the sake of forming a unity government in Ramallah, but to revitalize the PLO as a truly representative and democratic body that includes all Palestinian political currents and communities.

It is only through the resurrection of the PLO that Palestinians could finally return to their original mission of devising a national liberation strategy that is not manipulated by money and not subjected to regional politicking.

If history is any indication, the ‘Deal of the Century’ is another sinister American attempt to manage the situation in Palestine in order to assert political dominance in the region. This ‘Deal’ is essential for American reputation, especially among its disgruntled regional allies who feel abandoned by the progressive American military and political retreat from the region.

This latest charade does not have to be at the expense of Palestinians, and Palestinian groups should recognize and grasp this unique opportunity. The ‘Deal of the Century’ will fail, but efforts to achieve Palestinian unity could finally succeed.

– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter, and is a former Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.

Bolton’s Trap: Iran Cast as a Nuclear Threat, Diverting us from his Occulted Project

Alastair CROOKE

President Putin was correct when he foresaw that the US actions which forced Iran towards default on the JCPOA would be quickly forgotten – as they have – and that the US mainstream ‘narrative’ would be turned wholly against Iran (which it has).

John Bolton has activated his ‘trap’, which inevitably will lead to ratchetting tensions between Iran and the US: He has inverted the paradigm from that of the ‘Greater Israel’ (the Deal of the Century) project requiring the blunting of Iranian opposition, to that of the ‘threat’ of potential Iranian nuclear ‘break out capacity’ – as Iran is effectively forced to accumulate enriched uranium (even at 3.67%).

Precisely by withdrawing US ‘waivers’ permitting Iran to stay within the JCPOA strict limits on Iran’s holding of uranium and heavy water (from Arak), by sanctioning the export of any Iranian surplus (a JCPOA obligation), Pompeo and Bolton made a default inevitable – and intentional.  And with the prospect of Iranian default (and Iran’s response of threatening to go to higher levels of enrichment), Trump’s team have rewritten ‘the story’ as one of Iran grasping after nuclear weaponisation.

Why does this serve Pompeo and Bolton’s aim to drive Iran into the corner?  To understand this, we have to reach back to Rand Corporation’s Albert Wohlstetter’s seminal policy doctrine (in 1958) — that there is, and can be, no material difference between peaceful and weapons enrichment of uranium.  Wohlstetter said that the processes for both were identical, and therefore to halt proliferation, (untrustworthy) states such as Iran must not be allowed any enrichment: i.e. no nuclear programme at all.

This Wohlstetter ‘doctrine’ underlay all the heated arguments leading up to the JCPOA. Obama finally came down from the fence on the side of allowing Iran internationally surveilled, low enrichment – in an agreement that ensured that Iran would be at least a year away from breakout capacity (i.e. it would take Iran more than a year to switch toward assembling enriched material sufficient to build a bomb).

Pompeo and Bolton have effectively unilaterally decided that Iran may only have 0% enrichment.  And the western press has taken up again the cry of the renewed ‘threat’ of Iranian breakout.  Let us be clear — this where Bolton wants Iran.  He has undercut the only compromise that had halted that earlier march toward a military ‘solution’ being imposed by the US, under threats of imminent military action threatened by Israel.  And the Wohlstetter thesis, which still has a significant following in the US, offers no ‘off-ramp’ to ratchetting tensions.

Just to be clear:  There was no proliferation ‘threat’ at all from Iran, which has been in compliance with the JCPOA, as verified by the IAEA multiple times, until the US made compliance literally impossible by withdrawing the very waivers that made compliance possible. This was President Putin’s point. The origins to the issue will now be drowned out by the clamours about proliferation.

Why are Pompeo and Bolton’s so intent on this project to corner Iran?

Well, who is pushing it? Who stands behind it?  One key constituency – for Trump – is his Evangelical base (one in every four Americans say they are Evangelists). It was they who insisted on the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem; they supported Trump’s assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan; they support the annexation of Israeli settlements; and they were behind the demand that the US scrap the JCPOA.  But above all – and they feel truly empowered by their achievements – and now look to Trump, finally, to actuate a (biblical) Greater Israel.

Trump is not Evangelical (he is Presbyterian by upbringing), but has over the years moved closer to the Evangelical wing, and has given signs that he believes that the actuation of a Greater Israel would finally end the conflict in the Middle East, and bring lasting peace to the region.  It would be his legacy.

Whilst it is true that Trump keeps repeating (perhaps truthfully) that he does not want war, the act of creating Greater Israel, nonetheless, is no minor real estate re-shuffling of the Palestinians into alternative ‘accommodation’, so that his Israel project can unfold, and expand into a Greater Israel.  Laurent Guyénot, an authority on Biblical studies writes that it possesses another, often overlooked, but highly significant dimension:

“Zionism cannot be a nationalist movement like others, because it resonates with the destiny of Israel as outlined in the Bible … It may be true that Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau sincerely wished Israel to be “a nation like others”… [But the assertion] that Zionism is biblical doesn’t mean it is religious; to Zionists, the Bible is both a “national narrative” and a geopolitical program, rather than a religious book (there is actually no word for “religion” in ancient Hebrew).

“Ben-Gurion was not religious; he never went to the synagogue and ate pork for breakfast. Yet he was intensely biblical. Dan Kurzman, [Ben Gurion’s biographer] who calls him “the personification of the Zionist dream”, [nonetheless] was a firm believer in the mission theory, saying explicitly: “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race”.

“Ten days after declaring Israel’s independence, [Ben Gurion] wrote in his diary : “We will break Transjordan [Jordan], bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight—we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.” Then he adds: “This will be in revenge for what they (the Egyptians, the Aramis and Assyrians) did to our forefathers during biblical times.”

This is the point from which Bolton and Pompeo are deliberately diverting attention by laying a nuclear breakout false scent.  The project to realise Greater Israel –  resonating with metaphysical destiny, and redolent of special status, as when “all the nations” will pay tribute “to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob,” when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem”  –  is music to Christian Zionist ears, since they believe this precisely is what will advance the return of their Messiah and bring Rapture closer.

Of course, any such project – implicit or explicit – could be expected to be opposed by a civilisation-state such as Iran, with its own very powerful, but contrasting metaphysics. For Greater Israel to be actualised, Iranian opposition to the Israeli ‘divine election’ plan must be curbed.

Bolton is no Evangelical, but is closely allied with the Israeli Right. Ben Caspit, a leading Israeli commentator, expands:

“The US has no intention of invading Iran,” [my] Israeli source clarified, “but the Iranians are trying to signal to the Americans that [any escalation] … could cause serious damage to American interests and at a steeper cost than anything Saddam Hussein’s regime was able to achieve …”.

“Netanyahu’s distance from the escalating tension can be understood from [his appearance] before a Congressional committee in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq to claim that Hussein was attempting to build nuclear weapons and that toppling the regime in Iraq would rein in Iran and create greater stability throughout the entire Middle East. History proved all Netanyahu’s predictions wrong … Now, Netanyahu is attempting to tone it down, so that he will not be thought of as the person pressuring the Americans to launch a military strike against Iran. It is not at all certain that he will succeed.

“Israel is now trying to downplay its support for the stance of US national security adviser John Bolton, who advocates for direct conflict with the Iranians and is therefore considered the most hawkish in the administration. According to someone who has worked with Netanyahu on military matters for years who spoke on condition of anonymity, “It should be obvious that behind closed doors, Netanyahu is praying that Bolton succeeds in convincing the president to launch a military attack on Iran, but this cannot be too obvious. [Netanyahu] cannot be identified with this approach, particularly after he has already come under fire for being the person who pressured the US to invade Iraq.” Jerusalem is watching the conflict between President Donald Trump’s current conciliatory tone, which leads him to avoid unnecessary American military adventurism, and Bolton’s more belligerent approach. The fear is that Trump will blink first in this war of nerves with the Iranians and eventually lose interest and tone down the pressure”.

In October 2003, a “Jerusalem Summit”, took place, whose participants comprised three acting Israeli ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu, together with Richard Perle – a former colleague of John Bolton – as guest of honour. A declaration was signed which recognized Jerusalem’s “special authority to become a centre of world’s unity,” and professed: “We believe that one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth – is to make it the centre of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, as foretold by the Prophets”.

This then, is not just some abstract struggle over nuclear doctrine. The escalation against Iran serves rather as camouflage for a considerably more profound civilizational and metaphysical conflict.  Iran, of course, knows this. And Putin, of course, was right in his foreboding that Iranian absence from the JCPOA would be weaponised against Iran, but that Iran had little choice.  To sit passively – whilst Trump squeezed ‘til the pips squeaked’ – simply was no option.

Alastair CROOKE

Former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

Trump’s Annihilation Threat to Iran and WWI Déjà Vu

Finian CUNNINGHAM

The erratic US president has gone from wishing for peace with Iran to, a few days later, making a veiled threat of nuclear annihilation against the Islamic Republic.

Donald Trump got on his twitter pulpit at the weekend, warning about the “official end of Iran”.

The configuration of military power in the Persian Gulf, the heightening of tensions between the US and Iran, and the unhinged aggressive rhetoric all make a tinderbox situation.

At times, the protagonists have each said they don’t want war. But just like the slippery slope towards the First World War (1914-18), the eruption of hostilities can take on a logic of its own.

Paradoxically, assurances last week from President Trump and his top diplomat Mike Pompeo that the US “is not fundamentally seeking a war with Iran” are not in fact all that reassuring.

Neither, it must be said, are assurances from the Iranian leadership that they also do not want war with the US. Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif said there was “no appetite for war”. That may be so, but it’s no guarantee there won’t be one, especially because the circumstances are so precarious.

In the run-up to the First World War, European leaders were similarly adamant that war could be avoided. They thought their rationality and modernity would spare them from catastrophe. Nevertheless, the Europeans quickly plunged into a conflagration through a chain reaction beyond their control.

What bodes particularly grave today is the erratic and incendiary nature of Trump’s rhetoric. At the end of last week he was telling media that “he hoped” there would not be war with Iran. Indeed, he even alluded to the possibility of future diplomatic talks with Tehran. Then, over the weekend, Trump flipped as always and tweeted that if Iran threatened the US “it will be the official end of Iran”.

“If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!” tweeted the US Commander-in-Chief.

It’s not clear what set him off. Maybe reports of rocket attacks on the American embassy in Baghdad, fingering Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. Or maybe someone overcooked his hamburger.

There can be no doubt that Trump was invoking the use of nuclear weapons against Iran if any war were to break out. What else to deduce from the words “the official end of Iran”?

A senior Republican Senator, Tom Cotton, who is an arch war hawk on Iran, also appeared to endorse nuclear strikes if any conflict were to arise. He toldFox News that the US could defeat Iran with just two strikes, cryptically calling them “the first strike and the last strike”. That again leaves little doubt that nuclear annihilation is on the mind of Washington politicians with regard to prosecuting a war with Iran.

Such thinking is, of course, despicable. To contemplate the genocidal destruction of another nation demonstrates the barbarity and iniquity of American rulers. But we should not be surprised by such depravity. After all, the Americans are the only people who ever used atomic weapons when they dropped two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing over 200,000 civilians. Washington has always reserved the infernal “right” to use nuclear force preemptively to “defend its vital interests”.

During the Cold War decades, US strategists had drawn up plans to launch pre-emptive nuclear attacks on both the Soviet Union and China, knowing full well that millions of innocents would be obliterated.

Trump has previously warned North Korea with nuclear destruction, bragging about “a fury like the world has never seen before”. He even made a similar threat of annihilation against North Korea while addressing the UN General Assembly in September 2017. The arrogant criminality knows no bounds. Imagine, before the UN in brazen violation of its founding charter outlawing aggression, Trump actually seemed to relish genocide. (He has since gone on to embrace North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with diplomacy, but the psychotic American power could revert to barbarous aggression at any time, if talks don’t appease its dictates.)

Trump’s latest rhetorical broadside against Iran is as provocative as it gets. To crow about wiping out an entire nation is all but declaring war. It’s one tweet away from sparking a conflagration. It’s insane and criminal. Why has Twitter not shut down Trump’s account?

To return to our First World War analogy, that horrendous event, resulting in up to 20 million deaths and the arrival of industrial-scale killing, was largely opposed by the public at the time. Political, military and imperial leaders went to war in spite of assurances beforehand there would be no war. It was like the nations stumbled into a conflagration.

However, it wasn’t entirely unprecedented. What made the violence inevitable was the configuration of military forces and international tensions had been put in place over several years like a powder keg. One spark – the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 – led to a chain reaction of disaster.

That’s why vows from this American president that he doesn’t want war are rather disconcerting. The complacency is alarming. The Trump administration has done everything possible to lay down an explosive fuse in the Persian Gulf. From trashing the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, to ratcheting up economic terrorism through illegal sanctions, from sending aircraft carrier naval armada and B-52 bombers, to hinting at nuclear annihilation.

Washington is fully culpable for the explosive configuration. For Trump and other American politicians to talk about “not wanting war” is ludicrous naivety or duplicity.

Rockets fired at the American embassy in Baghdad, or Yemeni drones attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, or suspicious sabotage of tankers in the Persian Gulf. The sparks are flying at the powder keg.

The repetition of history is not inevitable. But Washington has surely done its fiendish utmost to make history repeat – a century after the First World War.

Finian CUNNINGHAM

Former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages

US Master Weaver of False Flags Uses Threadbare Material

Finian CUNNINGHAM

It can’t get more absurdly audacious than this. The Trump administration is accusing Syria’s government forces of using once again – allegedly – internationally banned chemical weapons against civilians.

The US has provided no evidence to support its accusations. This time, it seems to have run out of “material”, relying on bombastic assertion and the dubious “word” of Washington alone. Yes, that’s how desperately hard-up the master weaver of false flags has become. “It is because, er, well, we say it is.”

The American claims come (there’s the giveaway clue) just when the Syrian Arab Army and its Russian ally are moving to clear the country of the last-remaining anti-government militant stronghold in northeast Idlib province. These aren’t cuddly “moderate rebels” the Western media would have you believe. They are affiliated to the barbaric, internationally outlawed Al Qaeda network and myriad offshoots. The terrorists who supposedly carried out 9/11 whom the US has been purportedly waging a war against for the past two decades.

Moreover, the Syrian, Russian offensive has been brought on because the terrorists repeatedly broke ceasefire agreements by firing on Syrian citizens in nearby Aleppo city and the Russian airbase at Hmeimim.

So, what the breathless US claims about chemical weapons is really about is to hamper the Syrian, Russian offensive routing the terrorist enclave plaguing Syria. That’s because despite all the rhetoric about fighting terrorism, the Americans and their NATO allies have covertly sponsored the same terrorists over the past eight years to destabilize Syria for regime change. Having an enclave in Syria not under government control is a convenient way for the foreign enemies of President Assad to maintain a destabilizing influence on the country, to ensure that it never fully recovers from the eight-year war that these foreign enemies orchestrated, but for all intents and purposes have lost.

Additionally, the hackneyed old “chemical weapons against civilians” ruse could be used to justify the Americans launching missile strikes on Syria and intervening directly for its regime-change objective. With the buildup of US firepower in the Persian Gulf ostensibly to counter alleged Iranian aggression, Washington has got the military resources in place if it choses to redirect them for aggressing Syria. (Double-think alert!)

What makes this all so brazen is the flagrant nature of false flags with chemical weapons that the Americans and their NATO allies have been complicit in. Just last week it emerged that the UN-affiliated Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) suppressed its own expert opinion which concluded that a chemical weapon incident last year in Syria was most likely contrived by Western-backed terrorists as a false flag. The incident was in Douma near the capital Damascus last April. At the time, the Western media dutifully broadcast the sensational claims that it was the Syrian government forces which had dropped the deadly munitions from the air. Within a week of the alleged atrocity, the Americans, British and French launched a barrage of over 100 air strikes, killing several Syrian civilians, in what they claimed was “retaliation” for Syrian government “barbarity” against civilians. (Sick bag please for the overwhelming double-think.)

Many observers at the time of the Douma incident strenuously pointed out the anomalies of the claim that Syrian government forces were to blame. Witness accounts, including local doctors, testified that the whole scenario was set up by jihadists and their White Helmets accomplices. The chemical munitions were not dropped from the sky by aircraft, it was reliably claimed; they were delivered on the ground by the so-called “rebels”. An OPCW expert corroborated that account. Yet his report was suppressed by the OPCW chiefs. The Hague-based organization seems to have been pressured politically to conceal the truth. Why? Because it would show the US, Britain and France were guilty of a huge war crime by attacking Syria with air strikes based on a complete lie.

Notably and damnably, too, the Western news media have not reported on the OPCW cover-up. Because the corporate-controlled networks, newspapers and state-owned news services like the BBC are part of the propaganda machine. They don’t sell truth, they sell war. And they’re not going to admit that.

The lie over the Douma chemical weapons incident, just like many other such incidents in the past such as in East Ghouta in August 2013 and presently in Idlib, is an expedient. It is expedient for the US and its allies to demonize the Syrian government and its Russian ally, and to lionize “rebels” who in reality are nothing but foreign terrorist mercenaries who have been sent to that country on the errand of regime change for the US and its criminal allies.

The expedient lie extends to the ultimate deception of giving Washington and its NATO accomplices an excuse for attacking a sovereign country. In other words, carrying out a Nazi-like aggression – the supreme war crime – but in the guise of a chivalrous protector of civilians, human rights and international law.

You can’t get more audacious than that, nor more nauseating.

The one upside, however, to all this repeated chicanery is that the American master weaver of false flags has spun so many of them over the years (Havana Harbor, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11, Iraqi WMD, Syrian CWs, Iranian aggression, and so on) that the lie material has now become threadbare to the point of transparency.

Finian CUNNINGHAM

Former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages

How the US Created the Cold War

There was a speech that the smug Harvard neoconservative Graham Allison presented at the US aristocracy’s TED Talks on 20 November 2018, and which is titled on youtube as “Is war between China and the US inevitable?” It currently has 1,217,326 views. The transcript is here. His speech said that the US must continue being the world’s #1 power, or else persuade China’s Government to cooperate more with what America’s billionaires demand. He said that the model for the US regime’s supposed goodness in international affairs is The Marshall Plan after the end of World War II. He ended his speech with the following passage as pointing the way forward, to guide US foreign policies during the present era. Here is that concluding passage:

Let me remind you of what happened right after World War II. A remarkable group of Americans and Europeans and others, not just from government, but from the world of culture and business, engaged in a collective surge of imagination. And what they imagined and what they created was a new international order, the order that’s allowed you and me to live our lives, all of our lives, without great power war and with more prosperity than was ever seen before on the planet. So, a remarkable story. Interestingly, every pillar of this project that produced these results, when first proposed, was rejected by the foreign policy establishment as naive or unrealistic.

My favorite is the Marshall Plan. After World War II, Americans felt exhausted. They had demobilized 10 million troops, they were focused on an urgent domestic agenda. But as people began to appreciate how devastated Europe was and how aggressive Soviet communism was, Americans eventually decided to tax themselves a percent and a half of GDP every year for four years and send that money to Europe to help reconstruct these countries, including Germany and Italy, whose troops had just been killing Americans. Amazing. This also created the United Nations. Amazing. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The World Bank. NATO. All of these elements of an order for peace and prosperity. So, in a word, what we need to do is do it again.

The US did donate many billions of dollars to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan, however, excluded the Soviet Union. It excluded Belarus, which had suffered the largest losses of any nation in WWII, 25% of its population. It excluded Russia, which lost 13%. But those weren’t nations, they were states within the USSR, the nation that lost by far the highest percentage of its population of any nation, to the war: nearly 14%.

Russia had lost, to Germany’s Nazis, 13,950,000, or exactly 12.7% of its population. Another part of the Soviet Union, Belarus, lost 2.29 million, or exactly 25.3% of its population to Hitler. Another part of the USSR, Ukraine, lost 6.85 million, or 16.3%. The entire Soviet Union lost 26.6 million, exactly 13.7% of its population to Hitler. The US lost only 419,400, or 0.32% of its population.Furthermore, immediately after FDR died and Harry S. Truman became President, the US CIA (then as its predecessor organization the OSS) provided protection and employment in Germany for top members of Hitler’s equivalent to the CIA, the Gehlen Organization. (America’s CIA continues flagrantly to violate the law and hide from Congress and the American people crucial details of its relationship with the Gehlen Organization.) By contrast, the Soviet Union was unremitting in killing Nazis whom it captured. So: while the USSR was killing any ‘ex’-Nazis it could find, the USA. was hiring them either in West Germany or else into the US itself. It brought them to America whenever the US regime needed the person’s assistance in designing weapons to use against the USSR Right away, the US was looking for ‘ex’-Nazis who could help the US conquer the Soviet Union. The Cold War secretly started in the US as soon as WW II was over (the OSS-CIA’s “Operation Paperclip”). (There was no equivalent to “Operation Paperclip” in the USSR.)

The Soviet Union suffered vastly the brunt of the Allies’ losses from WWII, but the US, which suffered the least from the war, refused to help them out, and instead the US regime protected most of the ‘ex’-Nazis that were in its own area of control. Without nasty Joseph Stalin’s help, America would today be ruled by the Nazi regime instead of by America’s domestic aristocracy as it now is. And this is the way that our aristocracy thanked the Soviet people, for the immense sacrifices that they had made, really, on behalf of the entire future world. This happened right after WW II was over, and the US regime was already determined, right away, not to help those people, but instead to conquer them — to treat them as being the new enemy, so as to stoke the weapons-trade after the war (and the need for more weapons) ended. How ‘good’ was this behavior by the US rulers — the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC — actually? (The MIC took over as soon as FDR died and Truman replaced him.)

Truman was unfortunately an extremely effective agent of America’s billionaires in advancing them first to continue their MIC (or, actually, the weapons-making firms), so that the billionaires who controlled them had no reason to fear the breakout of peace in the post-war era — America right away started its world-record-shattering number of coups and invasions, virtually as soon as Truman took over. First was the coup in Thailand in 1948 — right at the CIA’s very start — in order to grab hold of Asia’s narcotics traffic so that the needed off-the-books funding for that spy-agency could be instituted (and its existence didn’t become public until the great investigative journalist Gary Webb uncovered its operations in Nicaragua during President Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, which entailed illegal funding — from cocaine-sales — of Reagan’s war against Nicaragua, a Soviet-friendly country) The heroic Gary Webb became blackballed from America’s ’news’-(actually propaganda)-media and plunged into poverty so that he (according to the government) committed suicide and “wasn’t murdered,” but (either way) his death was another of the CIA’s secret victories.

Hey, if this looks bad for the United States, then the truth looks bad. This is notthe propaganda. Deceits such as Graham Allison’s slick distortions are the propaganda — and thus he and the others who do such work are enormously successful and highly honored by America’s billionaires and the rest of their retinues. People such as that, train the next generation of and for America’s aristocracy, so that they can become just as smug in their evil and self-deception as their trainers are. Their parents get vindicated by Allison and others of the billionaire-class’s propaganda-merchants (‘historians’ ‘journalists’, etc.). What’s not to like in this? It’s virtually a cult of the world’s most-powerful people and of their retinues. Lots of people would like to join it — and, “To hell with the truth.”

Even the U.N. has caved to the American behemoth. It offers an article “UN/DESA POLICY BRIEF #52: THE MARSHALL PLAN, IMF AND FIRST UN DEVELOPMENT DECADE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM: LESSONS FOR OUR TIME”, eulogizing what maybe its authors didn’t know was actually the very start of the Cold War:

Three events from the Golden Age that left significant lessons relevant for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals include: the contributions of the Marshall Plan, the experience leading to the achievement of current account convertibility under the IMF Articles of Agreement and the declaration of the First UN Development Decade. The Marshall Plan marked the very beginning of successful international cooperation in the post-war period.

No mention is made, there, either, that this was the start of the Cold War. The fact that this was the start of America’s war against Russia is simply ignored. Instead, all of this is celebrated. But even the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia acknowledges, in its (heavily propagandistic pro-US-regime) article “Molotov Plan”:

The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union in 1947 in order to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. It can be seen to be the Soviet Union’s version of the Marshall Plan, which for political reasons the Eastern European countries would not be able to join without leaving the Soviet sphere of influence. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov rejected the Marshall Plan (1947), proposing instead the Molotov Plan — the Soviet-sponsored economic grouping which was eventually expanded to become the Comecon.[1]

Just think about that, for a moment: The Soviet Union is being blamed there because it “rejected” the US regime’s demand upon all nations that accepted aid from The Marshall Plan, that they be “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence.” How stupid does the writer of that particular passage have to be? Wikipedia’s description of the Molotov Plan continues:

The Molotov Plan was symbolic of the Soviet Union’s refusal to accept aid from the Marshall Plan, or allow any of their satellite states to do so because of their belief that the Marshall Plan was an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states through the conditions imposed and by making beneficiary countries economically dependent on the United States (Officially, one of the goals of the Marshall Plan was to prevent the spread of Communism).

The Marshall Plan wasn’t merely “an attempt to weaken Soviet interest in their satellite states” but was instead an actual lure, to draw into “leaving the Soviet sphere of influence,” the nations “that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union.” This wasn’t really about “Soviet interest in their satellite states” but instead it was about the US regime’s policy, immediately after WW II, to take over not merely the nations that the US had helped in Europe to defeat Hitler, but also the nations that the Soviet Union had helped to defeat Hitler. It was, in short, a US grab, to control territory within the lands that the Soviet Union had saved from Nazism. This is the reality.

Look at these tables, again, of how much the US and the Soviet Union — and all other countries — had suffered losses from actually fighting against Hitler, and then consider that the nation which had lost the least was now so war-mongering as to immediately try to grab “sphere of influence” — the very border-nations which were crucial to the Soviet Union’s national security against that very same grabber — grabbing away from the one that had lost the most.

Here is another piece of US-regime propaganda about the Molotov Plan (which they say was the Soviet response to The Marshall Plan even though it wasn’t and the Soviet Union had been so destroyed by Hitler as to have made any such donations to their own satellites only minuscule by comparison):

The plan was a system of bilateral trade agreements that established COMECON to create an economic alliance of socialist countries. This aid allowed countries in Europe to stop relying on American aid, and therefore allowed Molotov Plan states to reorganize their trade to the USSR instead. The plan was in some ways contradictory, however, because at the same time the Soviets were giving aid to Eastern bloc countries, they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR.

Those weren’t “socialist” countries; they were dictatorial socialist countries, as opposed to democratic socialist countries such as in Scandinavia — the proper term for what the Soviet alliance was is “communist,” not “socialist” — and there was a very big difference between the Scandinavian countries, versus the communist countries (though the US regime wants to slur one by the other so as to sucker fools against democratic socialism — progressivism).

And, by “they were demanding that countries who were members of the Axis powers pay reparations to the USSR,” we’re supposed to think that Germany, and Italy, and Japan, shouldn’t have compensated their victims? What? And yet we’re also supposed to believe that Germany should pay it for Jews who lived in Israel? What’s that about? Why? Why ‘should’ Germany be funding Jews to grab land that for thousands of years has been populated almost entirely by Arabs and for perhaps a thousand years almost entirely by Muslims, thus subsidizing the theft of that land, the grabbing of that land, by Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Holocaust? What is all of this really about, and what is propaganda such as Graham Allison delivers, really about? America’s manufacturers of the machinery of mass-death need to “make a living,” don’t they? And isn’t that propaganda the most effective way to do it? So, that’s what it really is about.

There is the presumption by neoconservatives — American imperialists — that the US Government is both democratic and well-intentioned, but at least after the death of FDR, it hasn’t been either one. (Back in his time, it was a limited democracy, very limited for Blacks.) And this is the reason why the US regime double-crossed Russia and shamed The West when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, ended communism and ended the USSR and even ended its Warsaw Pact in 1991, but the US side secretly continued the Cold War, and does so increasingly today.

None of this fits the US regime’s propaganda-narrative, such as Graham Allison, and many other thousands of other regime-shills, present. Theirs is called ‘history’. The reality is called “history.” In the US and its vassal-nations, there is vastly more of a market for ‘history’ than for “history,” because the billionaires not only control the government — they also control the alleged news-media, history-publishers, and other means of ‘informing’ and ‘educating’ the public. So, it’s a self-selecting circle of deceivers that are at the top.

PS: To get to the beginning of the Cold War, Truman’s complete diary needs to be published. The excerpts that have been published do include information that contradicts and overrides his published statements, and that thereby helps researchers penetrate to what was really going on in his head at the time. What they show is a tragically unintelligent but well-intentioned person, who had some guiding prejudices and therefore thought in labels instead of trying actually to understand the other person’s real problems (such as FDR did). For example, at the Potsdam Conference during 17 July to 2 August 1945, Stalin tried to explain why the Soviet Union needed to be surrounded by friendly countries just as much as the US and Britain did, but neither Truman nor Churchill would accept any such concern by Stalin. As the BBC summarizedthat, “Stalin wanted a buffer zone of friendly Communist countries to protect the USSR from further attack in the future.” Truman got his views on such matters from his top generals and other advisors. His diary on 16 July 1945 said“Talked to Mc Caffery about France. He is scared stiff of Communism, the Russian society which isn’t communism at all but just police government pure and simple. A few top hands just take clubs, pistols and concentration camps and rule the people on the lower levels.” But Stalin actually had lots of reason to distrust both Truman and Churchill — just as they had lots of reason to distrust him. FDR hadn’t been so totally in thrall of his generals, nor as naive — nor as manipulable. Just a day after that entry on July 16th, came this on July 17th: “I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell.”

The problem isn’t that Truman often misunderstood, but that he surrounded himself with people that his Party’s top donors liked. Truman wanted to be a progressive but ended up being only a liberal — which his Party’s wealthiest found to be acceptable. His main achievements were in foreign policy and amounted to leading Churchill’s Cold War, pretty much as Stalin had expected. For example, at Potsdam, as Steve Neal’s 2002 Harry and Ike says (p. 40), “Truman was elated that Stalin was preparing to join the Allies in the war against Japan. [But] Eisenhower advised [Truman against that, because, Ike said,] ‘no power on earth could keep the Red Army out of that war unless victory came before they could get in.’” So, Truman rejected the overwhelming opposition from the scientists, who favored doing only a public test-demonstration for Japan’s leaders, and nuked both Hiroshima and Nagasaki — in order to keep the Soviets out of Japan, not in order to win the war against Japan. (Then, of course, the very tactful Ike became Truman’s successor, and led for what at the end of his Presidency he famously named the “military industrial complex.”)

So: those bomb-drops were part of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, not really for the hot WW II to beat Japan. However, Truman could also have deceived himself about what his motives actually were, because his diary on 25 July 1945 said: “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new.” The two bombings occurred on 6 and 9 August — right after Potsdam. Obviously, it wasn’t just “soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.” And, never, after he perpetrated that, did he express regret about all those “women and children.” He had no difficulty ignoring embarrassing realities.

Truman’s intentions were progressive — for example, his diary-entry on 16 July 1945 said (in the context of damning the Soviet Government) “It seems that Sweden, Norway, Denmark and perhaps Switzerland have the only real peoples government on the Continent of Europe. But the rest are as bad lot from the standpoint of the people who do not believe in tyrany.” (He routinely misspelled like that.) Unlike Republicans, who love to equate “socialism” with communism and simply to ignore the Scandinavian examples disproving that equation, he wasn’t quite stupid enough to fall for the billionaires’ line on it. He didn’t need to be: he was a Democrat. Even the billionaires in his Party don’t spout that line — it’s strictly Republicans who equate “socialism” with “communism.”

FDR was a leader. Truman didn’t know how to lead, because he didn’t even know himself. Himself was a puppet, and he didn’t even know it, much less know the strings (from Ike etc. — the billionaires’ knowing agents) (which were pulling his own brain).

And that’s how the road to today started.

And 200 years from now is, by now, virtually certain to be vastly worse. If persons of FDR’s calibre had been America’s Presidents after his death, then none of this would likely have happened (at least not nearly as much); but none of them were. Leadership matters. It really does. It really did.

Eric ZUESSE

American writer and investigative historian