Trump and fellow gangsters look increasingly foolish

By Martin Love

NORTH CAROLINA - The maintenance of the notion that Iran’s leadership must remain steadfast and patient, as it has been since Donald Trump dumped U.S. participation and support for the JCPOA and slammed Iran’s people with draconian sanctions, has never been more imperative, because it is in fact, however tortuous, a winning strategy.

As said before, aside from the fact that the` Trump Administration appears desperate to chalk up some kind of “win” in the Mideast and farther east, it continues to embarrass itself in world opinion while Iran curries increased favor incrementally simply because it has remained steady enough and rational enough despite all the sanctions and bad mouthing by the U.S. There mere concept that Iran is or has been an “aggressor” in the Mideast, that it has itself promoted “terror” willy nilly simply by standing firm with the important allies it has such as Syria especially, must be the biggest falsehood of this century so far. But the U.S. desperation is quite palpable.

For example, this week the world learned that Trump through his vapid spokesperson Brian Hook offered the captain of the Iranian oil tanker Adrian Darya some $15 million and a life of perennial ease if he just sailed his tanker into U.S. hands. Apparently, when the captain, Akilesh Kumar, did nothing but sail closer to Syria (and turned off the ship’s transponder) where its oil may eventually be offloaded to a smaller ship than can negotiate a Syrian port, he was also “sanctioned” by the U.S. Had this sailor, an Indian, done the bidding of the Trump gang, he’d likely never have lived long enough to enjoy his sudden wealth: such is the infamy of most anyone overseas who now supports U.S. diktat and bullying. The U.S. looks utterly childish resorting to blackmail with the attempted the bribing of ship captains to try to get its claws on the Adrian Darya (or any other vessel transporting Iranian goods).

Some observers have lately questioned whether John Bolton will keep his job and may have been sidelined some by Trump (given the failures of sanctions so far to upend Iran’s patient government, or even Venezuela’s). Also, pressures have been ramped up by the usual suspects (Netanyahu, for example, whose re-election as Israeli PM this month is not certain) to avoid any U.S. give and take with Iran while Trump has suggested that he meet with President Rouhani for some bilateral talks at an upcoming UN General Assembly meeting in New York later this month.

 How crazy is that, given that the sanctions have lately been targeted against Iranian shipping networks with any ties to the IRGC? Does Trump really believe he can strike any kind of fresh deal with Iran without dropping the sanctions first? How delusional is he? The overture, at any rate, was made through French intermediaries, and meanwhile, Iran has not released the British tanker Stena Impero. The “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran looks increasingly like some kind of bad joke where, even if Iran suffers, the U.S. loses in the more important court of world opinion. Bullies are insufferable given a basic human nature against them.

The longer view may be important to grasp, and so far this appears to be a view that Iranians may have encompassed and adopted to get through these difficult times. It rests on the realization that despite various iterations of governance or even dominant religious fealty – whether Achaemenid, Parthian, Seleucid, Zoroastrian, Sassanid, Islamic, Abbasid, Ilkhanate, Safavid, Qajar, Timurid or even Pahlavi right up to the current Islamic Republic now just 40 years old – Iran survives on the bedrock of a splendid creativity fostered by a basic culture that has withstood the test of millennia and foreign imperialism throughout recorded history. 

Currently, of course, not just Iran but many other countries are having to deal with the aggression of U.S. and Western and Zionist imperialism, which are as horrific as, say, anything the Romans tried to impose long ago. (Remember what happened to the greedy Roman Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BC!) Iran, however it manages to deal with American imperialism, will remain – despite ups and downs which it has managed for thousands of years – simply Iran, when the U.S. and its “allies” have finally exhausted themselves and been reduced to temporal blips because of greed and short-sighted governance.

This is a primary question: why can’t a U.S. government come along that reorients itself to an international posture of “live and let live” or “let’s all try to prosper together”? What good, really, has ever resulted from Western aggression, and especially towards a country like Iran that really does not pose any kind of existential threat to the U.S.? Maybe that’s ahead as the U.S. falters in coming years without a change of posture and thus a possible reclamation of some real leadership.
 Maybe Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could become the President the U.S. needs, just as Jimmy Carter has long been a former U.S. President who has demonstrated courage and wisdom. But if there is not as wholesale change of mentality in the White House and in parts of Congress one can bet the U.S. is not going to be successful going forward because the world is fast reorienting itself to multi-polar expansions that include more cooperative efforts among great nations.