By Jeremy Salt
A traveler from an antique land sees half-buried in the desert sand the massive stone legs of a statue and the shattered remains of a face, still stamped with a frown and a wrinkled lip.
This is Ozymandias, king of kings, in Shelley’s poem. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works ye mighty and despair,” but the stone remnants with the sneer and the wrinkled lips are all that is left of his mighty works.
And this is all that will be left of Trump. Someone a thousand years from now will stumble across the remains of the golden statue buried in the sand of Gaza, if it is ever built. Nothing will remain of the mighty works of the American Ozymandias but the frozen sneer and the wrinkled lips.
From Minnesota to Palestine and Latin America, Trump is destroying a world based on law and respect for sovereignty and human rights. In his own mind, he is the king of kings. There is no law beyond his own morality, no crime that can’t be committed against those who are not strong enough to defend the territory they say is theirs. If they can’t defend it, it is not theirs.
The wanted war criminal Netanyahu has just agreed to join Tony Blair on Trump’s grotesque ‘Board of Peace’ even as he continues to kill children in Gaza and on the West Bank.
This is one measure of Trump’s morality. In Minnesota, his ICE brownshirts are now murdering American citizens and kidnapping children. In the Persian/Arab gulf the US is massing warships and planes following the failure of two attempts to destroy the Iranian government.
The military attack last June failed. Trump’s claim that the nuclear facilities were destroyed was a lie. Israel’s claim that it won the 12-day war was also a lie. A few more days, and it would have been brought to its knees by Iran’s hypersonic missiles. Netanyahu had to go running to Trump to arrange a ceasefire. Iran may yet regret that it did not continue its attack for those few more days.
The ‘regime change’ operation of the past fortnight also failed. The template was an old and familiar one in West Asia and Latin America. Ruin the economy. Ambush the currency (driven down 30 to 40 percent in Iran’s case). Infiltrate street protests with provocateurs and sow chaos until the US intervenes with military force to destroy the government and save the people.
The rioters were armed with guns and knives and organized by the CIA and Mossad, which even boasted of its presence in Iran. Some of these paid agents of disruption were shifted across the border from Iraq.
They were carefully programmed. They killed hundreds of police and civilians, beheading some or burning them to death. They set fire to markets, banks, and businesses, and destroyed hundreds of fire engines and ambulances to prevent fires from being put out and the injured from being taken to the hospital. The security forces struck back hard, and no doubt the innocent were killed along with the guilty.
The final decapitation was called off when the government disabled the internet. Tens of thousands of Musk’s Starlink terminals had been smuggled into Iran. They allowed intelligence agencies to organize riots in any part of the country.
These terminals were supposed to be invulnerable to state intervention, but the government worked out how to block them. The foreign intelligence agencies were blinded, and the rioting stopped almost immediately. This is the reality and the western media’s projection of this latest regime change operation as a vicious attack on peaceful protestors, another bare-faced lie.
The collapse of the ‘regime change’ operation was then followed by mass demonstrations in support of the government, infinitely larger than the ‘anti-regime’ protests.
Iranians are under no illusions about who their enemy is and who their friend is. Their country has been under sanctions since 1979. The aim of the US since that time has been to immiserate the people. This was also the aim in Syria ahead of ‘regime change’ there.
Iran has also been threatened with military attack, has had senior scientists assassinated, and its nuclear research facilities sabotaged, and suffered the killing of more than 1000 civilians by the US/Israel in the June war.
Iranians know that this campaign has nothing to do with democracy and human rights. They know that the Islamic government could fall tomorrow, and if its replacement maintained its support for the Palestinian resistance, it would be attacked just as viciously as now. The decades-long campaign against Iran is all about protecting Israel, and the Iranian people know it.
Having been thwarted twice in the past eight months, the US and Israel are gearing up to try again. The fleet massing in the Persian Gulf includes the ‘super carrier’ USS Abraham Lincoln, on its way from the South China Sea, having turned off its transponder after leaving regular shipping channels.
Two others reportedly ordered to the Gulf of Oman are the USS George H.W. Bush and the USS Theodore Roosevelt. These strike carrier forces include destroyers, F-35 aircraft, missile batteries, and counter-mining systems. They will reinforce the military assets the US already has at bases in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, and Turkiye.
It is hard to imagine that the US has sent this mass of military material to the Gulf only to recall it because Israel is not ready to attack yet. Media indications to this effect could be a ruse. Iran expects an attack, was caught off guard last year, and is determined not to let it happen again.
Netanyahu has warned that the level of violence in the next attack will be “unprecedented.” Is this a signal that Israel is preparing to use nuclear weapons, as distinct from the standing preparedness which has been fundamental to its nuclear policy since 1948?
The US used its biggest bombs to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities last June and failed. Israel’s anti-missile systems and the US THAAD system also failed to stop Iran’s hypersonic missiles. Perhaps the US and Israel have even more destructive weapons in their conventional arsenal that no one knows anything about, but if they throw everything they’ve got at Iran and the government survives, what next? Are they just going to walk away? Or will they or Israel resort to tactical nuclear weapons?
These events have brought the world to an inflection point. International law is being replaced by the law of the jungle. International law was never perfect, but it was a lot better than Trump’s ‘might is right.’
In Thomas Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’ life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” This is already the life into which Israel, Israel and their outriders in the ‘western’ world have thrust millions in Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Lebanon, Yemen, and other countries in recent decades.
It is the life that countless millions had to suffer during the centuries of imperialist global domination. In substance, is not form neo-imperialism is no different. The meek will not be inheriting the earth in this life.
There always was an internal imperialism alongside external imperialism, directed against the poor and the vulnerable in the home country. Trumpist imperialism is now turning inwards in an even more aggressive form than in the past. The ICE goons are killing or abducting not just ‘aliens’ and ‘illegals’, but killing middle-class citizens and abducting their children.
Americans are demonstrating countrywide. They are well armed, and some will surely soon start shooting back at Trump’s brownshirts.
The UK and Australia both have ‘anti-terrorist’ and ‘race hate’ laws that can be used to prosecute citizens opposed to Israel and its genocide of the Palestinians. The supporter of genocide in the form of support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza only has to say he or she feels intimidated or threatened for these laws to be applied against anti-genocide protesters; such is the nature of this gift to the Israeli lobby.
These laws can easily be turned around to stifle activist protests against other government policies, leaving anyone with a mind ready to speak out exposed to arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.
Jared Kushner spoke at the WEF on the great structures to be built along the Gaza coast. He is a ghoul, his impeccable suit a stinking shroud covering the bones of a person who is already morally dead.
Gaza is a vast cemetery. The Dutch cartoonist Peter de Wit sums it up in ‘Gaza 2030.’ A small child is running up to two people lounging in deckchairs on the beach, presumably his parents. He is holding the skull he has just dug out of the sand. ‘Look what I found, mummy or daddy,’ he must be calling out. Other skulls lie in the hole behind him.
There are thousands of them in the rubble to be bulldozed so Kushner can build his data centres and residential towers for ‘coastal tourism.’
“This is for the people,” Kushner says, by which he means the Palestinian people. This is a gross, offensive, and insulting lie.
Like Netanyahu, Kushner wants the Palestinians dead or pushed aside. That is their part in the grand plan. Corporate billionaires will invest, and eventually Israel will inherit. Netanyahu has made it clear he’s not going to let any part of Gaza go, whether the grand plan works or not.
It’s a great deal. The ‘Board of Peace’ will pay for the reconstruction of Gaza and then Israel will take it over for free in the greatest real estate deal since Chaim Weizmann remarked in 1948 that the theft of Palestine was “a miraculous simplification of our task.”
Collapse is already forecast, but a lot could happen before the fantasy of Miami on the Gaza shoreline evaporates. At the moment, the war on Iran heads the list. It would certainly take the attention away from Minnesota.
Trumpism is doomed, of course. It can’t work unless the American people are ready to give up their constitution, their laws, and their republic, and this is never going to happen.
Trump’s megalomania is so extreme that it caught the world off guard, but the world is now reacting. Cornered, in a position where there is no deal to be made with Iran, Trump may see war on Iran as the answer to all of his problems, but that would depend on him winning the war, and that is far from certain.
While the outcome might be existential for his presidency, it would be existential for Iran as a country. Losing it, Trump could walk away, even if it is into a prison cell after probable impeachment, but Iran can’t. It is preparing to fight to the end. All of this will play out in the next few weeks.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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