US Betrays Kurds – Again

It is a maxim of US statecraft that Washington “does not have permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” That maxim, attributed to Henry Kissinger, was starkly demonstrated this week when US President Donald Trump gave Turkey a green light to launch a military offensive on northern Syria, targeting Kurdish militants.

The Turkish offensive began on Wednesday with air and ground attacks against Kurdish positions in northeast Syria. It is not clear yet how far Turkey’s operation will proceed, but already there are reports of civilian deaths and thousands of people fleeing from artillery and air strikes, and possibly a major ground invasion by Turk forces into Syria.

The Syrian government has condemned the military assault as “aggression”. Iran has likewise condemned. Russia cautioned Turkey to respect Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. European states also censured the Turkish incursion, requesting an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. Russia vetoed a European-led resolution because it was not, in Moscow’s view, wide enough to cover all illegal foreign military presence in Syria.

President Trump called the Turk operation, named with Orwellian duplicity Operation Peace Spring, a “bad idea”. How ludicrous and cynical of Trump. Only days before in a phone call with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan he assented to remove US troops and a security guarantee for Kurdish militants, whom Washington has been using as an “allied” proxy force in Syria’s war.

Trump came in for much bipartisan and media flak in Washington for “betraying our Kurdish allies”. But as the maxim goes, American imperialism doesn’t have allies, only “interests”. The Kurds found out this week in the most cruel and callous way that they are merely “interests” for Washington, to be discarded like pawns off a chessboard.

The cynicism in Washington is astounding. The ethnic Kurdish people straddling Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran have time and again been exploited by US imperialism over many decades to act as proxies for American interests, only to be abandoned when their perceived usefulness expires.

The cynicism of Turkey’s Erdogan also knows no bounds. He declared that the offensive on Syria was an anti-terror operation, to, “bring peace and security to the region… We will protect the territorial integrity of Syria and save the region’s people from the claws of terror.”

This is brazen double-think by the Americans and fellow NATO member Turkey.

Washington couldn’t care less about the Kurds, whom it has weaponized and trained for the alleged purpose of “fighting terrorism” in Syria. The reality is the Americans have mobilized the Kurds to act as proxies to carve up Syrian territory with a disingenuous promise to provide them with regional autonomy. The real objective for Washington was always to exploit Kurdish separatist aspirations in order to dismember Syria for its bigger scheme of achieving regime change in Damascus. That scheme failed, thanks in part to Russia’s military intervention from the end of 2015 to defend Syria.

Now the Kurds have been left out to hang and die by Washington because of some whim by President Trump. Having unleashed Turkey’s escalation of violence against Syria, Trump is obviously flailing around seemingly to mitigate the onslaught, threatening to impose economic sanctions on Ankara to wreck its economy. It’s a comedy of errors, which is decidedly unfunny given the humanitarian consequence from Trump’s ham-fisted dumping of the Kurds.

So, what can be done to de-escalate the violence? First, Turkey must respect its stated commitment to the Astana process, along with Russia and Iran, in which it vows to respect Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. There is no excuse for launching military strikes on Syria, regardless of claims about “ridding a terror corridor”.

Secondly, as Syria, Russia and Iran have repeatedly stated, all foreign troops unlawfully present in Syria must get out of the country immediately in compliance with international law. American, British, French and Turkish troops, special forces and warplanes have for too long violated Syria with egregious violation of international law. Those NATO states are culpable of war crimes and aggression. European denunciations of Turkey this week are hypocritical nonsense.

The harsh truth is that Kurdish leaders have allowed their people to become pawns in criminal intrigues by NATO powers against the nation of Syria. One would think, surely, the Kurds must have learnt lessons from multiple past betrayals by Washington. They find themselves in a pitiless situation – again – because they foolishly subjugated their interests to those of Washington.

Kurdish militants – who paradoxically have fought effectively against Washington’s other proxies, various jihadist terror groups – have only one choice. They must somehow reconcile with their Syrian Arab brothers and the Syrian Arab Army to defend their common nation of Syria. That means a repudiation of America’s imperialist dirty games.

Russia, with its principled record of intervention to end the war in Syria, might play a role in facilitating a new alliance between the Syrian government forces and the Kurdish militia. In a new constitution being negotiated by Syrians perhaps the Kurds can be afforded eventually a degree of regional autonomy. But first they have to earn that right by defending the nation and freeing themselves from the nefarious imperialist scheming by Washington and other NATO powers, which is intent on destroying Syria.

Genocide from Kissinger to Trump

by RON JACOBS

Donald Trump’s statement earlier this week that he could win the US war in Afghanistan but he doesn’t want to kill ten million Afghans was both revealing and appalling. Like so many other of Trump’s statements, his remark revealed the genocidal nature of US foreign policy. It is a policy that considers human lives as part of some greater equation that results in the supreme dominance of the US economic and military system. When Henry Kissinger was working for Richard Nixon, it was called realpolitik. In that instance, it meant the deaths of more than a million Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and US citizens. Jimmy Carter and Zbignew Brzezinski shared Ronald Reagan’s view that the struggle against the Soviet Union rationalized the killing. George Bush the Elder and Bill Clinton saw it as a battle against a terrorist phenomenon. Baby George Bush and Barack Obama organized their mass murder as part of a global war on terror—the GWOT. The terror they were fighting was caused by the very foreign policy the GWOT is part of. Trump may not want to kill ten million Afghans, but he seems to be okay with killing them in smaller numbers like Obama was.

The statement by Trump is appalling only in that most US residents pretend that their lifestyles are not dependent on the murder of other people who live in other countries. It becomes even more appalling when one realizes that most of those same US residents will eventually accept (if hey haven’t already) this price in blood. Many even revel in it. That’s where we are at this moment in history.

Trump’s statement took me back to a different time. I was a ten-year-old boy living on a small military installation in Peshawar, Pakistan. Peshawar is a major city in the area of Pakistan and Afghanistan where the Pashtun people live. It is the Pashtun who form the largest part of the opposition to the current US occupation in Afghanistan. They are an ancient people who refuse to be subjugated. Anyway, my father had a job that involved gathering data from a radar system eavesdropping on China and the Soviet Union. He rarely talked about his work. It was all classified and I had yet to become curious about what his role in the imperial military was. So, I never asked him any questions about his work. We talked about baseball, household chores, school and life in general.

He had a coworker who lived off base. In fact, he lived in a hotel in downtown Peshawar that had been built during the recently ended British colonial period. Low fans hung from the ceiling, horse or mule-drawn tonga carts lined up like taxis in front of the hotel, servers brought us pine nuts and mango drinks while this man I’ll call Mr. S. and I waited for a driver who took us on different excursions. Many of those trips were to villages in the region. Upon arriving at a particular village, Mr. S. would introduce me to a couple of the boys who always greeted us. I would go off to play soccer, tag or some other game with the boys. I could speak a form of pidgin’ Pashtu. Still, we communicated mostly via gestures and some universal understanding. Mr. S. would head to one of the one-story adobe buildings with a group of men from the village. Sometimes, officers of the Pakistani military accompanied them. When I asked Mr. S. what they talked about, he said something about politics and agreements. I’m certain now that he was up to some kind of subterfuge I now oppose, but those were more innocent days. At the end of the day, we usually feasted on grilled chicken, grilled goat, fruits, tea and delicious cakes. There were no forks or spoons. However, we used hunting knives to cut the meat from the bone. After eating, we would wash our hands and faces with water drawn from the well. There were no women or girls present at these meals. I do recall talking to some girls in their own compound; we laughed and giggled through a hole in the wall. Then, the girls were called away and we scattered before we got into trouble. I wonder what happened to all those kids. I wonder how many of them were killed by bombing raids and drones as part of the ongoing US intervention. I wonder if Donald Trump, Barack Obama, the Bush presidents, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter even considered the humanity of those they let their henchmen kill. I wonder how many US residents do.

Ron Jacobs is the author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest offering is a pamphlet titled Capitalism: Is the Problem.  He lives in Vermont.

The Jeffrey Epstein case could sink U.S. elites and induce real change

By Martin Love   

NORTH CAROLINA - If anything can get worse, like the corruption among the powerful and wealthy in the U.S. in recent decades, it just has. 

Of late there’s been reams attention paid to the arrest last week at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey of Jeffrey Epstein, 66, a super well-connected Jewish billionaire who is a known sexual pervert and convicted sex offender with an obsession for underage females and lots of notable friends formerly or currently in high places. People like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Alan Dershowitz, among scores of others, and even codgers like Henry Kissinger. Epstein was returning from Paris on his private jet when the FBI nabbed him and charged him with various grave offenses that could land him in jail for the rest of his sordid life.

 The list, in fact, of “friends” of Epstein includes so many politicians and celebrities and wealthy individuals it is stunning. What did this bag of sleaze have to offer? Well, allegedly, young, underage hapless, needy teen girls for one thing for trysts at Epstein properties, but it remains unclear just exactly who, aside from Epstein, also committed sex crimes although it’s a pretty good guess that Bill Clinton and perhaps even Trump may have participated back in the 1990s and into this century. Epstein, currently in prison and not yet out on bail, if he ever gets bail which seems unlikely, has offered to name names of those who PAID for his pimping services in exchange for a reduced prison term of no more than five years. But this is a joke of an offer because you can bet the very rich people who know Epstein would not have literally paid for such services as Epstein’s “friends” and associates. At any rate, Epstein’s re-arrest after over a decade when he was earlier convicted and received basically a slap on the wrist and the potential revelations ahead and further convictions could be the biggest scandal in the history of the U.S. And as well reveal the utter depth of the corruption of the “elite” and monied in the U.S.

But there is another angle to this worth exploring, and that may eventually be explored. The possibility that Epstein was working for a foreign “intelligence” agency and may have filmed or recorded various people in compromising situations for the purpose of blackmail by some non-U.S. government entity. In fact, the federal attorney who managed to get Epstein off with minor punishment a decade ago is Trump’s current Secretary of Labor, one Alex Acosta, who claimed he had been notified that Epstein was part of the “intelligence” community and thus went easy on him just over a decade ago. To make matters even more bizarre, Epstein’s former lover, friend and co-conspirator was one Ghislaine Maxwell whose father, Robert Maxwell, a former newspaper tycoon in the U.K., was once linked to Mossad.

Another fact is that Epstein, a man who never even earned a college degree but who worked on Wall Street for a while and then went on his own with some kind of alleged hedge fund, lived like a billionaire, but no one as yet has accounted for HOW exactly he became so wealthy, and no one has apparently come forth to claim they invested money with Epstein’s firm or even worked for the organization. Was Epstein connected with Mossad in some nefarious way? Did Mossad make him rich? That’s the biggest speculation flying around right now. 

It’s hard to say but this is a case that remains murky indeed and the public may never know exactly who and what Epstein was all about and who he answered to ultimately. Some other pundits have also opined that Epstein had (to have had) a “state” sponsor and was running a blackmail operation targeting the most powerful people in the U.S. The evolution of this story at the moment has the most public attention of any.

One observation when one spies the breadth and scope of this story, and the many powerful people involved and who may be caught up in this scandal and who could wind up in prison, too, suggests that Epstein could NOT have managed this alone, nor his rather vast holdings of multiple homes on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Caribbean. Where was all the lucre coming from? How could he have managed to operate such a scheme for so long? These and many other questions may or may not be answered fully as Epstein eventually goes to trial once again. Bill Clinton for one is alleged, based on flight logs, to have gone on 24 trips aboard Epstein’s jet, aptly named the “Lolita Express”, but Clinton is claiming he only took four trips abroad courtesy of Epstein. People who have reason to condemn Epstein’s operations are coming forth to spill the beans like never before, and it’s anyone’s guess how this tale is going to play out and whom it’s going to finger for criminality. But the potential here is that the full scope of the corruption in the U.S. may for once be exposed.

Obviously, the question here is what this bizarre and lambent mess of crime has to do with Iran?

It may not be very probable, but it is still remotely possible, that at least part of this tale involves the grip the Zionists have had on U.S. foreign policy because many of the people who have MADE U.S. policies in the past two decades at least have been involved with or at least knowledgeable about Epstein. And if bribery has been a factor in warping U.S. policies in the Mideast, which admittedly is not a sure thing with respect to Jeffrey Epstein, it may well impact, at last, the public’s perception of the role of the Zionists in their control of U.S. “elites” and thus policy. It’s the sort of tale that could mark a sea change in the U.S. and abroad, because the public’s eyes may at last be opened. One really can’t speculate further about this now because so much more needs to be exposed and proven, but the case of Jeffrey Epstein is worth watching from afar. Nothing like it has ever surfaced before. 

Woodward’s ''Fear'' Exposes Trump’s Ineptitude

Kevin Barrett

When I was in high school (1972–1976) my political heroes included JFK assassination researcher Mark Lane, antiwar provocateur Abbie Hoffman, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — the Washington Post journalists who brought down President Richard Nixon. Today, I still admire three of the four. But I’m not so sure about Woodward.

Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets, a shocking and well-documented exposé of the Bush crime family, presents strong evidence that the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency was a coup d’état by deep-state actors — including a certain Naval Intelligence officer named Bob Woodward. Today, when I read Woodward’s work, I no longer embrace the illusions that led me to choose journalism as my undergraduate major. The USA does not have a free and independent press. What we have is “American Pravda,” as Ron Unz puts it in his masterful series of articles collected here.

Since Woodward is an intelligence officer whose cover job is “journalist,” should we believe anything he tells us about Trump’s White House? His new book Fear: Trump in the White House is almost entirely based on “Deep Throats” — that is, people who supposedly participated in and witnessed the events described, but whose names are withheld. So we are basically being asked to take the anonymous sources’ accounts on faith.

That said, I suspect that like most good disinformation, Woodward’s book is 95% true, at least to the extent of representing a reasonably accurate presentation of what the author heard from people who worked in and around the Oval Office. But the way the material has been selected and arranged betrays an agenda. Just as Woodward’s Watergate-era journalism was not disinterested truth-seeking, but part of an intelligence operation by oligarchs and their military intelligence friends aimed at ending Nixon’s presidency, Fear is part of a similar operation today whose purpose is to hobble and/or terminate the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

Like Nixon (and before him JFK), Trump poses a threat to the permanent national security state.* Each of these three presidential “threats” to the deep state was quite different: JFK had become a pacifist and an enemy of Israel’s nuclear program; Nixon and his sidekick Henry Kissinger were freelancers who transformed America’s China policy without deep-state permission (and of course Nixon was an “anti-Semite” who dreamed of ending Jewish-Zionist control over American media); while Trump is dangerous due to his “isolationism” and ineptitude.

If we remove the punctuation Woodward’s title becomes “Fear Trump in the White House” — which is of course its barely-subliminal message. So why should we fear Trump’s presidency? Woodward’s series of artfully-arranged vignettes shows us a White House in complete chaos. Trump seemingly has no idea what he is doing from one moment to the next. He watches six to eight hours of television a day, gobbling junk food, raging against CNN and MSNBC commentators, and nodding sagely at the wisdom of Fox News talking heads. His agenda is neither written down nor remembered, so aides can derail his projects by stealing presidential edicts from his desk before he signs them, confident that Trump will forget them: out of sight, out of mind.

Like the Watergate tapes, Woodward’s quotes reveal a White House in which practically every other sentence is laced with profanity. In 1974 America, this posed a political problem with a public not yet inured to foul-mouthed leadership. Today, the USA’s manners and morals have sunk so low that even Trump’s evangelical base is happy to support their p-ssy-grabber-in-chief, even if he and his whole entourage cuss like sailors.

If profanity was once considered sinful, so was lying. Today’s Washington, DC is a swamp of prevarication, but recognizes a distinction between good and bad liars: good liars skillfully recite officially-sanctioned bromides and stick to their stories with confidence and consistency; whereas bad liars blurt out whatever comes into their heads, rattle easily, and get caught contradicting themselves. Trump, Woodward informs us, is the quintessential bad liar. This comes on the authority of Trump’s ex-lawyer, John Dowd, who explained to Robert Mueller that when Trump was put through a mock interview “he just made something up. That’s his nature.” Dowd told Mueller that if Trump ever testified the President of the United States would be exposed not only as a pathological liar but as “an idiot… a goddamn dumbbell,” which would pose a threat to the national security of the United States.

Woodward’s book confirms Michael Wolff’s earlier claim in Fire and Fury that practically everyone who has worked with Trump considers the President a mental midget. Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis is quoted as saying Trump acts like, and has the understanding of, “a fifth or sixth grader.” Woodward confirms earlier accounts that ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron.” Many other Trump advisors express similar sentiments. There is only one denizen of the White House who thinks Trump is a “very stable genius,” and we all know who that is.

But is Trump really that stupid? The harshest attacks on Trump’s IQ are all coming from true believers in American imperial ideology. These people are frustrated that Trump doesn’t “get it” when they try to explain to him how self-evident it is that the USA must continue to serve as global policeman. Woodward notes that both Tillerson’s “moron” remark, and Mattis’s “sixth-grader” assessment, were responses to Trump’s rejection of American imperialist exceptionalism at a January 19, 2008 National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room. That meeting had been arranged by deep-state denizens John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Tillerson, and Mattis for the specific purpose of brainwashing Trump into accepting their “we must police the world” outlook. Trump belligerently refused. His final remark was, “We [have] spent $7 trillion in the Middle East. We can’t even muster $1 trillion for domestic infrastructure.” Over and over, throughout Woodward’s book, we see Trump trying to pull US forces out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Korea… and his deep state aides panicking and sabotaging his efforts.

Is the “sixth grader” who notices that the emperor has no clothes a “moron”? If the self-styled smart guys and adults in the room all think the US should bankrupt itself destroying the Middle East for Israel, and needs a globe-straddling empire with more than 1,000 military bases in more than 60 countries, maybe we need to find an as-yet-unindoctrinated sixth grader to apply some common sense. Trump is right in asserting that the US could be far more prosperous, at least for its ordinary honest citizens, if it became, once again, a normal nation: a republic, not an empire.

So if Trump wants to pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Korea, why hasn’t he? Isn’t the president supposed to be the commander-in-chief? Woodward explains that Trump’s aides have pulled off “nothing less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the President of the United States and his constitutional authority.” In other words, they have committed treason. But that shouldn’t surprise us, since they are all complicit, actively or passively, in the greatest act of treason in American and perhaps world history: the September 11th, 2001 Zionist coup d’état.

Unfortunately, despite his isolationist instincts, Trump has fallen for neocon-Zionist brainwashing with respect to Iran policy. Though Iran hawk James Mattis, cited by Woodward as hating “the idiot raghead mullahs” of the Islamic Republic, may be on his way out, the even more obsessive Iran-haters Mike Pompeo and John Bolton are now firmly in charge. The good news is that Trump doesn’t want war, he wants leverage. The bad news is that he won’t get any leverage, or any deal, by waving Pompeo, Bolton, and their MEK terrorist friends at Iran’s principled and disciplined leadership. The resulting standoff could encourage Israel to gin up another 9/11-style false flag, or perhaps a Gulf of Tonkin style attack on a US ship in the Persian Gulf, to try to draw the US into attacking Tehran. Such a plot wouldn’t have succeeded against the Netanyahu-loathing Obama Administration. But it might work on Trump, who fell for the April 4, 2017 Syrian sarin gas false flag, screaming “kill them all” and firing a volley of missiles, to the delight of his deep-state advisors and the cheers of the mainstream media.

So what are we to make of this chaotic administration? It seems that America’s top leadership, according to Woodward and other semi-reliable sources, consists of an idiot (some would say idiot-savant) commander-in-chief surrounded by traitors bent on endless mass murder in service to a dying empire.

* On the permanent national security state or “deep state” see Michael J. Glennon, National Security and the Double Government; Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State; Eric Wilson (editor), The Dual State; Kouzmin, Witt and Kakabadse, State Crimes Against Democracy; and Lance DeHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America. On Zionist influence on the American deep state see Laurent Guyénot, JFK-9/11 and From Yahweh to Zion.

 

Kevin Barrett

Will Madman Trump Rain “Fire and Fury” on the world?

Odds of nuclear winter better than 50/50

Kevin Barrett

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff; Pub: Henry Holt and Company, New York, New York, 2018, 324 pages. Price: $18.00 Hbk; $13.09 Pbk; $14.00 Amazon Kindle.

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg; Pub: Bloomsbury Publishing, London, UK, 2017, 432 pages. Price: $18.89 Hbk; $9.20 Amazon Kindle.

Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury takes its title from one of Donald Trump’s most infamous Twitter outbursts. On August 8th, 2017 — between the anniversaries of the US nuclear holocausts of Hiroshima (August 6th) and Nagasaki (August 9th) —Trump tweeted, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Trump’s promise to counter mere verbal threats by murdering millions of people with nuclear bombs suggested to many observers that the President is, at best, monumentally careless with his tweets.

At worst, he may be stark, raving mad — as 27 mental health professionals wrote in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. One of the authors, Bandy Lee, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, briefed Democratic lawmakers last month on the president’s mental state. Though professional psychological and psychiatric associations have discouraged such diagnoses-at-a-distance, 70,000 self-described mental health professionals have signed a Change.org petition entitled “Trump is mentally ill and must be removed.” Indeed, one does not need to be a psychiatric professional to see signs of sociopathy, narcissism, and emotional and intellectual instability in Trump’s demeanor, words, and actions.

From a Muslim perspective, the psychiatric diagnoses ring true. Trump is an extreme embodiment of bad adab. His self-centered arrogance seems to rival that of Pharaoh, the Qur’anic villain who follows the egomaniacal path of Satan.

On January 2nd, Trump inaugurated 2018 by once again taunting Kim Jong un, “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is much [a] bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” Some tried to laugh it off, pointing out that Trump’s unintentional Freudian joke sounded like a line from the nuclear black comedy Dr. Strangelove. Others countered that having a deranged buffoon like Trump in command of the world’s biggest military machine may be a joke on the world, but not a terribly funny one, since the eventual punchline could be tragic beyond measure.

How did we reach this point? Wolff’s Fire and Fury offers one answer: Trump’s run for president was a publicity stunt designed to bolster his brand and enhance his riches and fame. Nobody, least of all Trump himself or his family or advisors, ever expected him to win, or thought he would be capable of governing if he did (Trump, being a quintessential narcissist, quickly changed his mind on election night when he saw that he had won; but nobody else did).

Wolff’s account mainly follows Steve Bannon’s viewpoint, according to which it was Bannon, backed by huge cash infusions from the billionaire Mercer family, who put Trump in office. Bannon’s project was, and still is, to turn America in the direction of right-wing nationalism, in the manner of a Pat Buchanan on steroids. Bannon initially saw Trump as a useful idiot. But as Trump’s presidency underwent slow-motion implosion during its first year, with Bannon’s America-first project taking a back seat to the internationalist Zionist bankster machinations of former Goldman Sachs honcho Steven Mnuchin and Kissinger-Netanyahu protégé Jared Kushner, Bannon jumped ship, told all to Wolff, and broke decisively with Trump.

All this gossip about America’s unlikely, absurd, and quite possibly deranged President is as gripping and entertaining (at least until the novelty wears off) as it is horrifying. But in the end, it is not Wolff’s book that we need to read to understand our predicament. Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine is far more edifying, and in the long run, more important.

Ellsberg is a former nuclear war planner for the RAND Corporation who risked life in prison by leaking the Pentagon Papers in hopes of stopping America’s genocidal assault on Vietnam. The Doomsday Machine makes a strong case that the problem is not that we have a madman president. The real dilemma, according to Ellsberg, is much worse than that: we have a nuclear war system in place which is, for all practical purposes, in the hands of omnicidal lunatics — and has been for more than 70 years.

It isn’t that the individuals who run America’s nuclear war system are all as crazy and ignorant as Trump. As individuals, most of them are quite sane, not to mention highly intelligent, like the young Dan Ellsberg when he worked for RAND. Ellsberg opens The Doomsday Machine with a quote from Nietzsche, “Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” The nuclear command and control systems of our epoch illustrate the point to perfection.

As Ellsberg makes clear, it is only through the grace of Allah (swt) that all human life and all large animal life on earth, or virtually all of it, has not yet been extinguished by these nuclear madmen. For the nuclear war fighting plans and scenarios of the US, and presumably Russia as well, seemingly guarantee that such a thing will happen, probably sooner rather than later.

Two key points emerge from Ellsberg’s book. First, the chances of a major nuclear war between the superpowers are shockingly high. Repeatedly, such a war has been narrowly and improbably averted. If a professional oddsmaker were fully informed about the issue, he would probably conclude that the chances of a full-scale nuclear war breaking out are about 5%/year or 50/50 per decade (or per two decades if the oddsmaker dons rose-colored glasses). That means that during the 70-year nuclear superpower standoff, we have flipped the coin three to five times, and gotten lucky every time. In other words, we just played Russian roulette, holding a gun to the head of the world, with five bullets in the chamber (actually the odds are worse than that, but you get the drift). Absent continual miraculous divine intervention, we are eventually going to get the malhamah that Shaykh Imran Hosein and others claim is foretold in scripture. Or, paraphrasing Ibsen, “If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.”

The second key point is that the looming malhamah, as Imran Hosein says, is likely to kill all or nearly all of the world’s population. Ellsberg points out that even today, many decades after the discovery of the planet-killing “nuclear winter” that would follow even a relatively small nuclear war between superpowers, nuclear war planners continue to work toward “limited” nuclear wars under the delusional assumption that “only” tens or hundreds of millions of people would die, rather than the full seven billion (plus or minus a few miserable cannibalistic survivors). For the truth, according to climate scientists, is that even an improbably minuscule nuclear exchange of 100 small nuclear bombs (and no big ones) would put enough smoke into the atmosphere to block incoming sunlight planet-wide for more than a decade, plunging the earth into “nuclear winter” and completely ending agriculture. The result would be that all of earth’s population, except perhaps for a few warrior cannibals, would die of starvation.

The Qur’an tells us “…if anyone kills a human being — unless it be [in punishment] for murder or for spreading corruption on earth — it shall be as though he had killed all mankind; whereas, if anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he had saved the lives of all mankind” (5:32). Allah (swt) thus emphasizes the importance of protecting human life, showing the immense consequences of even one unjust killing. And yet the nuclear war planners calmly plot the murder of the whole of mankind, all the while deluding themselves into thinking they are behaving acceptably by imagining that they are “only” plotting the murder of tens or hundreds of millions.

The upshot is that, yes, Trump may be an ignorant, unstable, narcissistic nutjob. But the menace of Trump pales in comparison to that of the criminally-insane nuclear command and control system, which is built and maintained by thousands of individually sane people, and tolerated by 300 million seemingly normal Americans.

Dr. Kevin Barrett is a US-based journalist, commentator, and radio broadcaster. He hosts the TruthJihad radio program as well as manages the VeteransToday website.

 

The rising ‘Empire’: global, genuinely Persian

By Mehdi Sepahvand

The American fear of a rising Persian Empire resurfaced one more last week as former secretary of state Henry Kissinger warned President Donald Trump that a power vacuum after the demolition of ISIS will definitely put Iran in a one-on-one situation to score a new Persian Empire. I have already argued how Kissinger is partaking a folly that was established in previous years, and, nonetheless, how Iran transforms regional crisis into something of use to it much differently than for it to qualify as an empire proper. Here I intend to take my argument a step further by establishing how the rising Iran is turning into a pivotal point of difference between the Old and New worlds, therefore showing how this fear of a rising empire surfaces. “Persian empires were always known entities—feared, envied, hated, admired, but never a strangers or unknown. These same Persians and Persophilia becomes a peculiar attraction to Europeans… during the Renaissance and Enlightenment modernity. There is not a single period from antiquity to modernity in which Europeans have not known or referenced Persians and invariably marked their Persophilia,” observes Hamid Dabashi, an Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City, in his latest book “Iran: the Rebirth of a Nation”. Building on the back of a revolution now 40 years old, as well as the trauma of a national purgatory the aftermath of a democratic participation in presidential elections eight years ago, the Iranian nation is today both and none of these experiences at the same time, seeking a better self-in-the-world who revises itself according to latest developments day in day out. Asking any Iranian how they relate to these two seminal national experiences (and lesser ones scattered in time), you would find in their answer a surprisingly objective outlook that means to rectify and improve upon the self. This comes with a genuinely self-confident nature that is to be found in the history of Europe, with their experiences of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, the two world wars, etc., who seek a rebirth of the self right from the ashes of yesterday, much different from the, let’s say, American experience to leave everything behind and look for a new world order after rid of all those unwanted, bothersome people. The difference between Iran and Europe on one hand and America on the other may therefore be summarized as where they seek change. America is all about a new world order through an apocalyptic event that either wipes them out or installs them above everyone else, whereas the other two are about a new self. The formation of the European Union can provide the best example to this in the case of Europe. This kinship between the two old peoples found a however comic manifestation last week on the Iranian parliament floor where some dozen lawmakers started capturing soon-to-go-viral selfie pictures with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini while she was more or less unaware of or unprepared for the pictures. Mogherini was not the only high-ranking invitees there, President Hassan Rouhani’s inauguration, yet the way she arouse the desire of togetherness, however in a bizarre way to the point of being rejected by the entire political and social spectrum in the country, was quite noteworthy. Today, as the United States is spreading the fear that a new Persian Empire is rising, latest in a series that has included hate-mongering dramatizations such as through Hollywood in the movie “300”, Europe is generally seeing a promised land of peace in Iran within a restive Middle East. Trump’s vows to “tear” the nuclear deal have not yet moved back far in time to be forgotten. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, Europeans are pushing giant economic deals with Iran, alongside recognizing the country’s role in a to-be peaceful Middle East after the ISIS crisis. Looking at it from another angle, Iran is playing it smarter even than Russia, which is on guard against both Europe and the U.S. Iran is growingly turning into a point of difference between the Old and New worlds, breaking the “West and the rest” binary. While the EU remains faithful to its Persophilia to the benefit of its own - to reduce the flow of war refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the region, find a good market of 90 million population and a trade hub for a bigger 400-million population, and so on - the pragmatist Washington, having cut their umbilical cord with their mother long ago, seek the destruction of a burgeoning nation by whatever it takes, be it by allying with Saudis to balance Iran in Syria, the same Saudis whose son set the American “nation” “under attack” at the turn of the century, or by catastrophizing developments in Syria into imagined precursors to a rising Persian Empire a la mode “300”, forgetting (or wanting others to forget) in the meantime, that this has not been established when power vacuum ensued U.S. retreat in Afghanistan or Iraq in recent past. As Washington thinkers are engaged in replacing Persophilia with Irano-phobia, assuring the world of a rising Xerxes that will shed blood to high heavens, the world are giving themselves the chance to consider a growing-up Zarathustra figure to descend the Damavand and speak of what the world has long lost and dearly cherishes, a self-in-the-world that ceases to be so taken by a black-and-white image of things and instead tries to embrace new horizons and make new bonds by reviewing and reorienting itself.