Tag: iran

It depends which side you’re on…

Iran and Israel are exchanging missile fire and drone strikes. This is either the existential struggle of the Jewish people made manifest, or Zionist warmongering that puts the whole word in danger of nuclear conflagration.

It depends which side you’re on.

Meanwhile, back in Washington DC, Donald Trump was having a huge military parade – either to celebrate his birthday, or the 250th anniversary of the US Army.

It depends which side you’re on.

The parade was either a massive success or a humiliating lame duck event.

It depends which side you’re on.

At the same time, the “No Kings” protests were taking place in cities all around the country. It was either the largest political protest in American history, or a massive anti-climactic non-starter.

It depends which side you’re on.

A “political assassin” allegedly killed two people in Minnesota on Saturday. He is either an ultra-right wing MAGA type, or a Democrat who worked for Tim Walz.

It depends which side you’re on.

I’m sure you get the point by now.

Noam Chomsky famously said…

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum

…and he was totally correct. But that has evolved. We’re well beyond that now. There is no longer a “spectrum” of permissible opinion, only a series of on/off switches and yes/no tickboxes. There is no longer debate, only name-calling and echo chambers.

The pick-a-side meta-narrative is all-encompassing and swamps every issue from every angle. Every breaking news story is immediately, violently and finally divided into two camps, and each camp is supplied with evidence to support their chosen point of view.

The divide is brutally policed, with each side seeing the other as barely-human functionaries of a life-destroying other.

More dangerously, not only do neither side debate the evidence of the other, but increasingly they can’t even see it. The other side probably lied and made it up, after all, that’s the kind of thing the other side does.

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Israeli Journalist Explains Trump’s ‘Fabulous’ Response to Israeli Strikes on Iran

President Donald Trump took a page straight from the Iranian diplomatic playbook when he claimed the United States had nothing to do with Israel’s preemptive strike on Tehran and urged the country’s hardline leadership to sit back down at the bargaining table, according to Israeli journalist Amit Segal.

“When President Trump says, we had nothing to do with this operation, dear Iranians, and now we offer you to come back to the negotiating table, he uses the Iranian method, the proxy method, that said for years: ‘We have nothing to do with the Houthis, we have nothing to do with Hamas or Hezbollah, we just want to negotiate,'” Segal explained Monday on the Call Me Back podcast hosted by American author Dan Senor.

Now that Israel has attacked Iran, destroying large swaths of its nuclear program and military infrastructure, “President Trump says, ‘I had nothing to do with it, let’s negotiate,’” Segal said of the president’s strategy.

Iran immediately canceled a sixth round of nuclear negotiations with the Trump administration shortly after Israel launched its multi-pronged attack on Friday. By Monday—after Israel killed at least 20 senior Iranian military commanders and destroyed its operational headquarters—Tehran was reportedly begging to restart diplomacy.

Iran sent frantic diplomatic messages to both Washington, D.C., and Israel asking them to end the conflict and restart nuclear negotiations, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, citing European and Arab officials.

“Tehran has told Arab officials it would be open to returning to the negotiating table as long as the U.S. doesn’t join the attack,” the outlet reported.

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Netanyahu Claims Killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Would ‘End the Conflict’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in an interview on Monday that killing Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would “end the conflict” with Iran.

Netanyahu made the comments during an interview with ABC News in response to a question about a report that said President Trump was opposed to killing Khamenei over concerns that it would escalate the war. “It’s not going to escalate the conflict, it’s going to end the conflict,” Netanyahu said.

“We’ve had half a century of conflict spread by this regime that terrorizes everyone in the Middle East … The ‘forever war’ is what Iran wants,” the Israeli leader said.

Eli Clifton, a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute, pointed out in a post on X that Netanyahu was a major proponent of taking out Saddam Hussein and urged the US to go through with the invasion of Iraq. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” he told Congress in 2002.

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US Sent Israel Hundreds of Missiles Days Before Attack on Iran

Just days before the surprise and unprovoked Israeli war on Iran, the US shipped Tel Aviv 300 Hellfire missiles. An Israeli official implied they were used in the assault.

On Friday, Israel launched an offensive war against Iran, striking military sites, nuclear facilities, and carrying out targeted assassinations of top officials. Middle East Eye reports that on Tuesday, just three days before the attack began, the US sent 300 Hellfire missiles to Israel.

One Israeli official indicated that the precision air-to-ground munitions were used in targeted attacks on top civilian and military leaders. Ali Shamkhani, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in his home on Friday.

Shamkhani was part of the negotiation team engaging with the US to work out a new nuclear agreement. American and Iranian officials have engaged in five rounds of talks, with a sixth previously scheduled for Sunday. Tehran recently indicated it believed a deal was possible.

However, following the start of Israel’s undeclared war, Iran called off talks with the US. New York Times UN correspondent Farnaz Fassihi said Iranian officials made it clear that Tehran views Shamkhani’s assassination as “Israel targeting and killing nuclear diplomacy with the US.”

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Trump: ‘Everyone Should Immediately Evacuate Tehran’

President Trump on Monday appeared to threaten Iran, writing on his Truth Social account that Iran should have signed a “deal” and calling for the “immediate” evacuation of the Iranian capital of Tehran, a city of about 10 million people.

“Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign. What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” the president wrote.

He made the threat while attending the G7 summit in Canada. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said after Trump’s post that the president would be leaving the summit “because of what’s going on in the Middle East.”

Trump’s post came after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that he ordered the deployment of additional US capabilities to the Middle East. US officials confirmed that a massive deployment of tanker aircraft was related to the Israel-Iran war, and the US also redirected a second aircraft carrier to the region.

Sources familiar with the matter have told Antiwar.com Editorial Director Scott Horton that the Trump administration is poised to enter Israel’s aggressive war against Iran directly by launching airstrikes, which will almost certainly provoke attacks on US bases in the region.

Israel started bombing Iran on Friday, two days before the US and Iran were due to hold another round of nuclear negotiations. Trump had been demanding Iran eliminate its nuclear weapons program, which was a non-starter for Tehran. Despite the apparent impasse, Iran was set to present a counter-proposal to the US, but the talks were canceled after Israel launched its war.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the war under the pretext of stopping Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, but it has been the consensus of the US Intelligence Community that there was no evidence Tehran was working toward a nuclear weapon.

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The World’s Most Dangerous Man & His Enabler

It is some years since I described Benjamin Netanyahu as the most dangerous man in West Asia. That was back when we heard all about the menace of the Assad regime in Damascus, the Beelzebub otherwise known as Iran’s supreme leader and other such unthinkably malign figures.

The Israeli prime minister just graduated. By any serious reckoning he is the world’s most dangerous man as of the shockingly reckless, altogether nihilist attacks he launched against the Islamic Republic in the early hours of Friday, June 13. I will get to Donald Trump’s place in the ratings in a sec.

In his initial announcement of Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu asserted that Iran presents “an existential threat” to Israel and that he had no choice but to order an attack. This is nonsense, but we had better pay attention to the nonsense. With this loaded phrase, Bibi has effectively licensed the Zionist state to launch a nuclear weapon if these attacks fail to destroy all of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programs, as seems likely. This is my read.

There is indeed an existential threat abroad as of last Friday. But it extends well beyond Iran and, indeed, West Asia. As the self-defined Jewish state’s long, dreadful record makes plain, it appears to recognize no limits to the violence it will inflict on others, its breaches of international law and the norms of the human cause, and the risks it will inflict on the world in the name of what amounts to a biblically authorized project of subjugation and domination.

To finish this point, the obsessed leader of a nuclear-armed nation never subjected to the terms of the Non–Proliferation Treaty has just attacked a non-nuclear nation it calls a mortal danger to Israel’s survival because of the nuclear weapons it does not possess. You do the math, as the expression goes. 

“Operation Rising Lion,” for the record, is a reference to the Prophecy of Balaam, an infidel with a very mixed record but who impressed the ancient Israelites with his exceptional powers of divination. In the Revised Standard Version of Numbers, 23:24, we find him saying, “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion: he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain.” So does Bibi, who has the Palestinians down as evil Amalekites straight out of the Old Testament’s mythologies, once again state his purpose.

Israel and Iran are now at war, as one Tehrani told The New York Times after she listened to explosions and watched the flicker fires out her window last Friday evening. All is changed now. Netanyahu has craved this war for decades, always justifying his lust — a clinically psychotic lust, it is right to say — by way of endless lies and an apparently bottomless paranoia. These lies and this paranoia just put the world in danger of a global confrontation. We are all Iranians now: I am perfectly willing to say this.

As to President Trump and the American role in this, there is no need any longer for any of us to deceive ourselves. I continue to insist, against many who think otherwise, that the Zionist state is to be understood as a recklessly over-indulged client and not the Übermeister of U.S. policy. It is a complex dynamic, I mean to say, but the Zionist state just got done what the imperium wants in its broader ambition to “reshape the Middle East,” as the neoconservative cliques who direct U.S. policy have long put it. As I have noted previously in this space, borrowing from spookspeak, Israel does Washington’s wet work in West Asia.

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The Folly of a War With Iran

The neoconservatives who orchestrated the disastrous wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya — and who were never held accountable for the profligate waste of $8 trillion taxpayer dollars, as well as $69 billion squandered in Ukraine — look set to lure Americans into yet another military fiasco with Iran.

Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe.

It has a population of almost 90 million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.

Iran launched retaliatory attacks Saturday on Israel following waves of Israeli strikes that hit nuclear facilities and killed several top Iranian military commanders and six nuclear scientists. There have been dozens of explosions over the skyline in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

There is video footage of at least one large explosion on the ground in Tel Aviv from an apparent missile strike and reports of other explosions in some half dozen sites in and around Tel Aviv.

“Our revenge has just started, they will pay a high price for killing our commanders, scientists and people,” a senior Iranian official told Reuters. The official added that “nowhere in Israel will be safe” and that “our revenge will be painful.”

“They think it’ll be an easy war,” said Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat and member of British intelligence (MI6) who spent decades in the Middle East. He told me of the neocons when I interviewed him.

“They want to reassert American power and leadership,” he said. “They feel that every so often throwing a small country against the wall and smashing it up is good for this.”

These neocons, bonded with the Israeli leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, he went on, “will not tolerate any rival power, any challenge to American leadership and American greatness.” They will create facts on the ground – a war between Israel and Iran – that will “pull Trump into a war with Iran.”

You can see my interview with Crooke here.

While Iran’s air force is weak, with many of its fighter planes decades old, it is well supplied with Russian air defense batteries and Chinese anti-ship missiles, as well as mines and coastal artillery.

It can shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint that facilitates the passage of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. This would double or triple the price of oil and devastate the global economy.

Iran has a large arsenal of ballistic missiles it can unleash on Israel, as well as on American military installations in the region. While initial waves can be intercepted, repeated attacks would swiftly deplete the Israeli and U.S. air defense stockpiles.

Israel is not equipped to endure a war of attrition, such as the eight year conflict between Iran and Iraq that ended — despite U.S. support for Saddam Hussein’s regime — in a stalemate, or as in Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon that eventually forced it to withdraw in May 2000, after repeated losses suffered from Hezbollah.

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Trump Hints At ‘Possible’ US Entry Into War Amid Stepped-Up Israeli Daytime Attacks On Tehran

After Saturday reports widely said that Israel requested direct US military assistance in attacking Iranian nuclear sites, President Trump in fresh comments to ABC News has begun to change the White House tune a little, as he now says it’s ‘possible’ the US ‘could get involved’ in the Israel-Iran conflict.

He told ABC’s Rachel Scott that “it’s possible we could get involved” – however he emphasized that the US military is “not at this moment involved” in the conflict. He pivoted to calling for peaceful resolution, saying the US would be “open” to Russian President Vladimir Putin being a mediator in. “He is ready. He called me about it. We had a long talk about it,” Trump said. Of course, he campaigned against new wars starting and said these major conflicts would not have happened if he was president.

Regional sources are reporting on Sunday the highest number of observed strikes in daylight in an around Tehran. Israel’s military says that over 80 sites were hit overnight, and has vowed to “hunt down” ballistic missile launchers in western Iran. Radar and anti-air defense batteries were also struck “as part of the IDF’s aerial superiority in Iranian airspace.”

The densely populated capital of around 15 million has seen hundreds of thousands leave the city for safety.

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Tehran Starts Drowning in Sewage After Israeli Missiles Strike Key Water Infrastructure

Shock video circulating online appears to show parts of Tehran drowning in waste after Israeli missiles struck water and sewage pipelines.

Footage shared on social media shows a street in the Iranian capital overflowing with water and waste product, creating a disgusting brown flow through the city.

The outbreak means that emergency services in Tehran are grappling with simultaneous challenges.

These include the impact of missile strikes, crumbling nuclear infrastructure, and now a public health nightmare as sewage seeps into streets.

The breakdown of potable water and sewage systems also risks triggering disease outbreaks and major social rest in an already volatile capital.

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Musk says he is providing Iran with Starlink as regime restricts internet

Elon Musk signaled late Friday night that he is providing Iranians with Starlink satellite internet after conservative analyst Mark Levin asked him to turn the service on in Iran during Israel‘s conflict with the country.

“The beams are on,” Musk said in a response to Levin’s request on X.

Levin’s initial post argued that if Starlink is turned on in the country, “Musk can put the final nail in the coffin of the Iranian regime.” Starlink is Musk’s satellite internet service.

Iran restricted internet access for millions of people following Israel’s strike on the country. Internet usage in the country heavily declined after the restrictions were issued, according to the internet monitoring group Netblocks. There hasn’t been a complete block of traffic, however, as Levin’s post suggested.

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