Tag: perpetual war

Preemptive Strikes On Iran Will Be A ‘Real Possibility’ Under Trump: Officials

Starting in December the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, IAEA, warned that Iran is “dramatically” accelerating enrichment close to the roughly 90% level which is weapons-grade.

On Tuesday President Emmanuel Macron called Iran the main “strategic and security challenge” for France and Europe. “The acceleration of the nuclear program leads us nearly to the point of no return,” he told an annual conference of French ambassadors.

However, it remains anything but clear whether the Islamic Republic has actually decided to build a nuclear weapon, something recently (and surprisingly) acknowledged by the CIA.

Still, the constant daily headlines over Iran’s enrichment advances set things up for a collision course with the Trump administration after the Jan.20 inauguration.

According to a fresh report in Axios, the chances of Trump ordering a preemptive military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities are now higher than ever:

Iran’s recent nuclear advances give President-elect Trump a crucial decision to make in his first months in office: Try to neutralize the threat through negotiations and pressure, or order a military strike.

Trump’s decision in 2018 to withdraw from an Obama-era nuclear deal prompted Tehran to accelerate its nuclear program, such that it’s now a de facto “nuclear threshold state.” Officials and diplomats from the U.S., EU and Israel all told Axios they expect Trump to face an Iran crisis in 2025.

Trump and his advisers are planning to quickly return to the “maximum pressure” campaign they conducted against Iran between 2018 and 2020.

Axios further underscores that “Several Trump advisers privately concede Iran’s program is now so far along that the strategy might not be effective. That makes a military option a real possibility.”

But it remains that US attacks on the Islamic Republic would only surely accelerate possible efforts to achieve a bomb. Much of the country’s nuclear infrastructure and technology is now likely underground, which would make it hard for any external power to destroy everything.

Though in prior years the Ayatollahs have condemned nuclear weapons as ‘unIslamic’ – if the Iranians perceive themselves under direct threat of annihilation, they would urgently feel the need to rapidly have a bomb.

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Genocide: The New Normal

Joe Biden’s parting gift of $8 billion in weapons sales to the apartheid state of Israel acknowledges the gruesome reality of the genocide in Gaza. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. This is a permanent, endless war designed not to destroy Hamas, or free Israeli hostages, but to eradicate, once and for all, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is the final push to create a Greater Israel, which will include not only Gaza and the West Bank, but chunks of Lebanon and Syria. It is the culmination of the Zionist dream. And it will be paid for with rivers of blood — Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian.

Minister of Agriculture and Food Security of Israel Avi Dichter was probably offering conservative estimates when he said “I think that we are going to stay in Gaza for a long time. I think most people understand that [Israel] will be years in some kind of West Bank situation where you go in and out and maybe you remain along Netzarim [corridor].”

Mass extermination takes time. It is also expensive. Fortunately for Israel, its lobby in the U.S. has a stranglehold on Congress, our electoral process and the media narrative. Americans, although 61 percent support ending weapons shipments to Israel, will pay for it. And those that express dissent will be frog-marched into Zionist black holes where their voices are silenced and their careers jeopardized or destroyed. Donald Trump and the Republicans have an open disdain for democracy, but so do the Democrats and Joe Biden.

The U.S. provided $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel from October 2023 to October 2024, a substantial increase from the already $3.8 billion in military aid the U.S. gives Israel annually. This is a record for a single year. The State Department has informed Congress that it intends to approve another $8 billion in purchases of U.S.-made arms by Israel. This will provide Israel with more GPS guidance systems for bombs, more artillery shells, more missiles for fighter jets and helicopters, and more bombs, including 2,800 unguided MK-84 bombs, which Israel has a habit of dropping on densely packed tent encampments in Gaza. The pressure wave from the 2,000-pound MK-84 pulverizes buildings and exterminates life within a 400-yard radius. The blast, which ruptures lungs, rips apart limbs and bursts sinus cavities up to hundreds of yards away, leaves behind a 50-foot-wide and 36-foot-deep crater. Israel appears to have used this bomb to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, in Beirut on September 27, 2024.

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It Begins: China Cuts Undersea Internet Cables to Taiwan

In September, a group of journalists (including me) were hosted by Taiwanese national security experts to discuss the developing crisis of Chinese aggression toward Taiwan.

The portion of the week-long visit at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, the Taiwanese Defense and Security Think Tank akin to MITRE, Rand, or The Aerospace Corporation, contained an urgent and compelling message.

“We will be quarantined within six months and the first step of the operation will be China cutting our undersea cables to interrupt our communications with the world” was what Senior research fellows at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan, Drs. Tzu-Yun Su, Shan-son Kung, and Charles C.J. Wang, shared.  Their observations were prescient because that has now happened.

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Biden to Rush Final ‘Substantial’ Weapons Transfer to Ukraine

Before President Joe Biden exits the White House later this month, he is planning a massive final aid package for Ukraine. The Pentagon will attempt to rush the weapons to Kiev before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Two defense officials said the new package would be announced on Thursday during a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at an American military base in Germany, the Associated Press reported. The sources added that the weapons will come directly from US military stockpiles, and will be fast-tracked to Ukraine before Trump’s second term begins in less than two weeks.

The rush to provide Kiev with a “substantial” arms shipment before Trump returns to power appears aimed at undermining the president-elect’s stated goal of bringing the war in Ukraine to an end.

Since the American people voted for Trump to be the next president, the current administration has significantly escalated support for Kiev, even allowing Ukrainian forces to use long-range American missiles against targets inside Russia. Biden has also signed off on billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine since the war kicked off in early 2022.

The sources did not tell the AP how large the final package would be, though there is about $4 billion in congressionally authorized funding for Ukraine. The officials indicated that the Trump administration will have “more than a couple billion” in funding to send weapons to Ukraine.

While Trump pledged to bring the war to a close on the campaign trail, some incoming officials have stated that he intends to continue the arms shipments once he returns to power.

Since the start of the war, Washington has approved over $180 billion in aid to Ukraine; however, Kiev insists it has received only a fraction of that sum.

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Drones, exploding parcels and sabotage: How hybrid tactics target the West

When mysterious drones began appearing over oil rigs and wind farms off Norway’s coast about three years ago, officials were not certain where they came from.

But “we knew what they were doing,” Stale Ulriksen, a researcher at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy, said in a recent interview. “Some of it was espionage, where they are charting a lot of things. Some of it, I think, was positioning in case of a war or a deep crisis.”

The drones were suspected of being launched from Russian-controlled ships in the North Sea, Ulriksen said, including some ships that were near underwater energy pipelines. Norway could not do much to stop them, he added, given that they were flying over international waters.

In recent weeks, reports of drone swarms over the United States’ East Coast have brought fears of hybrid warfare to widespread attention. Only 100 of 5,000 drone sightings there required further examination, U.S. officials said, and so far none are believed to have been foreign surveillance drones. But it is a different story for the drones spotted in late November and early December over military bases in England and Germany where U.S. forces are stationed.

Military analysts have concluded those drones may have been on a state-sponsored surveillance mission, according to one U.S. official familiar with the incidents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation. British and German defense officials declined to discuss details of the sightings.

Experts said the drones’ presence was indicative of a so-called hybrid or “gray zone” attack against the West, where a range of tactics — military, cyber, economic and even psychological — are used to covertly attack or destabilize an enemy.

As Russia, Iran and other hostile states become increasingly brazen in their hybrid attacks on Western countries — such as the hacking of sensitive computer systems and alleged assassination plots — defense officials face a thorny challenge. How to deter such acts without touching off a broader and potentially deadly conflict? And how to assign blame against the attacker when the strikes are designed to evade culpability?

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Attacking Iran Would Be Wrong and Illegal

Richard Nephew thinks that the case against attacking Iran isn’t as strong as it used to be:

But today, the case against military action is not so neat.

If anything, the case against attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities is stronger than it has ever been. It is because Iran’s nuclear program has advanced so far that we have no reason to believe that military action would be successful. Because Iran is more vulnerable than it has been in the recent past, that makes it more likely that an attack would spur the Iranian government to pursue nuclear weapons as a deterrent. When a government feels more threatened than before but has more advanced capabilities for developing these weapons, that is a terrible time to make their fears of attack a reality. Thanks in large part to the stupidity and malice of hawks in the U.S. and Israel, Tehran’s incentives to acquire nuclear weapons have increased. That is why we should reject a military option that gives Iran an even bigger incentive to cross that line.

Military action against Iran is unnecessary, and the threat of military action has made the nuclear issue harder to resolve. The Iranian government likely could have built a small nuclear arsenal over the last six and a half years since Trump reneged on the nuclear deal, but their leadership has not wanted to do that. Western policymakers talk about attacking Iran as if this were a last ditch option to halt proliferation, but Iran weren’t constantly being threatened with attack (and then occasionally attacked) their government would have fewer incentives to consider acquiring nuclear weapons.

Nephew writes, “But unless it is prepared to live in the world that Iranian nuclear weapons would create, it may have little choice but to attack Iran—and soon.” This is dangerous nonsense. The U.S. has no right to attack Iran in the name of “preventing” a possible threat sometime in the future. Even if Iran were building a nuclear arsenal right now (it isn’t), the U.S. would have no right to attack them. The prohibition against the use of force has only one exception, and waging a preventive war against Iran has nothing to do with self-defense. If the U.S. chose to attack Iran, it would be doing so because it wanted to and because it had no respect for international law. It would be the act of a rogue aggressor.

One of the biggest lies that interventionists like to tell is that the U.S. has been forced into taking military action. They will always insist that they don’t want war, but that the other state has “forced” the most powerful country in the world to attack anyway. What they usually mean is that the U.S. has issued maximalist demands that the other government cannot accept without humiliation, and then when the other government refuses to capitulate the U.S. “has to” attack the much weaker state. This is the brutish logic of a thug. It is also the logic of an imperialist.

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Leaked emails expose ‘collaborative efforts’ between Israeli govt and Center for Countering Digital Hate

Emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal how leading “anti-hate” campaigner Imran Ahmed collaborated with Israeli embassy officials to censor pro-Palestine social media accounts — and courted them for donations to his censorship-obsessed Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Since emerging in America from seemingly out of the blue in 2020, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has become one of the trans-Atlantic establishment’s most effective tools for censoring online speech. Its founder, Imran Ahmed, has nurtured close ties with the Biden White House since moving to Washington DC, targeting its political enemies with calls for their removal from social media. Back in his hometown of London, Ahmed was an influential advisor to the neoliberal wing of UK Labour, helping sabotage the leftist insurgency of Jeremy Corbyn and place his ally, Keir Starmer, in charge of the party. 

Ahmed has been embroiled in controversy since journalists Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi published internal CCDH documents showing he held private meetings with influential Democratic lawmakers throughout 2024 to advance a plan to “kill Elon Musk’s Twitter.” The billionaire Twitter/X owner and his allies in president-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle retaliated by accusing the British operative of violating laws against foreign interference in American politics.

Ahmed, for his part, has dismissed the charge that he colludes with foreign governments as a kooky conspiracy. “The Center for Countering Digital Hate researches conspiracy theories. We don’t engage with them,” he said.

However, internal CCDH emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal that while Ahmed nurtures ties to the Labour government in Britain, the self-styled “anti-hate” campaigner also enjoys a secret, “collaborative” relationship with a rogue foreign government whose leadership currently stands accused of genocide by the International Court of Justice, and is wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

Provided by a CCDH insider who requested to remain anonymous out of fear that Ahmed and his allies would retaliate against him, the emails reveal that top officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC helped introduce Ahmed to potential funders, and were even invited to review a CCDH report before its publication. The report urged Meta to remove pro-Palestine Facebook groups on the grounds that they promoted “anti-Jewish hate.” 

Ahmed seemed agitated when The Grayzone reached him by phone and asked him to confirm his email exchanges with the Israeli officials. “I have no idea which emails you’re talking about,” he stated. “You’ll have to send them through to us and have a look at them and come back to you.”

When asked if he had collaborated with the Israeli government, Ahmed did not deny the relationship. “We work with all governments,” he claimed. 

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Genocidal President, Genocidal Politics

When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.

It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.

Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.

While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”

The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.

For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”

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2025, Iran Is Back in the U.S. Crosshairs for Regime Change

A new American president and a new Middle East configuration have brought Iran back into the crosshairs for regime change with an intoxicating vengeance.

The signs are that Iran is going to face intensified hostility from the U.S. over the next year for regime change.

The sudden fall of Syria and the isolation of Hezbollah in Lebanon – Iran’s regional allies – have made Tehran look vulnerable.

Anti-Iran hawks in the U.S. are cock-a-hoop about the prospect of regime change in Tehran.

The recent death of Jimmy Carter at the age of 100 puts in perspective how great a prize the Islamic Republic represents for Washington’s imperial desires. Carter was disparaged as the American president who lost Iran in 1979 as a crucial client state for U.S. power in the Middle East.

For over four decades, American imperialist power has sought to topple the Islamic Republic and return the Persian nation to the U.S. global fold.

Though, as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken lamented last month, American “regime change experiments” in Iran have been a failure.

Now, however, there is renewed enthusiasm in Washington for the Persian prize.

The lust for regime change in Tehran has peaked with the dramatic fall of President al-Assad in Syria.

American lawmakers and Iranian exiles are publicly calling for the new Trump administration to get back to its maximum pressure campaign on Tehran because they believe there is “a perfect moment” for regime change.

During Donald Trump’s first White House (2017-2021), he revoked the Iranian nuclear deal of the Obama administration and ramped up economic sanctions in what was referred to as a policy of “maximum pressure.”

A growing chorus of Republicans and Democrats are urging the United States to seize the opportunity of a perceived weakened Iran to overthrow the clerical rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

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