Taxi drivers know everything

I had a very intelligent taxi driver this evening. 

I don't travel by taxi that often, which is a shame. 

The more I see of taxi drivers, the more I think they know much more than the companymen who get their opinions from the internet. 

He said he is totally opposed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and to America's attack on Iran and Venezuela, and on the other hand he points out that Russia was provoked by America. 

He thinks Calin Georgescu was a brilliant man, had his election annulled because of interference, either by America or by the Romanian deep state. 

There's no question that that is true. The mistakes CG made he said were to say he would investigate historical corrupt privatisations and say he would stop giving money to Ukraine. 

Had Georgescu not said those two things. He would probably have been allowed to win. He might be right. 

He admires Viktor Orbán, and so in some ways do I, but I pointed out that Viktor Orbán was very corrupt. This is something I know not from the media, whom I do not trust, but from various people in Hungary, whom I do trust. 

Still, I am very grateful that Nicușor Dan won. 

Not because I think he is any good. I don't, but because after he won suddenly business sprung back to life, which it would not have done had somebody else won. That's good for me, who am in business, but for everybody. 

Romania is simply not in a position to defy, I am quite sure, NATO but NATO has passed its sell-by date and should be dissolved, and the sooner the better. 

If it's not dissolved, at least Great Britain should leave, but Great Britain is the worst warmonger among the NATO members.

No doubt she has its reasons for wanting to remain friends with America. No doubt there are advantages that I don't know about, but I suspect the best thing we could do is leave and just tend our garden. 

Mass murder, looting, kidnapping and piracy are in fashion while hypocrisy is out of fashion

The 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil seized by the USA are worth something like $6 trillion, based on a price of $92 per barrel, which is 54 times Venezuela's annual GDP. 

Extracting this oil will require massive investments and years of infrastructure work. Will it be worth the trouble?

The damage done to America’s standing in the world by this is difficult to gauge as so many things have damaged it. 

After piracy, mass murder and starting a war without any pretence that it was provoked does America have a reputation to damage? 

I think it does because people get confused by wars, especially in the Middle East, and killing alleged drug smugglers and arresting ships quite legally carrying merchandise to Russia.  

Kidnapping Maduro and taking Venezuela's oil, on the other hand, can be understood by a child of five.

The American empire was always an enterprise dedicated to accumulating as much power and money as possible, and for decades it has been run by people most of whom are dedicated to those things, but it used to be intelligent and discreet about it and preserve plausible deniability. 

This is what has changed with the present administration. 

The world is not run by psychopaths. They usually get found out in developed countries before they take power. 

It is largely run by opportunists and self-interested people who like the political game which means trickery, deceit and backstabbing and a small element of political belief. 

Much the same is true of many large companies. They too are rarely run by psychopaths thought the companies may themselves be psychopathic. 

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue and the decline in hypocrisy is a bad, not a good thing.

Arundhati Roy said, "So, the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.” 

The same goes for other America's other killing fields and for the Western civilisation standing for something admirable. 

90% of Ukraine's warehouses are gone

Ukraine's drone attacks on Russian Wildberries warehouses marked an escalation in the war and predictably Russia has retaliated. 

“Russia has destroyed approximately 90% of the warehouse facilities of retail chains in Ukraine,” says Ukrainian Minister of Agrarian Policy Vysotsky.

Ukraine ought to accept onerous Russian terms in order to keep possession of Odessa and the coast.

I heard former US Ambassador Chas Freeman, whose wisdom I greatly respect, say yesterday that Zelensky "is almost certainly corrupt". 

Canny retired CIA analyst Larry Johnson thinks the same.

Who knows? I don't understand his or the European Union's exit strategy, if they have one.

Brian Berletic says that Russia spends about 10% as much as the US on defence but outproduces the US anywhere between 3-10 times depending on the munition. 

He says Western sources say Russia is developing a supermissile more effective than anything America has. 

He attributes Russian success in producing weapons to Russia defence manufacturers being state-owned.  That sounds very believable to me. I always thought defence companies should be publicly owned. 

This, the latest Judging Freedom Intel Round Table, is interesting on Ukraine. 

The Strait of Hormuz has never been closed

I heard the BBC say yesterday that the Strait of Hormuz is closed.  

This is untrue. 

7 ships passed through yesterday.

17 the day before. 

The Strait of Hormuz has been open every day since February 28. 

Iran never closed it but charged a toll and only gave permission for some ships to pass. 

Traffic has collapsed but the handful of tankers that transit each day do so with Iranian permission after paying usually between $2 million and $4 million per ship in yuan or USDT on the Tron network. 

Iran wants to be compensated for the damage inflicted by the USA in its bombing raids but claims the fees are for maintenance or something like that  That makes them comply with international law, I assume. 

The IRGC issues vessels clearance with a time slot and an agreed route through Iranian waters near Larak Island where the Iranian navy, which still exists despite Donald Trump’s claim to have destroyed it, watches them carefully. 

China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, Iraq, Bangladesh pass. 

Shadow fleet operators linked obscurely to Russia pass. 

Not all pay the full toll. Ships from some countries favoured by Iran pay nothing. 

One such country is Nato member Spain.

It is not a blockade. 

Lloyd’s of London has withdrawn standard hull and machinery coverage for Hormuz transits. War-risk policies now carry premiums of up to 5 percent of vessel value. But if a vessel can prove it has paid the toll and received Iranian clearance this considerably lowers the premium. 

Lloyds has formalised Iranian authority over the strait.

Lloyds of London, like the bond market, proves the effectiveness of free market economics. 

By the way, I remember an Iranian minister guaranteed any ship safe passage if it was accompanied by a US warship, but his offer wasn't taken up. I thought that droll.

"War as a means of extending power and imposing one's will is increasingly obsolete."

Douglas Macgregor talking to Glenn Diesen argues that "war as a means of extending power and imposing one's will is increasingly obsolete." He said that while the U.S. remains an outlier in its reliance on war, major continental powers like Russia and China actively try to avoid direct military entanglement because it is impossible to control. Colonel Macgregor notes that large powers like Russia or Iran do not actually want massive territorial acquisition because "territorial acquisition is a lot of trouble... you have to administer it, you have to shelter, protect, and support the population."  

This is one of the cleverest talks I have heard in a long time. I urge you to listen. DM is a brilliant man.

Hitler thought land meant power and so it did until the Western world underwent the 1950s economic miracle and agricultural methods were revolutionised. He thought possessing Canada was the secret of Britain's power. and he was of course wrong even in his own day. 

Saddam believed and the Americans and Israelis continue to believe in expanding their rule by war and invading countries, but it is old-fashioned thinking. 

War now is about economics and satellites, not land. 

Buffer zones for example are obsolete in the age of drones. 

Colonel Macgregor thinks alliances are too, an interesting idea. 

Of course Nato is an aliance only in form, in reality as much vassilage as was the Warsaw Pact which Moscow set up as a response.  

In fact within the Warsaw Pact Organisation Ceaușescu was more independent of Moscow than any Nato leaders are of Washington except possibly Spain and Turkey. 

Don't support Hezbollah or Iran if you live in Great Britain. Supporting Russia is dangerous in Czechia and quite a few other places.

I don't support Russia, just so you know. 

The 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was provoked by PLO attacks on Israel launched from Lebanon but the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was triggered by the attempted assassination of Israel's ambassador in London by gunmen from Abu Nidal, a rival, dissident Palestinian group separate from and often at war with the PLO. 

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin chose to blame the PLO for the attack and used it as a casus belli. 

This was the invasion which brought Hezbollah into existence, midwived partly by Iran. 

If you choose you can call Hezbollah terrorists and Iran a sponsor of terrorism for fighting the Israeli invasion but it seems a wholly subjective matter. 

Every move in the Arab-Israeli conflict is in response to an earlier thing until you get back to the Balfour Declaration. 

That's where it all begins.

I remember Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, tweeting that he would block any Neanderthal anti-Semite who denied that Hezbollah was a threat to the United Kingdom and I fell on his sword.

On the other hand, let me be clear that I am not saying anything in support of Hezbollah.  

If I did so, thanks to the change in the law for which he was arguing, I could be arrested as I walked down the steps of the next plane I take to England and I could get 14 years in prison. 

Expressing support for the Iranian government or the regular Iranian military (the Artesh) is generally not illegal in the UK, as long as your statements do not support the IRGC. Under a recent legal change support for the IRGC gets you up to 14 years inside and the IRGC is enmeshed with the armed services. It is also illegal to support Iranian violence, but war means violence. Supporting the Iranian regime's violent suppression of domestic protesters or its foreign attacks violates UK anti-terrorism and national security laws.

Can an Englishman still say that he hopes Iran defeats the USA and gets the Americans to leave the Middle East? I think so but am not at all sure. It may depends on a jury.

Great caution is advisable. 

Supporting the IDF's actions in Gaza and Lebanon or the USAF bombing schoolgirls is absolutely legal.

"Freedom is England's secret weapon" said Stanley Baldwin.

'It's a free country' stroppy girls in England used to say if you asked if you could sit on the seat next to them but I don't imagine anyone says it now. It obviously is not. 

Nobody seems to care. 

Nobody argues the UK or the EU should copy the US First Amendment permitting free speech.

The USA is the only rich country left that still has free speech which used to be the norm in democratic countries until the 1960s cultural revolution. 

Talking of which the latest Intel Round Table is well worth watching, if you are not in Czechia. 

A Czech who wrote an article deemed pro-Russian was done for justifying genocide. I read this over breakfast years ago to the founder of the British Libertarian Party who said his conviction was well deserved. 

Eastern Europe had a short period of free speech after 1989.

Was I wrong about the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession?

General Mladic has died, the butcher of Srebrenica. 

Srebrenica. was a terrible thing. I remember vividly my horror at realising a massacre was going to happen there and there being no way of stopping it.

I remember bursting into tears hearing someone telling me about it when I was in Bosnia just after the war ended.

Mladic killed 8,000 men but he spared the women, boys and men of 60 or older. It was not therefore not genocide, as the UN declared. 

I followed the Yugoslav wars with keen attention and read much about them including Noel Malcolm's history of Bosnia and many other books. 

I wanted British and European intervention to help first the Croats and then the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs and applauded the USA for finally intervening.

A very clever American who worked for USAID told me in Pristina that the Kosovo war was the last just war. I now wonder.

The history of the last few years and a Neutrality Studies podcast I just heard with historian David Gibbs and Colonel Douglas Macgregor make me now think with sadness that there was much to be said for the Serbs and much against the Kosovars. 

However a British ambassador to Belgrade said that Milosevic was evil and this is probably right. 

Both Colonel Macgregor and Professor Gibbs think that the Yugoslav interventions were not motivated by humanitarianism but intended to justify NATO's continued existence and keep Europe following Washington. That I am sure is right.

Colonel Macgregor argued that Bosnia and Kosovo were an early laboratory for forced political and ethnic integration.

We see now that America was bent on imposing its rule on the world, refighting the Second World War and battling evil. 

That led to the wars we have today though the Trump administration has dropped the guff about fighting evil and now talks about fighting to steal other countries' possessions, such as oil. 

Yugoslavia was where the modern world began and this brave new world may lead  - may have led - to a third world war.

The Yugoslav conflicts made military intervention popular among liberals and the left.

Democracies now launched wars for values.

Nationalism was now seen as the enemy, which is wasn't before. What was St Gandhi? 

Yeltsin saw Serbia as part of Russia's sphere of influence but was powerless to do anything.

Colonel Macgregor said he heard talk before the bombing of Kosovo of NATO spreading democracy from Bosnia to Russia.

In the Yugoslav wars the media propagandised for the Bosniaks and Kosovars as now they propagandise about the current wars. 

We can believe few things we read in the mainstream media and nothing the American government says.

Colonel Macgregor says he is an isolationist. I wish America followed his lead and the UK and Romania too.

Edwin Luttwak's cruel fun

American strategist and historian Edward Luttwak once wrote an excellent article that I strongly agreed with about the utter unimportance of the Middle East, arguing that the West should leave it alone.

Since October 7, 2023 he has decided it is very important and he wins the medal for unpleasantness (and lack of patriotism) with his posts on X mocking American chefs delivering aid who were killed by the Israelis.

A celebrity chef seeking more celebrity sends amateurs into a very active war zone to deliver trivial quantities of food as a publicity stunt while hundreds of truckloads are arriving unreported. Unaccountably, the IDF failed to stop fighting its war in homage to the great chef.


When I made cruel fun of the celebrity chef humanitarians who died in delivering trivial amounts of food in Gaza while hundreds of heavy trucks enter each day, I did not know where these humanitarians stayed before venturing south : the Norman Hotel in Tel Aviv : $800 /basic room

Israel said at the time that the killings were an accident but now we have the commander who ordered the killings saying he is not sorry about it - the aid workers had links with Hamas and is "not really an organisation you can say is innocent."

I avoid using the word genocide except when quoting people. I prefer holocaust, which means burnt offering. Murder is the most useful word.

Clara Weiss on the Trotskyite site World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has a very interesting interview dated 5 January 2023 with Christian Gerlach, Professor of Modern History at the University of Bern and a leading authority on the Second World War. He is obviously very left-wing indeed. 

I recommend the whole interview which is about the German hunger plan to starve to death 20 million or more Soviet citizens. 

That plan was not really put into practice but almost 3.5 million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered through a systematic policy of starvation.

The passage below from the discussion is topical now.


CW: You have done extensive research into the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany but also other genocides. Today, the term “genocide” is regularly used by politicians and the media but with little to no evidence provided and no serious discussion of what the term actually means. Can you explain to a lay audience what issues a historian needs to consider when it comes to the assessment of whether or not a given historical event constitutes a genocide?

CG: Genocide is an analytically worthless concept made for political purposes. I don’t use it. It serves for political condemnation and intervention, that is, as a pretext for war (whether with aerial attacks, ground forces or deadly “sanctions,” as economic warfare is warfare). It also serves for prosecution in show trials, as part of the two main remedies that bourgeois regimes offer: enforced regime change and a bit of re-education. But since the socioeconomic problems and conflicts underlying mass violence are not being addressed in that way, such interventions are as “successful” in stopping violence as they were in Iraq or Libya; often they aggravate it.

How Wars Begin

I posted this on 1 March 2023 and alas it is now even more topical. I corrected some mistakes. Joseph Kennedy was nether a bootlegger nor an anti-Semite. I made other changes too. For example I took out the phrase 'nihilistic terrorists' because the word terrorist adds heat not light, somewhat like the word genocide. 

Donald Trump is no Bismarck or Cavour but a great failure like Napoleon III (or Charles X of Sweden to go further back) and far less substantial than the latter two. Netanyahu has his Bismarckian qualities as well as resembling certain later German Chancellors.


I re-watched most of AJP Taylor's lectures on How Wars Begin recently and strongly recommend them. He first gave them in 1978, live without a timer or autocues, something that was absolutely antediluvian then.

In brief, all the wars happened by mistake pretty much on all sides except when Cavour or Bismarck were involved. Hitler was not nearly so brilliant as them. As Norman Stone said of the fall of France in 1940, "A Bismarck or a Churchill could control success of this order, a Hitler not".

The Franco-Prussian war in particular was completely unnecessary: an elephant trap set by Bismarck against the wishes of his master William I, into which Napoleon III walked.

Some think Putin walked into a comparable American trap when he invaded Ukraine, but I do not. The State Department did not expect it till December 2021 nor expect Ukraine to withstand the invasion when it happened.

The lecture on the Second World War makes clear that America provoked Pearl Harbor.

That is a partial analogy with US policy towards Ukraine from 2008 onwards.

It does not justify Pearl Harbor or Putin's attempt to topple the Ukrainian government, but explains both.

An incredibly telling passage in the Guardian obituary of Peter Snape

'On one occasion, he was profoundly shocked, when sitting on the government bench as the “duty whip” during a late-night debate, to be unexpectedly joined by the prime minister, James Callaghan, who asked him conversationally (and sotto voce) if he had ever thought of emigrating because “this country is finished”. Snape was still a relatively new and young MP and discreetly kept this exchange entirely private.'

Ecstasy

Bewitching like the wanton mermaid's songs,
Yet from mine ear the templing tune is blown
Venus and Adonis

 
THE ideal, cheerful, sensuous. Pagan life is not sick or sorry. No ; yet its natural end is the sort of life which Pompeii and Herculaneum bring so vividly before us, — a life which by no means in itself suggests the thought of horror and misery, which even, in many ways, gratifies the senses and the understanding ; but by the very intensity and unremittingness of its appeal to the senses and the understanding, by its stimulating a single side of us too absolutely, ends by fatiguing and revolting us ; ends by leaving us with a sense of confinement, of oppression, — with a desire for an utter change, for clouds, storms, effusion, and relief. 

Matthew Arnold.

I FLUNG away, and with full cry 

Of wild affections, rid 

In post for pleasures, bent to try 

All gamesters that would bid. I played with fire, did counsel spurn, 

Made life my common stake ; 

But never thought that fire would burn. 

Or that a soul could ache. 

Henry Vaughan

This is the entry for August 26 from 'Words and days : a table-book of prose and verse' by Bowyer Nichols (1895) 

Patrick Craig Roberts talking to Dr Nima Alkhorshid on Dialogue Works

Paul Craig Roberts says that Iranian leaders are mistaken if they view a pause in U.S. attacks as more than tactical. Washington is not interested in peace but is focused on maximum pressure to control the region, making any negotiations insincere. 

"I was 25 years in Washington essentially at the top, and those people they can't accept defeats."

"When you agree to a ceasefire before you finish off the enemy, the war's not over. And the longer this thing goes on, the more the Americans can come to the conclusion: 'We have to win this, our national prestige is at stake, America's military reputation, we can't let Iran prevail,' and they'll talk themselves into using nuclear weapons. That's the danger I've always seen, I pointed it out at the beginning, it still worries me."

"Weaponising the US dollar through sanctions is the true threat to its global reserve status."

Back in November talking to Iran's Pars Today he said:

"I was surprised that Iran did not make greater use of the Iron Dome’s ineffectiveness, as it was unable to intercept Iran’s attacks. Iran could have continued the assault and destroyed Israel.

...A ceasefire is usually proposed by the side that is losing its military advantage. In this case, Israel was able to gain an opportunity to recover by requesting a ceasefire. By accepting this pause, Iran gave Israel time to rebuild.”

I used to think he and other people like Pepe Escobar and Alastair Crooke were pretty crazy but the last few years have taught us all a lot about America. 

I always trusted John Mearsheimer from at least 2014 or before. The Syrian war taught me to trust Alastair Crooke. I remember enjoying but distrusting Douglas Macgregor and Scott Ritter when friends sent me their broadcasts after Russia invaded Ukraine and continuing following Sir Lawrence Freedman and the RUSI boys etc etc, time thrown away.

Said yesterday

I asked a prime minister of one of the major countries back in 2023, I said, you know, the Ukraine war is absurd. You know, it’s a dead end. Why don’t you say something in Washington? And he said to me, “Jeffrey, they treat us like children in Washington.” And then we were in a room, suddenly the meeting started, so I didn’t get a follow-up. But I have thought ever since, 3 years onward, how could a leader of a major country of Europe allow himself and his colleagues to be treated as children? And that taking that as an explanation why you don’t speak up in Washington, it’s stuck with me very, very painfully, that remark.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs talking to Glenn Diesen

We are like kids, and we keep maintaining this climate of hate. This is worrying because it’s also a matter of maturity—not just political maturity, but also the maturity of individuals. And what we see today are people who behave like teenagers.

Swiss Colonel Jacques Baud

The answer to the question “Why is that terrible thing happening?” is usually “Because it makes some rich white guys wealthier” or “Because it helps shore up US planetary domination” or “Because Israel wants it,” and it’s often some combination of all three.

Caitlin Johnstone

As the prime minister described it, he was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.

Toronto Star article

Iran is fighting for much or most of the world

Trita Parsi is interesting on 'Why so many countries around the world quietly root for Iran':

'There is relief [among officials from a wide variety of countries who spoke to Mr Parsi] that aggression and violations of international law did not pay off for the US and Israel in Iran, just as they didn’t for Russia in Ukraine. Venezuela was, in the eyes of many, a terrifying case. Regardless of one’s views of Maduro, the idea that a superpower could surgically kidnap the head of state of another country, install its favored ruler—who must now get her social media posts approved by the US Secretary of State—and gleefully announce that Venezuela is now American territory was petrifying to a lot of countries. So was the fact that European leaders praised the regime-change operation while dismissing concerns about its legality.

'Europe, which had by and large stood against the George W. Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq, was now enthusiastically onboard with regime change in Venezuela, all while insisting on the sanctity of international law in Ukraine and Greenland. That lack of resistance made the cost of a US neocolonial rampage all the more manageable. And given Donald Trump’s proclivities, both friends and foes of the United States feared they could be next.

'...As one official from a traditional American ally told me: “Had it not been for the resilience of the Iranians, Trump would likely have attacked Cuba by now and perhaps even annexed Greenland.”'

Caitlin Johnstone goes much further and says this (presumably it's about the letter from leftists in the Guardian criticising the Iranian government):

'It’s crazy this even needs to be said, but if you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea. 

'If you live in the US or one of its allied nations, then you live under the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on earth, and that’s where your focus belongs. You do not have any legitimacy in squandering any of your energy and attention criticizing human rights abuses in empire-targeted nations while living under a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by a nonstop river of human blood. It is not okay for you to use your western privilege to attack the nations your own government is working to help absorb into the power structure you live under.'

'....Iran has only survived the latest imperial onslaught because Tehran tightly controls what happens in that country. The only reason we didn’t see Xinjiang absorbed into the western power umbrella with the help of CIA-backed separatists is because Beijing waged a sweeping crackdown on the extremist factions who’d been launching attacks in the province. The only reason North Korea has gone relatively unmolested by the western empire in recent years is because its government obtained nuclear weapons. It’s baby-brained analysis to pretend such things happen independently of the US and its allies working to take control of unabsorbed nations and force them into compliance with Washington’s capitalist world order.'

I disagree with her on this - I think we should criticise Russia and any country that attacks or invades another country, but at a time like this we should leave the ones that do not alone. 

Said in the last day

It feels like what happened at Cambridge has been a sort of Chernobyl moment for academia. It’s revealed the incompetence, corruption and stupidity of those running the system and its hard to unsee once seen. Trust in the system has been destroyed.
Nick Longrich, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bath.


Again, we have no strategy [with Iran]. We haven't had a strategy really since the Soviet Union collapsed and the state system went with it. I think what we adopted was something we called the rules-based liberal international order which was really an attempt to consolidate American political, military, economic hegemony over the world behind the façade of something that was going to spread democracy, human rights, goodness, love and truth which was all nonsense. What we did was we began a series of interventions ultimately designed to edge out and suppress anybody who could be a potential competitor.
Colonel Douglas Macgregor

US officials suppressed internal assessments that Al Qaeda’s Syrian wing had an “advanced” sarin production cell even as the US publicly blamed the Assad government for a 2013 chemical weapons attack, a report reveals.

Antisemitism and islamophobia

"We're cooperating with the European and US far right against Islam because we have a common struggle. Antisemitism no longer works for us because it doesn't grab attention among Westerners, but Islam we can exploit to get them to support us."

Amichai Chikli, Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs.

American casualties

The number of U.S. servicemen and women reported wounded or killed in the Iran war has jumped to 774, according to the Washington Post. All those casualties are the fault of Trump, Netanyahu and the Mossad as are the far greater number of Iranian casualties, mostly civilians. 

I wonder if that Washington Post number is still an underestimate and wonder how many Israeli casualties there have been. 

Don't mess with Turkey

Turkey is the largest and most heavily armed state in the region with an army ten times bigger than the IDF.

Douglas Macgregor, whom I learn much from, has been expecting a Turkish intervention in Israel's war for years but so far it has not happened. He has also been expecting a Ukrainian defeat for years.

He compares the current situation of Syria to the 1939 fourth partition of Poland between Germany and Russia.

Netanyahu needs to defeat Iran to allow his Greater Israel project to succeed but antagonised Turkey by striking a military airbase in Syria close to the Turkish border, that the Turks were considering using. It could lead Turkey to respond with severe military force if Turkish troops or direct assets are targeted again. 

Alastair Crooke and Chas Freeman say much the same except they say the Greater Israel project is now impractical in any case.

Clearly this incident happened to win the Likud support in the forthcoming election.

Why do Erdogan and Arab and European leaders not fly to Tehran and organise a peace? 

This should be Andy Burnham's priority.

MI6/CIA deception about hacked (unnamed) power plant

My nose tells me the story in the very MI6-adjacent Sunday Telegraph that Iranian hackers disabled a British power station for a time is not true. 

The article gives not one scintilla of evidence. 

Looking on X I see someone has posted this which saves me the trouble of writing it.

Per GROK more fear mongering and false flags. What proves it was Iranian linked? There is no publicly released technical forensic evidence (such as specific malware samples, IP addresses, code signatures, or detailed TTPs unique to this incident) that independently “proves” Iranian linkage in open sources. The attribution rests primarily on the following:

"Short term pain, long term gain"

"The rise of the West was not made possible by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion... but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence." Samuel Huntington's remark is a statement of the obvious but it is worrying that it was quoted with approval by Palantir co-owner Alex Karp who is doing so much to help the IDF in Gaza.

"This mob that is not a people, that they call themselves a Palestinian people but they are not a people. They have never been a people and have no rights. The rights are ours. We say these things unequivocally.....Gaza is the Land of Israel, Gaza is ours, Nablus is ours, Jenin is ours, all of them are ours".
Israel’s Chief Rabbi David Yosef in an address at West Jerusalem’s Gush Katif Museum on August 20th

"Institutions nominally dedicated to knowledge — universities, media organisations, publishing houses — are full of people captivated by second-hand fantasies, excluding coherent thought" Kathleen Stock

This is funny - innumerable Americans on political TV programmes on TV repeating "short term pain, long term gain" about petrol prices.

Weather Underground leader and convicted bomber Bernardine Dohrn rears her head again, to condemn Iran

The letter to the Guardian by leftists criticising Iran is signed by the infamous communist terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, 'retired professor of law' (I wrote here about her praising Charles Manson's followers' murder of Sharon Tate) and her almost equally dreadful husband Bill Ayers.

Mr Obama's political career was launched in a fundraiser in their drawing room, just so you know.

I am certainly no admirer of hers but rereading this post I see she was quite right when she said in 2010 in an interview:

"The real terrorist is the American government, state terrorism unleashed against the world."

But her anti-imperialism has softened.

Sami Ramadani, an Iraqi-born British academic and leftist, said this about the letter.

A famous victory by Iran

Larry Johnson was first to report that Iran disabled a base that cost $1 billion according to his sources in Bahrain.

This has forced the US Navy to move its supply operations 2200 miles away to Diego Garcia and caused the hardships being faced by US sailors in the Gulf some of whom are committing suicide or trying to, but Mr Hegseth kept quiet about it.

It is shameful that the UK is complicit in this unprovoked war by letting the US use Diego Garcia.

Germany at the brink

Germany is in a crisis, her greatest crisis since Khrushchev offered to permit a united democratic neutral Germany and Adenauer at Eisenhower's suggestion said no.

Germany is facing deindustrialisation because of the breakdown of its economic model: reliance on inexpensive imported energy to manufacture high-value export goods. It exports are undercut by cheap Chinese competition and impeded by EU regulations.

Whatever one may think of the German AfD party (Elon Musk and JD Vance love it, many Germans want to ban it as extremist and may succeed) its energy policy seems to me to make sense: to go first to the USA and then to Russia to obtain cheap energy and to go back to fossil fuels.

Back in 2022 I read people saying the Americans were using the Ukrainian war to separate Germany from Russia and China and make her dependent on expensive American liquefied gas. 

I dismissed this Machiavellian thinking then but don't now. Of course, the State Department certainly does thinks this way. 

What a steep learning curve the last four years have been.

What is the truth about the Beirut barracks bombings on October 23, 1983?

The Iranians do not seem to me to have given Donald Trump any reason let alone justification for his attack last year or this year.

America has wanted to overthrow the Iranian Islamic republic since the Shah was overthrown and for no clear reason that I can see except desire to dominate the Middle East and take revenge for the seizure by Iranian students of the American diplomats in 1979. (In fact they were not diplomats but working for the CIA and presumably working to undermine the new government). 

But Americans often mention their 220 marines, 18 sailors, and 3 soldiers on a peacekeeping mission who were killed in the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983, they claim by Hezbollah under the direction of Iranian Intelligence. 

When I come across this on two occasions I looked up the account of the incident in John Ghazvinian's magisterial book America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present – I can't recommend it enough-  and am writing this as an aide memoire.

The bombing was in retaliation for the US 6th Fleet shelling Shia villages and killing innocent villagers. 

Hezbollah and Iran always denied responsibility, while Islamic Jihad admitted responsibility. Casper Weinberger always said to the end of his life that it wasn't clear who was behind it and said this was why the US did not retaliate against Iran or Syria.

The US troops were in Lebanon as peacekeepers but also very much to support the Israeli invaders and pro Israeli Christian-led government. It seems to me that they had become combatants when they shelled the villages.

This is Max Blumenthal's view, that this was not the start of Muslim terrorism but part of the civil war in which Reagan had allowed US forces to become embroiled.

The families of the victims later sued Iran in a civil lawsuit and their lawyer uncovered, according to Wikipedia,  a U.S. National Security Agency intercept of a message sent from Iranian intelligence headquarters in Tehran to Hojjat ol-eslam Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus. As it was paraphrased by the judge "The message directed the Iranian ambassador to contact Hussein Musawi, the leader of the terrorist group Islamic Amal, and to instruct him ... 'to take a spectacular action against the United States Marines"'. 

'Musawi's Islamic Amal was a breakaway faction of the Amal Movement and an autonomous part of embryonic Hezbollah. According to Muhammad Sahimi, high-ranking US officials had a different interpretation from that intercept, which stopped them from ordering a revengeful attack against Iran.'

The US does not seem to have had any role in inciting Saddam to invade Iran in 1980 but supported Iraq. 250,000 to 500,000 Iranians were killed in that unprovoked war. Iran had no reason to love the US.

In 1982 Hezbollah came into existence with Iranian help to defend Lebanon against the invasion by Israel, which Israel launched to expel the PLO from Lebanon. 

And so it goes. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. 

A piece of advice: don't rely on AI to research topics like this. It is very biassed in favour of the American official line. Instead research and use common sense.

Is America Still Capable of Enforcing the World Order?

In the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

Is America Still Capable of Enforcing the World Order?

As the Iran war drains vital stockpiles of missile interceptors, American allies increasingly question Washington’s capacity to wage multi-front conflicts

By 

Yaroslav Trofimov

"Ever since President Trump’s return to office, America’s allies have been fretting about Washington’s intentions. Now, after the inconclusive war against Iran has eroded U.S. weapons stockpiles and laid bare the limits of American hard power, they also worry about American capabilities.

"Can America still defend its friends, if it wants to?"

"The question that officials in allied—and adversary—capitals are asking themselves is whether industrial decline, strategic incoherence and political dysfunction have weakened the U.S. to the point where it would no longer wield decisive force in a multi-front conflict that may encompass Europe, the Middle East and Asia. It is a concern shared by many in Washington, too." "

How they misinform us

David Miller says that a unit in the British government coordinates misinformation about Russia including the story of the poisoning of the Skripals, which I discovered to my great surprise thanks to former British ambassador Craig Murray is clearly a pack of lies, and the war crimes at Bucha. 

I have not studied what he says properly but post it here for you to see.

What is certain is that all we read in the mainstream media is what MI6 and the CIA etc want us to think. 

I wonder whether Michelle Haslam, whom I knew when she was posted here in Bucharest, is involved. I expect so.

Even though it was obvious to any informed person when the invasion of Iraq went wrong that America was the great danger to the world the habit of thinking well of America took a long time for me to break. 

I only reluctantly came to the obvious conclusion that Biden was worse than Putin but Biden is guilty of financing a holocaust.

Trump has less blood on his hands so far but is much worse.

As the man said, we have met the enemy and it is us.

A close friend of mine once said to me 'The poets do not sing of friendship' but breaking up with friends is as painful as breaking with a lover

In fact Shakespeare did when he made Orlando in As You Like It deplore 'violated vows/’Twixt the souls of friend and friend.'


“They parted—ne'er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining—
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between;—
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel


If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.
St John Henry Newman

Gideon Levy: 'There is no good Zionism and no bad Zionism. There is one Zionism, which established the Jewish state by forcibly expelling the Palestinians.'

'There is no good Zionism and no bad Zionism.
There is one Zionism, which established the Jewish state by forcibly expelling the Palestinians.
It did this in 1948 and in 1967, and it has been doing so to this day.'

The great Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, whom I think of as the conscience of Israel, wrote this in Ha'aretz January 18, 2020, in an opinion piece titled "Religious Zionism? The Secular Zionist Left Is the Mother of the Occupation." He makes the indisputable point to his secular liberal Israeli readers that today's Israeli religious settlers and religious right are continuing the Zionist project that was started by atheists, secular progressives and socialists.

Many of the most fanatical Zionists came from the Russian empire and quite a few Russian Jewish Bolsheviks also distinguished themselves by fanaticism.