CALIBAN

Alastair W. Crooke CMG is a former British diplomat, and was a ranking figure in both British intelligence (MI6) and the European Union. Historically, MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States have worked in close collaboration: "The close ties between the CIA and British MI6 were evident in Iran where CIA coup master Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., worked closely with MI6 to coordinate the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had tried to nationalize Iran’s oil industry." He expounds on the current unfolding Middle East War.



If the above video is taken down, you can access the audio of the interview with Alastair W. Crooke HERE.

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...But wait a minute, haven't we been here before?

Trump has backed himself into a corner. The self-imagined dealmaker sincerely believed that by applying economic pressure on Iran, backed up with the threat of force, the Iranian government would come to the negotiation table and agree to a nuclear deal that denied it everything it had achieved through diplomacy with the Obama administration. Trump believed he could bully America’s allies in Europe to go along with him. And, in the end, when he asked his military leaders to provide him with options to forcefully compel Iran to bend to his will, Trump was told that nothing short of an all-out war, involving more than 500,000 troops, could provide the outcome he sought, and even then only at great cost. Trump had run on a platform that promised an end to costly wars of choice in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. If he pulled the trigger on Iran, his chances of reelection in 2020 would be all but eliminated.

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As a way of widening the historical context to this war, it is important to note that said conflict transcends any particular US administration. As General Wesley Clark once admitted in public, this war turns out to be merely the latest in a string of seven planned Middle Eastern wars since the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.

Instead of giving a comprehensive history of the lead-up to the current Iran war, suffice it to say that around three years ago, the stage was being set. On 14 July 2022, then US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid signed a document called the Jerusalem US-Israel Strategic Partnership Joint Declaration, indicating the US would use all of its “national power” to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. I would furthermore argue that additional events underlay and eventually accentuated the urgency for the USA to "take down" Iran.

Around the same time the US-Israeli Joint Declaration was being signed in Jerusalem, Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Tehran for a summit with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. According to analyst Patrick Lawrence,

...the centerpiece of the occasion was a simultaneous memorandum of understanding signed by the National Iranian Oil Company and Gazprom. In an agreement worth $40 billion, the Russian energy supplier is to assist on the technology side as Iran develops two gas fields and six oil fields. Further out, this is part of a long-in-the-making project that will connect Russia, Iran, and India by sea, road, rail, and, eventually, a very significant Iran–to–India gas pipeline.

It is noteworthy that by this time China had already signed a 25–year, hundreds of billions dollar agreement with Iran which included tech transfer, infrastructure development, oil sales, and so on — that had been years in gestation. Needless to say, the prospect of Eurasian integration struck terror into the heart of the United States:

The [International North-South Transport Corridor] INSTC was announced back in the early 2000s, but progress was slow until recently when the West’s actions put it into overdrive. The sanctioning of Moscow and Tehran and the severing of Europe from Russian energy created the incentive to accelerate investments by key stakeholders. The authorities in Tehran realize their centrality on the India-Russia trade route, and considering that India’s imports from Russia quadrupled last year, one can deduct the potential upside for Iran. With an investment boost from Russia, Tehran has been trying to speed up the completion of improved railway networks that will connect to the existing railways of Russia and Azerbaijan and Chabahar Port in southeastern Iran.

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Postscript

So what are we to make of this new Middle East War? As I (and others) have stated before, this new phase of jingoism accompanied by rank xenophobia we are experiencing in the West is part and parcel of a declining US empire:

There is a certain cadence to decline, a rhythm of arrogance and desperation, of miscalculation and delusion. The late-stage empire, unmoored from reality yet clinging to myths of its own indispensability, lashes out at perceived threats not because they are real, but because it cannot conceive of a world in which it is no longer the gravitational centre of history. In this way, Russophobia and Sinophobia function not merely as ideological constructs, but as symptoms of systemic decay, the fever dreams of a civilisation struggling to process its own obsolescence.

Unfortunately, the US empire doesn't seem to want to go quietly into the night. Hopefully, Iran's preparations over the years for this current conflict will help it emerge victorious.

Labels: Anti-War, BRICS, geopolitics, US imperialism, Zionism