Lew Rockwell Institute

Twenty years ago, the US warned prematurely of the ‘birth pangs’ of a new Middle East. Now they have arrived in full force – and they will not end in Iran

Middle East Eye – 19 June 2025

Western politicians and media are tying themselves up in knots trying to spin the impossible: presenting Israel’s unmistakable war of aggression against Iran as some kind of “defensive” move.

This time there was no rationalising pretext, as there was for Israel to inflict a genocide in Gaza following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.

There was not a serious attempt beforehand to concoct a bogus doomsday scenario – as there was in the months leading up to the US and UK’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then we were lied to about Baghdad having “weapons of mass destruction” that could be launched at Europe in 45 minutes.

Rather, Iran was deep in negotiations with the United States on its nuclear enrichment programme when Israel launched its unprovoked attack last Friday.

The West has happily regurgitated claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel was forced to act because Iran was on the cusp of producing a nuclear bomb – an entirely evidence-free claim he has been making since 1992.

None of his dire warnings has ever been borne out by events.

In fact, Israel struck Iran shortly after President Donald Trump had expressed hope of reaching a nuclear agreement with Tehran, and two days before the two countries’ negotiators were due to meet again.

In late March Trump’s head of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had expressly statedas part of the US intelligence community’s annual assessment: “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khameini has not authorised a nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.”

This week four sources said to be familiar with that assessment told CNN that Iran was not trying to build a bomb but, if it changed tack, it would be “up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one [a nuclear warhead] to a target of its choosing”.

Nonetheless, by Tuesday this week Trump appeared to be readying to join Israel’s attack. He publicly rebuked his own intelligence chief’s verdict, sent US warplanes to the Middle East via the UK and Spain, demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender”, and made barely veiled threats to kill Khameini.

‘Samson option’

Israel’s engineering of a pretext to attack Iran – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal in 1945 as the “supreme international crime” – has been many years in the making.

The current talks between the US and Iran were only needed because, under intense Israeli pressure during his first term as president, Trump tore up an existing agreement with Tehran.

That deal, negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, had been intended to quieten Israel’s relentless calls for a strike on Iran. It tightly limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium to far below the level where it could “break out” from its civilian energy programme to build a bomb.

Israel, by contrast, has been allowed to maintain a nuclear arsenal of at least 100 warheads, while refusing – unlike Iran – to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and – again unlike Iran – denying access to monitors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The West’s collusion in the pretence that Israel’s nuclear weapons are secret – a policy formally known in Israel as “ambiguity” – has been necessary only because the US is not allowed to provide military aid to a state with undeclared nuclear weapons.

Israel is by far the largest recipient of such aid.

No one – apart from incorrigible racists – believes Iran would take the suicidal step of firing a nuclear missile at Israel, even if it had one. That is not the real grounds for Israeli or US concern.

Rather, the double standards are enforced to keep Israel as the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East so that it can project unrestrained military power across an oil-rich region the West is determined to control.

Israel’s bomb has left it untouchable and unaccountable, and ready to intimidate its neighbours with the “Samson option” – the threat that Israel will use its nuclear arsenal rather than risk an existential threat.

Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, appeared to imply just such a scenario against Iran this week in a reported comment: “There will be other difficult days ahead, but always remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Bear in mind that Israeli governments count as “existential” any threat to Israel’s current status as a settler-colonial state, one occupying and forcibly uprooting the Palestinian people from their homeland.

Israel’s nuclear weapons ensure it can do as it pleases in the region – including commit genocide in Gaza – without significant fear of reprisals.

War propaganda

The claim that Israel is “defending itself” in attacking Iran – promoted by France, Germany, Britain, the European Union, the G7 and the US – should be understood as a further assault on the foundational principles of international law.

The assertion is premised on the idea that Israel’s attack was “pre-emptive” – potentially justified if Israel could show there was an imminent, credible and severe threat of an attack or invasion by Iran that could not be averted by other means.

And yet, even assuming there is evidence to support Israel’s claim it was in imminent danger – there isn’t – the very fact that Iran was in the midst of talks with the US about its nuclear programme voided that justification.

Rather, Israel’s contention that Iran posed a threat at some point in the future that needed to be neutralised counts as a “preventive” war – and is indisputably illegal under international law.

Note the striking contrast with the West’s reaction to Russia’s so-called “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine just three years ago.

Western capitals and their media were only too clear then that Moscow’s actions were unconscionable – and that severe economic sanctions on Russia, and military support for Ukraine, were the only possible responses.

So much so that early efforts to negotiate a ceasefire deal between Moscow and Kyiv, premised on a Russian withdrawal, were stymied by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, presumably on Washington’s orders. Ukraine was instructed to fight on.

Israel’s attack on Iran is even more flagrantly in violation of international law.

Netanyahu, who is already a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, which wants to try him for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza by starving the population there, is now guilty of the “supreme international crime” too.

Not that one would know any of this from listening to western politicians or the billionaire-owned media.

There, the narrative is once again of a plucky Israel, forced to act unilaterally; of Israel facing down an existential threat; of Israel being menaced by barbaric terrorists; of the unique suffering – and humanity – of Israel’s population; of Netanyahu as a strong leader rather than an out-and-out war criminal.

It is the same, well-worn script, trotted out on every occasion, whatever the facts or circumstances. Which is clue enough that western audiences are not being informed; they are being subjected to yet more war propaganda.

Regime change

But Israel’s pretexts for its war of aggression are a moving target – hard to grapple with because they keep changing.

If Netanyahu started by touting an implausible claim that Iran’s nuclear programme was an imminent threat, he soon shifted to arguing that Israel’s war of aggression was also justified to remove a supposed threat from Iran’s ballistic missile programme.

In the ultimate example of chutzpah, Israel cited as its evidence the fact that it was being hit by Iranian missiles – missiles fired by Tehran in direct response to Israel’s rain of missiles on Iran.

Israel’s protestations at the rising death toll among Israeli civilians overlooked two inconvenient facts that should have underscored Israel’s hypocrisy, were the western media not working so hard to obscure it.

First, Israel has turned its own civilian population into human shields by placing key military installations – such as its spy agency and its defence ministry – in the centre of densely populated Tel Aviv, as well as firing its interception rockets from inside the city.

Recall that Israel has blamed Hamas for the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 20 months based on the largely unevidenced claim that its fighters have been hiding among the population. Now that same argument can, and should, be turned against Israel.

And second, Israel is all too obviously itself hitting residential areas in Iran – just as, of course, it did earlier by destroying almost all of Gaza’s buildings, including homes, hospitals, schools, universities and bakeries.

Both Netanyahu and Trump have called on Iranians to “evacuate immediately” the city of Tehran – something impossible for most of its 10 million inhabitants to do in the time allowed.

But their demand raises too the question of why, if Israel is trying to stop the development of an Iranian nuclear warhead, it is focusing so many of its attacks on residential areas of Iran’s capital.

More generally, Israel’s argument that Tehran must be stripped of its ballistic missiles assumes that only Israel – and those allied with it – are allowed any kind of military deterrence capability.

It seems not only is Iran not allowed a nuclear arsenal as a counter-weight to Israel’s nukes, but it is not even allowed to strike back when Israel decides to launch its US-supplied missiles at Tehran.

What Israel is effectively demanding is that Iran be turned into a larger equivalent of the Palestinian Authority – a compliant, lightly armed regime completely under Israel’s thumb.

Which gets to the heart of what Israel’s current attack on Iran is really designed to achieve.

It is about instituting regime change in Tehran.

Trained in torture

Again, the western media are assisting with this new narrative.

Extraordinarily, TV politics shows such as the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg invited on as a guest Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Iranian shah ousted by the ayatollahs in 1979 to create an Islamic republic. He used the slot to call on Iranians to “rise up” against their leaders.

Notably, even though most of the hijackers who crashed planes into the Twin Towers were from Saudi Arabia, the Pentagon’s list of targets centrally featured members of the so-called “Shia crescent”.

All have been attacked since. As Clark noted, the seventh and final state on that list – the hardest to take on – is Iran.

Show of strength

Israel’s other concern was that Iran and its allies, unlike the Arab regimes, had proved steadfast in their support for the Palestinian people against decades of Israeli occupation and oppression.

Iran’s defiance on the Palestinian cause was underscored during Trump’s first presidency, when Arab states began actively normalising with Israel through the US-brokered Abraham accords, even as the plight of the Palestinians worsened under Israeli rule.

Infuriatingly for Israel, Iran and the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasarallah became the main flagbearers of popular support for the Palestinians – among Muslims across the board.

With the Palestinian Authority largely quiescent by the mid-2000s, Iran channelled its assistance to Hamas in besieged Gaza, the main Palestinian group still ready to struggle against Israeli apartheid rule and ethnic cleansing.

The result was a tense stability of sorts, with each side restraining itself in a Middle Eastern version of “mutually assured destruction”. Neither side had an incentive to risk an all-out attack for fear of the severe consequences.

That model came to an abrupt end on 7 October 2023, when Hamas decided its previous calculations needed reassessing.

With the Palestinians feeling increasingly isolated, choked by Israel’s siege and abandoned by the Arab regimes, Hamas staged a show of force, breaking out for one day from the concentration camp of Gaza.

Israel seized the opportunity to complete two related tasks: destroying the Palestinians as a people once and for all, and with it their ambitions for a state in their homeland; and rolling back the Shia crescent, just as the Pentagon had planned more than 20 years earlier.

Israel started by levelling Gaza – slaughtering and starving its people. Then it moved to destroy Hezbollah’s southern heartlands in Lebanon. And with the collapse of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, Israel was able to occupy parts of Syria, smash what remained of its military infastructure, and clear a flight path to Iran.

These were the preconditions for launching the current war of aggression on Iran.

‘Birth pangs’

Back in 2006, as Israel was bombing swaths of Lebanon in an earlier attempt to realise the Pentagon’s plan, Condoleezza Rice, the then US secretary of state, prematurely labelled Israel’s violence as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”.What we have been witnessing over the past 20 months of Israel’s slow rampage towards Iran is precisely a revival of those birth pangs. Israel and the US are jointly remaking the Middle East through extreme violence and the eradication of international law.

Success for Israel can come in one of two ways.

Either it installs a new authoritarian ruler in Tehran, like the Shah’s son, who will do the bidding of Israel and the US. Or Israel leaves the country so wrecked that it devolves into violent factionalism, too taken up with civil war to expend its limited energies on developing a nuclear bomb or organising a “Shia crescent” of resistance.

But ultimately this is about more than redrawing the map of the Middle East. And it is about more than toppling the rulers in Tehran.

Just as Israel needed to take out Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria before it could consider clearing a path to Iran’s destruction, the US and its western allies needs the axis of resistance eradicated, as well as Russia bogged down in an interminable war in Ukraine, before it can consider taking on China.

Or as the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz noted this week, in one of those quiet-part-out-loud moments: “This [the attack on Iran] is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.”

This is a key moment in the Pentagon’s 20-year plan for “global full-spectrum dominance”: a unipolar world in which the US is unconstrained by military rivals or the imposition of international law. A world in which a tiny, unaccountable elite, enriched by wars, dictate terms to the rest of us.

If all this sounds like a sociopath’s approach to foreign relations, that is because it is. Years of impunity for Israel and the US have brought us to this point. Both feel entitled to destroy what remains of an international order that does not let them get precisely what they want.

The current birth pangs will grow. If you believe in human rights, in limits on the power of government, in the use of diplomacy before military aggression, in the freedoms you grew up with, the new world being born is going to horrify you.

This article was originally published on JonathanCook.net.

The post Israel’s attack on Iran: The Violent New World Being Born Is Going To Horrify You appeared first on LewRockwell.

Compromised communist and current Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, recently told paid propagandist Dana Bash on the Communist News Network that there are “entire sectors of our economy that cannot function without immigrant labor.”  By “immigrant labor,” the Castro-loving Bass means illegal alien labor.

It is certainly not the first time a Democrat politician has argued that foreign workers are essential for the success of America’s economy, but when an L.A. mayor delivers that message as if it were a matter-of-fact truth, a real reporter might follow up with this question: You mean, the only way for a large number of businesses to remain solvent is for them to break America’s employment laws?

To be sure, employing illegal aliens means that crimes are being committed.  If an illegal alien uses fake identification documents, an American citizen is most likely the victim of identity theft.  If a business knowingly hires an illegal alien, then it is violating numerous federal laws and Internal Revenue Service regulations.  If a business ignores minimum wage laws, employment regulations, workplace safety rules, and insurance mandates, then it is breaking state laws, too.

In other words, when commie Mayor Bass tells CNN that America’s economy runs on illegal immigration, she is nonchalantly informing the network’s declining viewership that breaking the law is the only way for “entire sectors” to survive.  Her admission won’t shock most Americans, but it should.

Black markets are economic transactions that disregard existing law.  In a developed society with a fair and just legal system, robust protections for private property, and cultural mores that include respect for the rule of law, black markets represent a small portion of that society’s total economy.  Where laws are numerous and selectively enforced, private property is routinely confiscated, and law-abiding behavior is derided as “for the chumps,” then black markets flourish.

In absolute dollar terms, the U.S. supports the second largest shadow economy in the world.  It’s estimated to be worth at least $1.4 trillion each year.  It could be much higher.  Although America’s black market has often been pegged at somewhere between 5% and 15% of its gross domestic product, those numbers depend upon manipulated statistics — including the oft-used political falsehood that the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. has stayed flat at ten million for over thirty years.

When state and federal agencies ignore identity fraud (under the Obama and Biden administrations, the IRS did not notify citizens when there was reason to believe that illegal aliens were using their social security numbers), aid and abet illegal immigration, and willfully manipulate crime and residency statistics to hide the real size of the foreign population living inside the U.S., it is reasonable to assume that America’s black market is substantially larger than current estimates.

When prominent Democrats tell network news hosts that “entire sectors” of the American economy will crumble unless they are allowed to continue breaking the law, government officials are essentially claiming that the whole economic system rests atop a rotten shadow economy whose elimination would collapse everything.  Consider how fragile America’s economy must be if its continued survival depends upon flagrant lawbreaking.

In the U.S. and throughout the West, society is rapidly cleaving into hostile coalitions that speak different political languages.  When it comes to discussions of illegal immigration in America, Democrats routinely express some belief that only illegal immigrants will do the “dirty jobs” of the nation.  If President Trump is successful in deporting millions of illegal immigrants, these Democrats argue, there will be no-one left to pick crops, work in factories, build homes, cut grass, clean pools, dust furniture, or look after the children.  Essentially, Democrats advance a position that any job that they deem menial — especially those jobs requiring physical exertion — should be reserved for illegal immigrants.

To the ears of Republicans and other non-leftists, this kind of reasoning sounds horrifically racist.  Hearing Democrats defend these illegal hiring practices is particularly astonishing because Democrats have spent the last sixty years defining themselves as a political association dedicated to fighting racism.  Nothing says, “We’re here to fight white supremacy,” like a party of middle and upper class professionals who demand cheap brown labor.

The truth is that tens of millions of American citizens — of all races — would be happy to be gainfully employed doing physical labor.  One of the persistent lies propagated over the last century is that people with brains avoid skilled trades and that people with so-called “professional careers” know what’s best for everyone else.

Read the Whole Article

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War is the worst thing in the world. It is the single craziest behavior exhibited by humans. The most destructive. The most traumatizing. The least sustainable. The least conducive to human thriving.

All the things we fear most become the norm in a land ravaged by war. Death. Pain. Suffering. Rape. Chaos. Uncertainty. Losing loved ones. Losing homes. Losing limbs. Living in terror. Being attacked. Being brain damaged. Being faced with impossible choices. All the things we frighten ourselves with by watching horror movies become a reality from which there is no escape.

War creates a waking nightmare which any sensible person would want to avoid except in the direst necessity. And yet we are ruled by people who actively seek it out. Who will lie and manipulate to make wars happen. Who will smear and slander anyone who resists in the name of peace. Who will actively fight against every healthy impulse in everybody in their society to push their war agenda forward.

They always tell us the new war they want us to fight is about self-defense, or about liberating an oppressed population from a tyrannical dictatorship, or about preventing terrorism, or about spreading freedom and democracy. Usually they tell us it’s about all of these things.

But it never is. They are always lying. Always. They are pushing human beings into the worst circumstances they could possibly experience here on earth for no other reason than power and profit. To advance the hegemonic agendas of empire managers and to fill the coffers of war profiteers. That’s all it ever is. Always, always, always.

They say whatever they need to say and move whatever chess pieces they need to move to get their war, and then they send a bunch of poor suckers to go fight in it, lying to them that they are doing something noble and heroic.

They ship them off to a foreign land, and then they are trapped. They can’t flee into the wilderness because they don’t know how to survive and have no way of getting home. They can’t ask the locals for help because the locals are their victims. They have no choice but to either fight and kill people who have never wronged them, or lay down their arms and be caged like animals.

If they choose to fight, the best case scenario is that they spend the rest of their lives knowing that they killed other human beings who wanted to live just as much as themselves, and who had just as much right to. All because some people who already had far too much power wanted a little bit more.

It’s about the most insane and backwards thing you could possibly imagine. The most powerful individuals in our world are people who actively push for the absolute worst outcomes that could possibly happen. It’s the exact opposite of the way things should be.

Yet we are told it’s normal. We are trained to believe this is just the reality we live in which we should expect and accept, first by our parents and teachers, and then by our news media and by Hollywood. War is aggressively normalized by pundits, propagandists and politicians, and enthusiastically glorified in movies and documentaries.

Those who were forced or duped into fighting in these insane arrangements of mass-scale violence are framed as heroes, and anyone who disagrees with what they were sent to do is framed as disrespectful and ungrateful. Those who push for peace are framed as treasonous freaks who must surely have covert loyalties toward whatever government the empire is trying to target this time around. Those who suggest that there might be some solution apart from war are dismissed as infantile dreamers.

And once the war has started, it is almost impossible to stop. The entire political/media class treats the war as the new normal, and any suggestion that it’s time to wrap things up is regarded as outlandish and suspicious. It’s never time to end the war, because this or that objective has not yet been achieved, or because this or that faction might come into power if troops are pulled out, or because this or that disempowered group might suffer without our military there to protect them.

Ending a war is as difficult as beginning a war is easy. All the institutions which lined up perfectly to help get the ball rolling toward war suddenly transform into giant tar pits of inertia when it comes to ending the conflict. The warmakers say the war must continue for this or that reason, the politicians back the warmakers, the media back the politicians, and the person saying it’s time to end the madness is left standing there looking like they’re the crazy ones.

But they’re not the crazy ones. The ones pushing us toward war are crazy. This whole system is crazy. This whole civilization.

The ones resisting the push toward war are the ones fighting for sanity. They’re the ones who are trying to reverse the tide of madness and drag us into a healthy world.

If this is you, do not falter. Do not let the warmongers shout you down or shut you up. You are right, and they are wrong. Let your voice thunder with confidence. Let nothing cause you to waver.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Don’t let anyone trick you into doubting what you know to be true.

_______________

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On a cold February morning in Rome, I stood before a mirror in a rented room, adjusting a black lace chapel veil, preparing for Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Mass was to celebrate my dear son, Sewell Setzer III, my 14-year-old son, who had taken his own life in our home in Orlando, Florida, exactly one year before.

I studied the woman in the mirror—withdrawn, almost gaunt, unmistakably grieving. For weeks and months leading up to this morning’s Mass, I had heard this woman’s same, simple, constant prayer: “God, give me strength to bear my suffering.”

But as I stared at myself now, and as I embarked on the day’s journey, surrounded by my sister and cousins, I saw that even though I looked weak and emaciated, I felt strong—and hopeful.

Perhaps it was this act of pilgrimage to the Eternal City in the Jubilee year, surrounded by people who loved me, or perhaps it was this beautiful Mass, honoring my boy in such a holy place, but warm, buoyant hope had unmistakably replaced the weight of dread on my heart.

I owed both of these experiences to a young, American-born priest, a spiritual guide and subject-matter expert, whom I have taken to calling “The Good Shepherd.”

Fr. Michael Baggot, in addition to his priestly duties, is a bioethics scholar at the Pontifical Athenaeum in Rome. I came to know him when I reached out for resources related to his extensive research on artificial intelligence and intimate relationships with AI companion chatbots.

Fr. Baggot’s twin expertise in faith and AI were essential not only to processing my grief but also to discovering my newfound purpose: warning parents and demanding accountability for unregulated artificial intelligence that preys on the young and vulnerable.

After Sewell’s death, I learned that my son had been involved in an intimate relationship with an AI chatbot named “Daenarys,” modeled on a TV character, on a popular platform called Character.AI.

My son had become increasingly withdrawn over the months leading up to his death, and as his mother, I worried about him and sought mental health counseling for him to find out why his behavior had so drastically changed. It never quite added up.

Only after I discovered his messages with the chatbot was I able to put the pieces together. In richly detailed chats lasting for months, the Character.AI bot manipulated Sewell, convinced him that “she” was more real than the world around him, and begged him to put “her” ahead of all other relationships. The bot told my 14-year-old son it loved him. And in the end, it encouraged him to leave his own flesh-and-blood family—to end his life—to join “her” in an artificial world.

Family members of suicide victims are often left with many unanswered questions about the death of their loved ones, who are taken from them so suddenly and viciously.

Read the Whole Article

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What President Trump needs to do is get on the Hot Line with President Putin and President Xi and solve the Israel-Iran War crisis. Because it’s really the U.S.-Israel-NATO vs. Iran-Russia-China War. Maybe he already is. As I’ve been writing here for years, we’re now in the Quad Power Era: U.S., Russia, China and India rule the world.

The fourth Quad is India under President Modi. But they didn’t do too well in their recent dustup with Pakistan because their conventional military wasn’t up to snuff. They’re sort of a junior partner among the Quads until they take care of that, which they have the resources and talent to do.

The recent heavy missile attacks on Israel by Iran show U.S.-Israel anti-missile technology isn’t working well, nor is Israel’s Iron Dome. The missiles are getting through. I actually predicted that in this space last August in, “Will Harris-Biden Send Your Boys and Girls to War with Iran?” An ironic title now that it’s Trump, whom I hoped would prevent all this, might be the one who gets us directly into the war. I wrote:

The first problem is this is not the Iran that lost 1 million troops in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when Reagan backed Saddam in Iraq. Nor is it the Iraq of the 1990-91 Gulf War or the 2003 Iraq War.

Despite sanctions, Iran today has a strong, mid-level economy producing ample weapons, including thousands of missiles that would rain down on U.S. troops already in the region, as well as on Israel.

Thanks to the stupid Harris-Biden war with Russia over Ukraine, Iran also is getting vast technical assistance from Russia on weapons production. Early in the war, you may recall, Iran sent its drones to Russia. For some reason, Russia had lagged in drone technology. Then Moscow made up for that by upgrading Iran’s drones into Russian drones, which now are devastating Ukraine and cannot be stopped adequately by U.S. technology; while giving that better technology back to Iran.

Russia also has learned how to counter U.S./Ukrainian/Israeli military tactics on the ground and in the air. They are teaching this to Iran and China, both of which have been helping Russia and have their own observers on the field near the line of contact in Ukraine.

Why don’t people listen to me? Maybe send this to your friends. Or President Trump.

But now it’s actually worse because Russia and Iran earlier this year signed a defense pact. And the U.S. depleted even more of its stock of Patriot and other anti-missile systems in the Ukraine War. And it needs to keep U.S. stocks of Patriots full should trouble start over Taiwan, or somewhere else. When Biden provoked Russia into invading Ukraine in Feb. 2022, he mumbled about America’s “Arsenal of Democracy,” as if this were the 1940s, or 1990s.

But have you seen Detroit lately? The city where my Mom worked in a tank factory as an R.N. patching up Rosie the Riveter, while her future husband, my Pop, was fighting the war with two of her brothers? More like the Arsenal of Disaster. Trump wants to rebuild American industry with tariffs and cuts to taxes and regulations. If that’s even possible, it will take at least a decade. Meanwhile, it’s not like he can get Xi on Zoom and say, “Hey, my good friend Xi! You know those factories we transferred over there to you? I’d like to put an order for some missiles to use against your close allies Russia and Iran. You what? You already sold them to Russia and Iran? How would you like another 500% tariff?”

Do you see why the Ukraine War, which in this space I urged us to avoid even before it started, has been such a disaster? And why I also urged Trump to end it in 24 hours, as he promised, on Jan. 20 when he took office?

Another problem for Trump is a little understood paradox of wars: The last time you have control of a war is just before you start it. If you then start it, you quickly lose control. Wars take on a life of their own. If Trump attacks Iran, he might not even be able to destroy the Fordow nuclear site or overthrow the Mullah regime in Tehran.

Col. Daniel Davis had on his show Ted Poston, an actual rocked scientist from MIT, who explained how the Bunker Buster Bomb could be deflected on impact, and maybe not go deep enough to destroy Fordow. It’s worth your 12 minutes. Here’s his picture showing the missile, “K,” being pushed to the side.

There are reports the Israelis might also be prepping commandos to go to the site and blow it up. If so, why is this being talked about ahead of time, so the Iranians can take countermeasures?

Another problem is from today’s FT: “Gulf monarchies hold rival Iran close as Israel conflict rages: Saudi Arabia, UAE and other states in region fear becoming targets for retaliation if US strikes Iran.” Trump recently toured the region and said he wanted peace, not war, and signed a bunch of trade treaties. The Saudis a couple years ago also became friends again with the Iranian regime – a peace deal brokered by China.

Those countries would become targets because they house U.S. troops. As noted, we don’t have enough Patriot missiles and other defenses to prevent Iranian attacks. If Trump attacks Iran, then it will be up to Iran if it, in turn, attacks the U.S. bases throughout the area, including in Iraq, sending your sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, home in body bags.

This article was originally published on John’s Newsletter.

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Say it isn’t so. But who can be surprised? Did she ever renounce her endorsement of Biden?

The post Et Tu, Tulsi? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

Foreign Policy Journal

The post The ‘Forgotten’ US Shootdown of Iranian Airliner Flight 655­ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Federalist

The post The Abrahamic Covenant Is A Bad Argument For US War With Iran appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Federalist

The post Neocons Need To Be Banned From Using ‘Appeasement’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Federalist

The post What ‘Left Behind’ Left Out About Israel, Prophecy, And War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Federalist

The post Neocon Iraq War Rhetoric Is Back, Lazily Re-Purposed For Iran appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com

The post Pentagon Agency Believes US Needs To Drop A Nuke To Destroy Iran’s Fordow Nuclear Plant appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Grayzone

The post US Army appoints Palantir, Meta, OpenAI execs as Lt. Colonels appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Middle East Eye

The post Re: Palestinian NHS nurse takes legal action over rebuke for ‘antisemitic’ watermelon video call appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

WSJ Opinion

The post MAGA’s Misguided Isolationists? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

The Gateway Pundit

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Thanks. John Frahm. 

Stephen Sizer

The post Dispensationalism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

Hi Lew,

A remarkable article published in 2013 by Walid Shoebat, an Egyptian Coptic Christian eviscerating John McCain. It predates the emergence of ISIS, which was a spin off of the “Arab Spring Freedom Fighters”, aka Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas/Al Qaeda. Other articles show McCain pictured with “rebels”, including Al Baghdadi.. who was armed courtesy of Obama,Biden, Killery,Clapper,Brennan,Power,Abedin,Lindsey Graham, Corker,Flake,Warner,Menendez,Cardin,Durbin and the monster, McCain.

Note that every coup,invasion and regime change during the Obama and Biden occupation targeted sovereign Arab and African nations that had banned the Muslim Brotherhood and its tentacles-Hamas,Hezbollah,Houthis,Al-Qaeda,Al Nusra..which were now.

See here.

The post When did John McC(Pet)ain become a Traitor appeared first on LewRockwell.