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The Iraq invasion was justified by the false claim that the government in Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction, posing an imminent threat to the region and beyond. The surprise Israeli attack on Iran on 13 June was similarly justified by the Israeli claim that Iran was close to developing a nuclear device.
Too much focus on Israel’s war with Iran obscures the fact that it is but one conflict in a multi-fronted war that Israel is waging in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen – all of which are under Israeli air attack – to establish Israeli-US hegemony in the Middle East. Of the once-numerous nation states and non-state militias that once opposed Israel and the West in the region 50 years ago, Iran is the last opponent standing and is now on the brink of defeat.
Atrocities are now commonplace
The war in Iran has diverted international attention away from the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, a diversion that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu probably intended. Day after day families huddling in tents are hit by air strikes or are gunned down by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) as they seek food for their starving children from a few aid posts. Since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, some 55,706 Palestinians have been killed and 130,101 injured, according to the Gaza health authorities.
The routine massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is a terrible act of deliberate evil, one of the great state-sponsored crimes of modern times
The routine massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is a terrible act of deliberate evil, one of the great state-sponsored crimes of modern times. The Palestinian death toll has risen to the same level as the mass killing of Iraqi Kurds by Saddam Hussein in his so-called Anfal campaign in 1988, which is recognised as genocide by the UK Parliament.
In Gaza, the moral bar which divides good from evil has been set at a much lower and deadlier level than before. As in Europe in the 1930s, surprise military attacks, the assassination of leaders, and the mass killing of civilians has once again become the norm.
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He now says that he will spend two weeks deciding whether or not America is to become a co-belligerent with Israel against Iran. In reality, Trump already signed America up as a participant in this war when he agreed to the Israeli attack on 13 June. His fabled preference for deal-making over war is not to be taken seriously after he gave Netanyahu the go-ahead for a surprise attack, even as his all-purpose envoy Steve Witkoff was about to meet with the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, last Sunday. As with Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran, diplomacy Trump-style is invariably high-profile, amateur, erratic – and ineffective.
Will Trump and Netanyahu – in so many ways doppelgängers as populist nationalist leaders – be able to get their way with the Palestinians and Iranians, relying on force alone? Will they be able to enforce a quasi-imperial control over the Arab world of 22 states with a population of 350 million? It is a tall order, but Western-backed regime change over the last quarter century has marginalised or destroyed the most powerful Arab nation states – Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya – so they can no longer resist outside interference.
Iran in 2025 is not Iraq in 2003
An Israel-US dominion over the region, policed by their air forces, might not necessarily fail, at least in the short run. The US-led coalition in Iraq might not have been such a disaster if it had overthrown Saddam Hussein, whom almost all Iraqis wanted removed, and departed rather than occupying the country. As it was, the occupation provoked stiff resistance from both the Sunni and Shia communities, supported from outside Iraq by Iran and Syria.
As Israel assassinated Iranian commanders in Beirut, Damascus and Tehran over the last few years, dire retribution was often promised by Tehran but, in the event, turned out to be feeble. Iran did not even try very hard to keep its crucial ally in the Arab world, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in power last December.
Further thoughts
On occasion, a credible news outlet publishes or broadcasts a well sourced and detailed scoop on an important topic – only to find their story mysteriously ignored by the rest of the media and the public.
This latter motive for scepticism might explain why an exhaustive investigation by Adam Entous, published in the New York Times on 29 March, did not have more impact. Headlined “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine”, it is subtitled: “The untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.” Entous, who spent a year reporting the story, and conducted over 300 interviews, discloses how US generals oversaw the Ukraine war effort from an early stage in the conflict, directing military operations in minute detail from the headquarters of US Army Europe and Africa, in Wiesbaden in Germany.
“At critical moments,” he says, “the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by US counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command centre, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funnelled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”
Impending Russian defeat also had its dangers: when the Ukraine army threatened to reoccupy the Crimea at the end of 2022, the CIA calculated that there was a 50 per cent chance that Russia might use its tactical nuclear weapons. People in the West who are cavalier or dismissive about the likelihood of nuclear war might like to think about this CIA estimate.
Back in the 1980s, for instance, an air force colonel “visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the US military was secretly testing recovered alien technology”.
Other UFO sightings turn out to have prosaic explanations – mysterious floating orbs seen by pilots of commercial or military aircraft were in reality reflections of the sun from Starlink satellites. Also fuelling UFO cover-up conspiracy theories was the Pentagon’s obsessive secrecy, suggesting that to many that the US government had something diabolical to hide.
Cockburn’s Pick
I thoroughly enjoyed this Tucker Carlson interview in which he eviscerates Texas Senator Ted Cruz on Israel, Iran and everything else.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
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Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Gaza is forgotten and Iran is on the edge – these wars are crueller than Iraq )
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