Blood Brothers - by Mr.͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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Going to War, Again, for Israel
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| Chris Hedges |
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| Feb 28 |
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Blood Brothers - by Mr. Fish
Once again, America is going to war for Israel. Once again, many will die for
the Zionist state, including American service members. Once again, we will
stumble blindly into a military fiasco. Once again, we will do the bidding of a
foreign power whose interests are not our interests, but whose lobbyists have
bought up our political class, including Donald Trump. Once again, we will
violate the U.N. charter by attacking a country that does not pose an imminent
threat.
This is not our war. This is part of Israel’s demented vision of Greater
Israel, of dominating the Middle East. But Israel needs our military, our
taxpayer dollars, our weapons to do it. And we have handed them the keys to our
formidable arsenal.
The architects of the war with Iran, which the administration feels no need to
justify to the American public or the international community, admit it will
not be quick.
Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CBS
News on Saturday that the goal is not only to curb Iran’s nuclear program, but
“dismantle their terror support network.”
“To do all that is going to take longer than the strikes on their nuclear
program last summer,” Cotton said. “We’re probably looking at weeks, not days,
of joint efforts by the United States, Israel and our Arab partners, who have
also been attacked this morning.”
Israel’s lackeys in the political class, along with their courtiers in the
media, including former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)
employee Wolf Blitzer, as well as academia, are shining examples of Israel’s
transparent and often illegal meddling in the American political system. Forget
Russia. Forget China. No foreign government comes close to exerting Israel’s
influence.
Democratic Party leaders are not opposed to attacking Iran — they are opposed
to attacking Iran without being consulted. Two dozen Democrats lept to their
feet and applauded every time Trump threatened Iran, or lauded Israel, in his
State of the Union address. The Biden administration and Democratic Party
leadership made no effort to reinstate Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement.
It focused instead on sustaining the genocide in Gaza. It cheered Israel’s
decapitation of Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Kamala Harris in
her feckless and tone deaf presidential campaign promised to continue funding
the genocide, which alienated many voters, and labeled Iran our most dangerous
enemy.
Endless war is a bipartisan project.
The flagrant interference by Israel in the American political system is
documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby,” which Israel and its
supporters blocked from being broadcast. Pirated copies can be watched on the
website Electronic Intifada. In the documentary, the leaders of the Israel
lobby are captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how, backed by the
intelligence services in Israel, they discredit and silence American critics
and use huge cash donations to control the American electoral process and
political system.
Israel’s death grip on our political system is also documented in “The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
“If you wander off the reservation and become critical of Israel, you not only
will not get money, AIPAC will go to great lengths to find someone who will run
against you,” Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of
Chicago, says in the documentary. “And they support that person very
generously. The end result is you’re likely to lose your seat in Congress.”
Israel flies hundreds of members of Congress, often with their families, to
Israel for lavish junkets at seaside resorts. These Congress members run up
individual bills that frequently exceed $20,000. The Honest Leadership and Open
Government Act of 2007 attempted to restrict lobbyists from offering paid trips
lasting more than one day to members of Congress. But AIPAC, which has never
been forced to register as a foreign agent, used its clout to insert a clause
in the act to exclude so-called educational trips organized by charities that
do not hire lobbyists. The AIPAC-affiliated charity utilized to navigate this
loophole is called the American Israel Education Foundation.
The investment by Israel is worth it. The United States Congress in 2016
authorized a $38 billion per year defense aid package from 2019-2028 for
Israel. We squandered $ 4 to $ 6 trillion on the futile wars Israel and its
lobby pushed for in the Middle East. Congress has, as well, authorized $ 21.7
in military aid to Israel to sustain the genocide.
God knows the cost of this war, but it will likely be in the billions of
dollars.
We are back to where we were in 2003 with a war whose utopian goal is
regime-change. It didn’t work then. It won’t work now.
The same fatuous lies have been dredged up to justify this war, with U.S.
Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff telling Fox News that Iran is “probably a week
away” from having the materials necessary to make a nuclear bomb.
This has been Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby’s mantra for three
decades.
I’m not sure how we are supposed to swallow this after Trump announced last
July, following U.S. air strikes, that “All three nuclear sites in Iran were
completely destroyed and/or OBLITERATED. It would take years to bring them back
into service...”
One lie supersedes the next.
Once again, we promise to bomb a country to liberate it, with Trump saying all
he wants is “freedom for the people” of Iran.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s compound was bombed and, according to
Israeli officials, he has been killed. Iran insists he remains alive.
The Israeli prime minister, like Trump, is calling on the Iranians to seize the
“once-in-a-generation opportunity” to “take to the streets en masse, to
complete the task of overthrowing the regime that is making your lives
miserable.”
“This is your time to join forces to overthrow the regime, to secure your
future,” Netanyahu said.
That every other attempt at regime-change in the Middle East resulted in
disaster eludes them. This time, they promise, it will work.
We may not have assembled a ground force, as Bush did in 2003 for the Iraq war,
but once you open the Pandora’s box of war, war controls you. You don’t control
it.
American troops will likely be killed as Iran targets U.S. bases in the region.
The Iranian navy has announced it is shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, the
world’s most important oil chokepoint that facilitates the passage of 20
percent of the world’s oil supply. This will potentially double or triple the
price of oil and devastate the global economy. Oil installations along with
U.S. ships and military bases in the region will be hit.
Iran has already fired missiles at Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, Al-Salem airbase
in Kuwait, Al-Dhafra airbase in the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. Fifth Fleet
headquarters in Bahrain and U.S. bases in Jordan. Explosions have been reported
in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Thousands of innocents will die. Israel hit an elementary girls’ school on
Saturday in Minab, a city in the Hormozgan province of southern Iran. Iran’s
Tasnim News Agency cited the Judiciary of Minab as saying that the death toll
had risen to 85.
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An image of a girls’ elementary school hit by an airstrike on Saturday in
Minab, Iran posted by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on X.
The steady losses, and a huge spike in oil prices, will compound the
frustrations of Trump and his Israel allies. These frustrations, like those
during the two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, will ignite a protracted
regional war.
Iran, under sustained attack, could eventually fragment and splinter, sending
millions of refugees over its border and igniting the chaos we engineered in
Libya. But Israel, whose goal is to degrade the military capabilities of its
neighbors, will get what it wants.
We will be left with the mess.
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