JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: IRAN AND AMERICA - AMERICA'S CEASELESS, STUPID HOSTILITY OF MORE THAN FORTY YEARS - NOW IRAN WILL CAMPAIGN LONG AND HARD AND VERY SUBTLY FOR AMERICA TO LEAVE ITS REGION - AMERICA WILL NOT COMPLETELY LEAVE THE MIDDLE EAST OWING TO THE IMPERIAL COLONY CALLED ISRAEL - WHAT ISRAEL COULD DO TO MAKE THE REGION A BETTER PLACE FOR EVERYONE - BUT TRUMP'S "PEACE PLAN" GOES JUST THE OPPOSITE WAY WITH PALESTINIANS TREATED AS A HERD TO BE PENNED IN

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY THE SAKER IN THE UNZ REVIEW


“U.S in the Middle-East: Preparing for Disaster”

I comment only on the portion of the article concerning Iran. The author does make a number of fairly sweeping claims about the United States in the Middle East with which I disagree (see my added comment at the bottom).


The American forces were warned by Iraq about the missile attack, Iraq having been warned by Iran. That was necessary for Iran to do because American bases in Iraq are typically inside Iraqi bases.

Clearly, the intention was no deaths of Americans.

The American forces all took cover in some kind of shelters.

But anytime you have high explosives going off near people in an enclosure, you have a formula for concussions.

I fully expect the nature of the American shelters contributed to the result of about fifty cases of concussion.

Maybe that explains Washington’s reticence to talk about it. The “boyz” were hurt by their own inadequate equipment?

I am sure Iran’s “message” to America with its precision missiles was received ‘loud and clear.” That also is a topic not discussed a lot in the mainline press and by politicians, the precision of Iran’s missile technology. Its precision and the huge quantity of missiles Iran has stocked in underground bunkers give the country a genuine deterrence against arbitrary attack, especially given such rich target fields as Israel itself and the region’s large American military bases.

As far as Iran's efforts to get the US to leave the region, I think it fair to say, "You ain't seen nothing yet."

The effort will be subtle and unattributable and sustained over a long period.

There can be no question that blundering American leadership, always under the tug of Israel, has opened a Pandora’s box by assassinating a national hero, doing so publicly, bragging and even joking about it.

After all, Iran has suffered unwarranted American hostility for forty years.

And before that, it was the victim of America's “man in the Mideast,” the brutal Shah of Iran, installed by coup. The charming Shah with his SAVAK secret police who quite regularly pulled out the fingernails of prisoners.

Perhaps no country in the region has been more mistreated by America. The abuse has always been intensified by the fact that Israel hates Iran, not out of any phony claims about atomic weapons but just because it represents such a large and influential country in a region Israel thinks it should dominate.

And there’s the irony, too, that the illegal invasion of Iraq, forcefully advocated by Aerial Sharon and America’s Neocons, had the unwanted side-effect of strengthening Iran in relative terms by removing Saddam who was a natural and ruthless opponent of Shia Muslim power.

The US also encouraged and supplied Saddam Hussein in the bloody Iraq-Iran War of 1980-88, including seeing that he was supplied with poison gas weapons Saddam used heavily to even the odds of Iraq’s much smaller population. About a million and a half people died in that terrible war, a war I’m sure most average Americans would not even be aware of.

And when an American warship, in the final year of the war, shot down an Iranian airliner (Iran Air Flight 655 with 290 people aboard) over Iran’s own territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz, something the US refused even to apologize for, the commander of the warship was awarded a medal. It really is difficult to imagine more deliberately insulting behavior.

The full tale of America’s decades-long abuse of Iran I think is not widely appreciated in America, but it certainly is part of the national consciousness in Iran.

____________________

"Empires can survive many things, but once they are not feared anymore, then their end is near."

While I agree with that generalization, I think the case is not made that the US isn't feared anymore.

Iran strikes me as an exceptional case, taking into account some of the history of America's relations with it and perhaps its own people's special qualities. Not a lot of nations have three thousand years of history.

The complete US presence in the Middle East cannot be ended so long as there is Israel, which is effectively a very privileged imperial colony, an American pied-à-terre, more than it is a truly independent country.

Many or most of its influential citizens are dual US citizens, and the country literally floats on a tide of both public and private American subsidies unprecedented in history.

Given the immense influence of the Israel lobby in the US, I don't think there is any prospect of Israel's being diminished.

However, it might be possible for Israel one day to come to its senses about the Palestinians and make genuine efforts for genuine peace, instead of trying to pen them in like a herd of cattle.

It must be demoralizing for many to endlessly treat millions of people as Israel treats the Palestinians.

I am sure, at the least, it gets tiresome, and indeed, what could be more tiresome than the Trump "peace plan," which is nothing more than a revival of Nationalist South Africa's discredited system? It even arrogantly judges the competence of millions of people to govern themselves, people who have a far longer history in the region than modern Israelis.

It will not happen, and the Palestinian population – roughly the same size as the population of Jewish people in Israel and growing – is not going away, as so many Israelis in the past thought they would if just treated badly enough for a long enough period. That is a formula that has utterly failed. It has failed in practical terms, but it failed from the start in moral or ethical terms.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2020/01/29/john-chuckman-comment-trumps-bizarre-peace-plan-for-the-middle-east-having-nothing-to-do-with-peace-and-dead-on-arrival-new-permanent-apartheid-arrangements-as-clear-and-unfair-as-those-of-old/