The best information about the Iranian crisis I can find is from an Indian general

This is a programme on the leading Indian English language channel. General Bakshi is a well known military commentator. Please watch to get a lot more information than I found elsewhere about the attempted revolution in Iran.

This sounds very Great Game and very like John Buchan's Greenmantle but whereas Sandy Arbuthnot was a chevalier sans raproche I worry that the MI6 men and women pulling strings at a distance in Iran may be mixed up with murder, like the Mossad.

Maybe it's less Buchan, more Quentin Tarantino.

America is much more of a 'malign imperialist' than China.

The Daily Telegraph is much worse than useless on Ukraine and the Middle East but not so bad on the EU.

 
Sherelle Jacobs's article headlined

It has finally dawned on Strasbourg’s blob that the European dream is dead

is interesting. 

The effect of the Greenland crisis and Mr Trump's Davos speech have throw the EU into the air, which must be a good thing. 

At the European Parliament she reports 

"Many view Trump as the new enemy. Several I spoke to compared the implosion of US-EU relations to the bloc’s broken relationship with China – as if these two malignant imperialists are in the same category. With Trump having merely paused tariffs rather than taking them off the table, hawks called for the EU to get on a long war footing."

I am a great admirer of the imperialism of the late 19th century, at least British imperialism, but America is much more of a malign imperialist than China. Which countries has China invaded?

Vietnam in 1979 and that's about all - and that one month conflict was in retaliation for Soviet ally Vietnam invading Cambodia. Britain was on the side of Pol Pot and China in that one.

Meanwhile the USA has carried out about a hundred regime changes, not to mention failed regime changes like the one last week in Iran. America invaded Panama, bombed Serbia, invaded Iraq, Syria and ... I forget the others. 

America helped organise revolutions in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, with what consequences we see. If they succeed in Iran that may make Iran a failed state, which is what Israel wants.

America has bequeathed the Ukrainian war to the EU and UK who would be sensible to bring it to an end fast on Russia's terms.

Actually another malign imperialist is the European Union itself, utterly undemocratic and corrupt, taking power from elected governments and proclaiming its first priority as being to restrict freedom of speech in member states.

As I said, empires need not be malign. They can be good. Helen Szamuely said Austria Hungary was a European Union that worked. 

A democratic, federal Ottoman Empire ruling the Middle East would have been peaceful and very rich.

The crisis in Europe is wonderful theatre. News is part of the entertainment industry always, even when people are being murdered

Globalism is being smashed to pieces
the illusion is crumbling and the truth has come out.
I love watching it unfold and all the parasites being exposed for what they really are.
Ive waited for an entire life time to finally see this. I have to say I never thought I would.
God is back in the house.

Seen on Facebook

"NATO is running Europe. Europe is not a democracy. It's run by the United States via NATO. It's made sure that the only officials in charge of foreign policy are servants of the United States, not Europe. Their job is to make sure that Europe has no voice independently of what the US wants to do. In order for Europe to develop and to be a democracy, it must dissolve NATO because the purpose of NATO is singular: to attack Russia and to become an Asian power in the South China Sea to attack China as well. It's an aggressive attacking power."


Professor Michael Hudson


"Yet it is fruitless now to complain that our leaders are weak, slow-witted, and negligent: had they been otherwise, they would not have been elevated to their role in Washington’s imperial system.

"A clearer assessment of our place in the world was given, if unintentionally, by the European leaders at Davos, when Belgium’s Prime Minister sadly declared that “being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else”, as if this were a meaningful distinction. Like Orwell’s analysis of Dickens’s politics, observing that the novelist’s lament was not the fact of exploitation in itself but that the factory owner was insufficiently benevolent to his proles, America’s regional branch managers in Europe chafe not at the fact of their servitude, but at its worsening terms. When Nato chief Mark Rutte’s obsequious text message to Trump was leaked by his graceless master, we understood that their current shame is that they are now being made to kneel in public, and not grovel, as before, in private comfort.

"Everything desperately said of Greenland to stave off annexation — that America is already sovereign de facto, and can expand its bases, and pour in troops unhindered — is just as true of Europe, and Britain as a whole. Trump’s repeated declaration that it is not worth America defending territory it does not fully possess implies, as the least alarming interpretation, that Nato’s Article 5 mutual defence clause is already defunct. Yet, showing their customary foresight, European security wonks are celebrating as a victory for European resolve the precedent apparently now being set that US bases on European soil can overnight become American sovereign territory, while European leaders squirm at their helplessness being exposed to world derision. Yet Trump has burdened them with no new chains they have not previously competed for as honours. Europe’s subordination is the fruit of all the glittering prizes and titles, thinktank fellowships and security conferences that Washington offered them. Men will fight long and hard for a bit of coloured ribbon, Napoleon remarked. America’s innovation was realising that a continent can be bought with lanyards."

Aris Roussinos in Unherd


"We can see how Europe today is completely encircled: vassalized in the West by the United States in digital, technological, and defense terms; vassalized in the East by China industrially; and subjected in the South to increasingly strong migratory pressures." Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s far-right party National Rally, quoted by Aris Roussinos on X

"You will never convince me, at gunpoint even, that Keir Starmer is making independent decisions about the future of Britain. He is taking orders." Tucker Carlson replying to Eva Vlaardingerbroek who said Starmer, von der Leyen, Merz, and Macron "literally post the same things and push the same agenda: erosion of borders, nation states, and heritage". Actually it should the British cabinet in charge not the Prime Minister but where does power lie? The top civil servants, the Foreign office mandarins, MI6 and CIA and the American deep state, courts in the UK and abroad, a nexus of powerful Europeans and Americans, the web of interests described by Whitney Webb.... the court of Donald Trump which is very corrupt? Who forms the zeitgeist? Where are the political scientists when we need them?

The Iranian regime change attempt was a CIA Mossad Musk plot that failed - there was no mass unrest.

Scott Besant US Treasury Secretary said at Davos that the Iranian currency crisis was created with the aim of inciting protests and succeeded. For two days the protests were peaceful, then thugs and killers, employed presumably by the Mossad-CIA, created mayhem and killed innocent people. This was filmed and is on the net. There is lots of evidence. 

Perhaps 700 rioters were killed by police? I imagine they were mostly the Mossad-CIA thugs. Plus far more people murdered by said thugs. 3,000 in total maybe, which is far more than in the Islamic Revolution, maybe more.

A huge psychops operation is happening to tell us there are 43,000 dead - which is CIA-Mossad disinformation but not the sort the EU objects to. The lies are amplified by pro-Israel people on social media and the traditional media, people who do not do their own research.

This makes me doubt the stories about Kosovo that led to the Kosovo war. The lies that were told by the CIA before the Iraq war we know about and the propaganda that got me to be ambivalent about toppling Gaddafi.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me (Richard II, V.2)

From Bowyer Nichol's Words and Days (1895): the entry for January 25th.

O gentlemen, the time of life is short;
To spend that shortness basely were too long.
I KING HENRY IV. V. 2.


It has been well believed through many ages that the beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life; that the mind which sees itself blameless may be called dead in trespasses— in trespasses on the love of others, in trespasses on their weakness, in trespasses on all those great claims which are the image of our own need. 

GEORGE ELIOT.


Get up, get up, thou leaden man!
Thy track, to endless joy or pain,
Yields but the model of a span:
Yet burns out thy life's lamp in vain!
One minute bounds thy bane or bliss.
Then watch and labour while time is!
CAMPION.

I am more worried about the consequences of mass immigration than about Trump, but pretty worried about Trump too.

Elon Musk reposted this on X with this emoji: 

I am more much worried about the consequences of mass immigration than about Trump, but pretty worried about (and revolted by) Trump too.

Erik Dale 

@EuroDale

If you're European and more worried about Trump than the consequences of mass immigration, you have a serious mental illness. Your mind has been captured. Your ability to think independently: subverted. You exist only as a mindless drone in the unwitting service of forces that seek to destroy us. The only reason you think you're smart and good is because the TV told you so. By definition, this post will make zero impression on you. Which is exactly why YOU are a greater threat to Europe than Trump and mass immigration combined. Yet we will defeat you. Easily. Your shame will pursue you to the end of your days. After which you'll be remembered only as a warning to future generations. That will be your entire legacy. Thus spoke Zarathustra

Quotations

"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident." 

Schopenhauer

“You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” St. Francis de Sales whose day it is today.

“The Israelis if they want to kill you, they'll blow up the entire city block where you live, they'll kill a thousand people Just to get you and they don't care..” 

Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou 

Daily Telegraph: 'Britain is heading for utter oblivion. Here is why. '

This link takes you behind the paywall of the Daily Telegraph to an article by Neil Oliver about the grim future of the UK. It was an open tab on my laptop and I only just got round to reading it but you should do so. 

Here are some excerpts.

"If you go back 20 years and apply today’s spending and tax rates to the demographics of 2004 – changing nothing else, that would give the Chancellor an extra £84 billion a year to play with, enough to cut the basic rate of tax by about 13p in the pound. Unless something is done, every budget will feel like an austerity budget. Taxes per person will go up; public services will crumble under the load of an old population.




"....Demographics are the driver of history. Today, South Korea and Israel are both developed countries. But at current fertility rates every 100 Israelis can expect 210 grandchildren and the Koreans just 15. South Korea has created an economic miracle in my lifetime, but unless they fix this, that’s basically the end of the country.


"If we in the UK had kept the same fertility rate we had in 2010, then for every 100 people we would expect them to have 92 grandchildren. But the rate is dropping sharply: at current rates it would be just 55 grandchildren. Gulp.


"Among private renters in Greater London, around a third are white British. In greater London’s schools just over one in five school children are white British. The old conversations about “integration” and “assimilation” don’t really even make sense any more. In many places people cannot really integrate into the traditional majority culture because it doesn’t exist any more."

Ed West is right talking here about Trump's speech at Davos. Rod Dreher has made the same point.

'What makes it more depressing is that the American diagnosis of Europe’s problems is essentially correct, and the continent’s current leadership are not prepared to do what is necessary to change course.'

Did you read about US behaviour to Iraq in the media?

Yesterday the US was reported to have threatened to freeze Iraq's oil revenues in US banks should pro-Iranian groups be included in the next government.

This week American troops finally left Iraqi government-controlled territory, six years after Iraq asked the Americans (and Iranians) to withdraw their forces, following the Americans assassinating Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani on his way to talks with the Iraqi government.

Trump ignored Iraq's request in 2020 and threatened to freeze $8 billion of Iraq's money then if US troops were forced out. 

US troops remain in the autonomous region of Kurdistan. I do not know on what authority.

The US and Uk had troops in Syria for years much against the Syrian government's will until the Al Qaeda man they backed took power thanks to Turkey.

Meanwhile armed groups loyal to the Al Qaeda Syrian government have today broken the resistance of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syrian Kurds, thanks to the support given the new regime by the United States. 

Assad supporters like Syrian Girl on X enjoy the Kurds' comeuppance but they destroyed ISIS at America's request and now are abandoned.

[24 January 2025: Donald Trump threatened to slap a 100% tariff on Canadian goods if the country strikes a trade deal with China.] 

Trump is not all bad

If it sounds as if, after his mass murders, incipient dementia and sheer incompetence, I regard Donald Trump as wholly bad I do not, at all. 

He is also a visionary and there were very good reasons why he won the presidency twice. He is the necessary man. 

As Kissinger said he is a figure that was necessary to show that one historical era is at an end and a new one begins.

He is bringing peace to Ukraine, dismantling Nato and the Anglo-American alliance and moving the Overton window on immigration- all these are very good things. 

His National Security Strategy and Vice-President Vance's speech at Munich were wonderful and long overdue recognitions of reality.

So Trump has done important and courageous things as well as unforgivable ones.

John Mearsheimer thinks that were there another Nuremberg Tribunal Trump and Netanyahu would suffer the fate of the German leaders back in 1945. 

He is a Democrat and omits to include Biden, but Biden would get off on the grounds of diminished responsibility. 

Trump in that unlikely hypothetical situation might try the same defence. It would be worth a shot.

The West doesn't need to fear state actors

Financial Times headline this morning:

US unveils national defence strategy to counter China in Indo-Pacific

Why does the US need to counter China in Asia or do anything in Asia? 

The US got involved in Asia to counter the threat of godless communism after the war, when the US and UK left half of Europe under communist rule.

US intervention in Asia saved South Korea but led to Laos and Vietnam becoming communist as well as Vietnam. On balance a failure, as most US foreign and defence policy has been since FDR.


There is no threat from any country to Canada. 'Canada is the colony that stayed at home to look after mother' (Anthony Burgess) and that's why she went to war in 1939 and why historically she is in Nato. Far from freeloading on US defence expenditure Canada could cut her defence expenditure. Her only enemy is the US but she cannot hope to protect herself from US attack and fortunately the US Congress would bestir itself to prevent that.


Why does Europe need to spend more to defend itself from a Russia that for four years has failed to take Donetsk? 

One answer is that it was the Americans who prevented Russia from taking Donetsk and Kiev, but it is silly to think that Russia has any reason to attack other countries except conceivably but improbably Moldova.

Do Nato countries have  vital interests in Ukraine or Moldova and such vital interests that they need to increase defence spending?


Why doesn't Europe make a deal with Russia instead, create a new security architecture for Europe that includes Russia and use Russia and China to counterbalance dependence on the USA?


The answer to that question might be: the USA is vindictive, lawless and makes a very bad enemy.

When Americans suddenly care about women’s rights in a Middle Eastern country, those women are about to be bombed

Historically, when Americans suddenly care about women’s rights in a Middle Eastern country, those women are about to be bombed.

Annette Mullaney

The US engineered protests in Iran through economic sanctions. They began peaceful. Then MI6 and Mossad infiltrated, armed violence erupted, casualties followed, and Iran was blamed. Western media faked death tolls, and now Trump readies war on a false pretext.

Max Blumenthal

Many US, UK, and EU journalists are in fact intelligence assets, their job is to be stenographers for imperial power…

Max Blumenthal

Greenland

“European leaders stayed silent when the U.S. bombed Iran. Telling Iran, not Washington to show restraint. They accepted the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president. But when Greenland was mentioned, they suddenly invoked fairness & international law.” Jeffrey Sachs

"We will protect Denmark, Greenland, the north from the threat posed by Russia." Friedrich Merz Chancellor of Germany at Davos

Mary Trump, the Donald's sister, in her Substack today

'The one thing Donald has always feared most is to be seen as a loser and the humiliation that comes with that. Given the perfect storm of his incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive, and the physical); and the sense that he is losing control—over himself and the narrative—and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn. He humiliates himself on an almost daily basis and often in the most public ways imaginable. It feels like a bit of cosmic poetic justice.'

After that striking and convincing first paragraph her second paragraph talked about the corrupt Supreme Court and I stopped reading.

All of these strike me as brilliant

 

Aris Roussinos

@arisroussinos

 

The precedent now apparently being established that US bases on European territory can become US sovereign territory overnight is a victory for European resolve, and will have no future implications for Europe— very clever European defence analysts.

Chas Freeman said there have been over 500,000 casualties in Gaza but this figure is suppressed by both Hamas and Israel

I am well aware that the Israelis have probably killed over 400,000 people in Gaza and according.to some scholars over 700,000 but the media talk about 80,000.

Even this figure is often hedged with the accurate caveat 'according to Hamas'. 

I did not understand why the Hamas-run Ministry of Heath downplays the numbers until I heard Chas Freeman talk about over 500,000 casualties in Gaza and say this figure is suppressed by both Hamas and Israel - by Hamas because they do not want known the true figure of the numbers killed in response to their attack.

The Israelis have not told us the number of civilians killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023 after you deduct the combatants (all the young people at the pop concert were IDF) and the hundreds of Israelis killed by the IDF. My guess is it's between 100 and 300 terrible murders but we are not told.

The most interesting American presidents and British Prime Ministers

The most interesting US Presidents are Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, possibly Nixon, probably Reagan and certainly Trump. Kennedy for glamour, looks and sex life.

The most important are Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, LBJ and possibly Trump. 

The worst are Lincoln without a doubt, LBJ, Bush 2 and Biden.

The best? Probably Coolidge.

The most interesting English PMs are the Pitts, Wellington though not for his premiership, Disraeli, Lloyd George and Churchill. Canning was very interesting, a great man but as Foreign Secretary. He was PM for the shortest time of any.

The most important English PMs are the Pitts, Disraeli, Gladstone, Peel, Salisbury (probably the best), Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill (very wrong about many things), Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Attlee was a brilliant chairman.

The incompetent ones were Theresa May followed by Boris Johnson, 'Liz' Truss, Macdonald perhaps (he looked up railway timetables for his secretary) and Balfour (as PM, before his Declaration).

The worst was Blair because of immigration, devolution and an unjust, catastrophic war worse than Putin's.

Heath changed UK forever by joining the EEC but had it not been him it would have been Wilson or somebody else. It was wanted by Washington and eventually permitted by Paris.

Chas Freeman talking to Glenn Diesen : Fake Peace, Political Collapse & Major Wars

Former US Ambassador to KSA Chas Freeman is exceptionally interesting always and certainly in this talk with Dr Glenn Diesen.


Glenn Diesen said something which makes very good sense. 'The harsh conditions the Russians are putting forward in the diplomatic solution are certainly much better than what a Russian victory would look like.'


Chas Freeman: The idea was we should have all Europeans, meaning everybody but the Russians in a common security structure. That was the logic and that was tragically wrong. I actually had something to do with promoting that fallacy because I remember asking myself when I became assistant secretary of defense if NATO's the answer, what was the question? And what the question was was should we have an an inclusive national and security structure in Europe? And what's the logical basis for that? A logical basis is NATO, so let's expand NATO at least in terms of its outreach through the partnership for peace and let's graft on to that an inclusion of Russia with the Russian NATO Council. Well that effort might have led to something but it was overrun by cold war of triumphalism and and this competing idea of Europe as everything but the Russians something that de Gaulle would have rejected as an idea, of course, since his concept of Europe extended to the Urals at least.


Chas Freeman: Hamas in the Israel lexicon just means any Palestinian nationalist. By the way Hamas is keeping the ceasefire. Israel is engaging in provocations not responses to Hamas violations. There's only one side keeping the peace or ceasefire and it isn't Israel.
And the United States has now built a base on the fringe of Gaza from which apparently we are directing a lot of the Israeli actions with the result that nationalist Israelis are upset that Israel is compromising its sovereignty and there's a crisis in US Israel relations as a result.
An odd way to generate a crisis. One would have thought a crisis might have occurred over genocide, but now it's occurring over the efforts of the United States to direct activities that are part of the genocide.
So this is a very depressing situation.


Glenn Diesen: Besides the escalating the tensions with Gaza and Lebanon, we also see now reports that Netanyahu has visited the newly occupied territories in Syria. What should we make of this? - it doesn't seem like something he would do if they have any intentions of returning these territories.

Chas Freeman: No, they have no such intention.
He is pursuing the vision that many of his quasi-fascist religious messianic cabinet members have of an Israel that extends well beyond the the borders of Palestine.
So it has come to the attention of the world that the source of instability in West Asia is not as has been alleged Iran but is Israel.
And therefore you're seeing various coalitions formed to contain Israel and you're seeing hedging against Israel like the Saudi Pakistani defense pack which by the way is going to facilitate a Chinese technology rush into the into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since the Pakistani military technology is all Chinese or Chinese derived and proven in battles with India and newly credible.
Therefore, I mean this is a really important evolution that's going on. While we have our eyes on the mass murders that are being conduct conducted by Israel, they are having consequences in terms of geopolitical rearrangements.

Truman's American empire - Nato was the first outing for the domino theory.

Since the Cold War ended Nato has ceased to be purely defensive and the USA has been very aggressive indeed. 

The present teaches us about the past and looking back to the creation of Nato it never purely defensive. It was always an American empire.

Eisenhower said in February 1951 “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.”

The cold war and the arms race were unnecessary, George Kennan said. Of course that's true. I saw the cold war was unnecessary in the 1980s. 

He opposed the creation of Nato. I thought that Nato was what the UN was intended to be and had kept the peace. I no longer think that.

Though grateful to the USA for Nato I wanted peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Bloc. Détente.

Stalin had no intention of conquering Europe, as Hitler did. He said England would never allow Greece to go Communist and he did nothing to help Italian and French Communists. 

I suppose Nato was the first outing for the domino theory. 

It was as much a mistake in Europe as in Indochina.

We don't know if Hitler intended to conquer Europe (it's very unlikely) rather than recapture lands lost in 1919 and conquer Russia, until that is England and France went to war with Germany. That is another story. 

Franklin Roosevelt provoked Japan to go to war and in our time the USA has similarly provoked Russia, China and Iran. Chamberlain said the Americans pushed England into going to war in 1939. 

Trump told his audience in the Swiss resort of Davos that were it not for America they would all be speaking German. This is untrue but most people in Davos do speak German 

Trump has lied to Davos and is starting to lose his mind, but the invasion of Greenland is off

Donald Trump just said in his speech at Davos that Spanish flu ended the First World War. That didn't have anything to do with it. The Bulgarian campaign did.

Trump said Iceland 4 times in his speech when he meant Greenland.

When he told the Norwegian PM that he would be less peaceable having not been given Nobel Peace Prize and would need Greenland was he confusing Norway and Denmark?

The important news. The invasion of Greenland isn't going to happen.

Let's hope the great peacemaker doesn't attack Iran.

Trump lies saying Iran was 2 months away from having the atom bomb when he attacked. Tulsi Gabbard has said the CIA told her there was no danger of it happening.

Are they right?

"China is our enemy! Says who? Says us. Why is that? Because we made an enemy out of the them, same as we did to all of our enemies." Robert Lindsay, who is right.

"Forty years ago, the sociologist Charles Tilly concluded that state making may often have much in common with organized crime. This was particularly true when states first manufacture a ‘threat’ and then ‘protect’ their charges from this self-same manufactured threat. Doesn’t this exactly describe the political arrangement we currently have – indeed, that we have long been stuck with -- and by no means only with respect to Iran?" Paul Grenier

“Global warming is part of a natural cycle and there’s nothing we can actually do to stop these cycles. The world is now facing spending a vast amount of money in tax to try to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist.” David Bellamy the botanist and famous British TV presenter in 2008. His TV career abruptly ended. I suspect he is right too.

Syria was a failed Anglo-American regime change attempt

Jeffrey Sachs says that the uprising in Syria against Assad was another US regime change attempt. I thought it began spontaneously but what do I know? 

This below is from the site of the Modern War Institute at West Point, the military academy where American army officers have trained.  I knew most of this but am astonished to see the American army admit what it did. Assad was saved by Putin sending forces to his rescue in retaliation for the Ukrainian revolution and by Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton. She said 8 days before the election she lost that regime change in Syria would be her top priority.

The Belgian Prime Minister admitted just now that European countries were just US satellites

“Being a happy vassal is one thing; being a miserable slave is something else. If you back down now you are going to lose your dignity.”

That Europe has been ruled by the USA for a long time (despite Eden and De Gaulle) is now obvious to everyone. It should have been all the time.

My simple solution to the Greenland question

People say European countries cannot fight the USA if it invades Greenland, but Denmark can send two or three  brigades of soldiers there and dare Trump to shoot them. 

Other countries can send men too.

TACO stands for 'Trump Always Chickens Out'.

Pepe Escobar yesterday

I pray Trump leaves Iran alone. Let's have no more illegal wars. I am sure he won't send in troops. If he did it would end in disaster for the USA.

"It took only a few days to unmask the massive propaganda campaign across NATOstan about “mass casualties” among Iran protesters.

"The – fake – figures came from the Center for Human Rights in Iran, located in, where else, New York, and financed by the CIA-infested National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington and other assorted disinformation entities.

"The list of reasons for urgent regime change in Iran though remains off the charts, featuring, among others, these four key elements:

• Tehran must ditch the Axis of Resistance across West Asia supporting Palestine.

• Because Iran is at the privileged crossroads of trade/energy connectivity corridors in Eurasia, both its connections with the International North–South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) and China’s New Silk Roads (BRI) must be severed. That means blowing up from the inside organic intra-BRICS cooperation between Russia, Iran, India and China.
• As over 90% of Iranian oil exports go to China – and are settled in yuan – that’s a serious threat to the petrodollar: the ultimate anathema. That’s where in Empire of Permanent Strikes terms, Iran aligns with Venezuela. It’s our – petrodollar – way or the highway.
• The staying power of the never-ending dream of an Iran under the Shah remix – complete with a Shah-style SAVAK secret police; cozy Mossad ties to rein in those Arab barbarians; and a sprawling CIA-run net of surveillance hubs targeting both Russia and China."

The USA is still the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today

'But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.'

Martin Luther King in 1967.

'That the Black Power movement comes right on top of the Six-Day War is another cruelty of this period. Stanley Levison, Dr. King’s closest adviser, said just a few days after the Six-Day War, We’re in a real pickle here because the architects of nonviolence theory, of the enlightenment of ethical culture, have always been Jewish, and the Jews are turning into hawks because of the Six-Day War. You know–Israel beat five Arab armies in six days, and muscular Judaism was born. And he said this is going to be a big crisis ’cause we’re going to lose a lot of brainpower for nonviolence.'

Historian Taylor Branch in the January 26, 2009 issue of The Nation. Levison was a Jewish Communist and one of King's two speechwriters.

The Vietnam war was a foolish adventure, though you can say that of most wars that are lost.

Unlike the US invasion of Iraq, US toppling of the Libyan government and Hillary Clinton's intention to topple the Syrian government had she won in 2016, the Vietnam war was legal and just. 

The North Vietnamese regime was also very much more horrible than Saddam's, Assad's, Gaddafi's, Milosevic's or the Iranian government today. 

But Vietnam was none of America's business.

Nor is Iran, whose government seems to have a lot of support to judge by the million people who came out in a demonstration days ago.