Give peace a chance

Personally I think Great Britain spends enough on defence. Illegal immigrants and terrorists are the threat to us. John Healey is the first British Secretary of State for Defence to resign. John Nott wanted to after the invasion of the Falklands but Mrs Thatcher would not let him.








John Profumo was Secretary of State for War when he resigned after admitting he lied to Parliament about Christine Keeler and Lord Lambton was Under-Secretary of State for Defence when he too resigned because of prostitutes. Duff Cooper and Churchill resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty. Were there others? I am sure there were.

The Guardian which peddles MI6 misinformation about Iran including the CIA/MI6 regime change attempt praises Healey who is responsible for my country being guilty of war crimes by helping the IDF in Gaza.

Declassified UK

@declassifiedUK

·

Jun 11

Defence secretary Healey authorised hundreds of UK spy flights for Israeli intelligence during a genocide. He was never seriously questioned on this let alone held to account, and now freely leaves office. The real issue here is our governance: one national media won’t tell.

Great Britain should to be neutral, stay out of American wars, in which I include the Ukrainian war, and repeat over and over that we have no interests east of Suez. But despite this the UK should try to build good relations with Iran and China rather than be dependent on America.

America is a big threat to us, China or Iran not so much.


We should use our good offices as a neutral country to try broker a lasting security architecture that leads to peace in Ukraine but that is easy to say and may be impossible to do.

Two wise old servants of the American republic

I recently heard Col Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Colin Powell, say in a podcast that under international law Hamas and Hezbollah aren't terrorists but resistance movements fighting a foreign occupier.

"O good old man, how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world."

Former US Ambassador Chas Freeman would agree.

Trump is 'totally erratic' and is 'mentally incapacitated'

Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News tells Breaking Points that the Iranian negotiation team added senior psychologists to review draft communications to Trump because they believe Trump is 'totally erratic' and is 'mentally incapacitated'. Qatari mediators, Saudis and Turks are also concerned.

The world has a sick man on its hands.

This might explain why the Iranians and Americans think a peace deal is imminent when the Iranian demands are ones Trump cannot accept without abject humiliation.

Like a dream that repeats itself over and over aain

Yvan Stoclet on LinkedIn


Trump has defeated Iran 55 times, destroyed it 35 times, announced an imminent deal 38 times, and informed us 25 times that the Strait of Hormuz is open.



It’s a fascinating management style: declare victory, declare total destruction, announce a breakthrough, then simply repeat the entire sequence over and over.

Seen on Facebook

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The media are the midwives of revolutions and wars

Neutrality Studies is a very informative podcast channel which was taken down by YouTube but came back. The people who rule the West are very anxious to silence criticism of their foreign policy.

Truth Revealed: USA Is Nr.1 Democracy Killer has Irish journalist and author Finian Cunningham talking about his book Killing Democracy: Western Imperialism’s Legacy of Regime Change and Media Manipulation and US regime change operations in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Congo, Ukraine, Venezuela, Myanmar, and China. He explains how mainstream media act as propaganda tools to manufacture public consent for US interventions.

The most recent one of course is the attempted regime change in January in Iran which the Western media portrayed as a spontaneous uprising in which 30,000 people were slaughtered. The Israeli press were permitted by the censor to tell this story at the end of April.

The media said with no evidence that 30,000 people were slaughtered. I think the Iranian figure of a tenth of that is credible, many of the dead being policemen.

Finian Cunningham says Zelensky is clearly guilty personally of things that I prefer not to repeat lest Zelensky sues me.

Remember everything you think you know about Iran comes from American controlled media, unless you go to dissident sites or podcasters or now to one or two famous ones..

'The Cold War ended with a fool and the post Cold War era is ending with another fool.' Discuss

Gorbachev thought Leninism could become democratic, Trump that America and Western civilisation could be made great again. 

Gorbachev was bound to fail. Was Trump?

Yes the multipolar world cannot be wished away, but he has stumbled into a trap entirely of his own making.

Robert Pape in After Beijing, the World Looks Different argues that the Iran war may be remembered as the first conflict of the post-American era, the moment when the world stopped fearing U.S. military dominance in the way it once did.

Despite weeks of American and Israeli strikes, Iran has defeated the USA.

Beijing watched closely.

Professor Pape says great powers rarely collapse all at once — the world simply slowly stops fearing them in the same way.

Chas Freeman says empires decline and fall the way Hemingway said bankruptcy happened, gradually and then suddenly.

Alliances are archaic. In praise of neutrality

It took a five or six days after the US's assault on Iran to realise that Iran would defeat the US.

It came as a surprise to Xi who has better sources of information than I do.

Professor Marandi I think was the first to explain how things would unfold and was proven right.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor in his latest podcast New World - Israel Dying, NATO Dead & U.S. Defeated by Iran says the US defeat shows that countries can defend themselves with missiles and drones - and without American bases that endanger rather than protect them. 

People are starting to see this though people who say so are slimed as unpatriotic.

Almost the only time I agreed with Tony Benn, the British left-wing socialist politician, was when he said the UK could defeat a Russian invasion by guerrilla warfare. He was right about that as he was about wanting us to leave the EEC. 

He could have added that Russia was never going to attack us - something which remains true.

Now things have moved on, alliances are out of date and countries like Romania and my country the UK should be neutral - and therefore fee of subservience to a foreign power.

Today the Russo-Ukrainian War has gone on as long as the First World War

Today the Russo-Ukrainian War has been going on for 1,567 days — the same length of time as the First World War unless you count the eight previous years of low-level conflict in the Donbass.

Lies are not normal in democratic countries, though Biden and Hillary are pathological liars too - Trump not only lies continually but he lies so badly

Trump has claimed 37 times that he is close to concluding a deal with Iran, according to CNN, starting on March 23. The last time was yesterday when he said that Washington and Tehran would "conclude a deal in the next two weeks".

Pro-China and pro-Iran? Oh my fur and whiskers! Conservative media have taken to cancel culture with gusto

The Daily Telegraph yesterday:

Southbank chief in fresh row over ‘anti-Semitic’ conspiracy theory

Misan Harriman reposted claim that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are ‘selling off Albanian coastline to Jewish billionaires’

After reaching the Pacific the American frontier extended until now it stands on the borders of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran

'America has always been an expansionist power.'

So begins Stephen Kinzer, a journalist who wrote the history of US regime change operations, in an interesting podcast. I learnt lots from it.

America has organised regime changes in a hundred countries and this is an indirect way of invading and conquering them.

Eisenhower tried to prevent a united, neutral, democratic Austria but had to accept it eventually. 

He prevented the same thing in Germany which would have ended the unnecessary cold war. 

He also overthrew Iran's democratic government in 1953, fifty years before the US illegally went to war with Iraq to create a democracy at the heart of the Middle East.

Eisenhower once seemed to me one of the better US presidents but in fact he was as terrible as any of his successors and that's saying a very great deal. Most were terrible except the Democrats FDR, Truman and Kennedy and the idiot savant Reagan.

Obama and Carter were below mediocre but did some good in the Middle East.

America is responsible for invading Iraq, overthrowing Gaddafi, the war in Ukraine and for all the things Israel has done recently. 

That makes it hard not to see America as an evil empire and a far more aggressive one than the USSR at least after Stalin.

NGOs, Soros, USAID were US instruments.

Mr Kinzer repeats a joke that "There can never be a coup in the United States because there's no American embassy there."

I now see that the left wing students were acting in self defence when they took hostage the "diplomats" (all were CIA officers) in the US embassy in Tehran 48 years ago.

I suppose after conquering North America (England defeated the USA, which is why Canada exists) the American frontier extended until now it stands on the borders of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.

What is clear to most people now is that America is the tyranny, overthrowing governments around the world including Ukraine in 2014, Venezuela, attempting to do it now in Iran and Cuba. 

America has become the evil empire but perhaps it always was one. Think of Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 54, Bay of Pigs, Chile... 

Americans should go home and tend their gardens. 

Had America not interfered Ukraine would be undivided and at peace. 

See how Armenia became a US satellite and lost Nagorno Karabakh. 

See what the US is doing by proxy in Palestine and Lebanon.

Quotations

Alastair Crooke:

Beijing can fund itself cheaply and almost indefinitely – and thus can outlast the U.S. grand strategy to contain China.

Retired US Ambassador Chas Freeman:

So Israel is at odds with the entire world and the latest polls, as you implied, show that it is widely regarded as a pariah internationally. 97% of Turks feel strongly that that Israel should not exist. So, Israel used to pose the question does Israel have a right to exist and the answer now that is coming back from the world is not if you behave the way you do, then you do not have a right to exist. 

Seen on Facebook

This helps you understand the history of the last quarter century. This is not a parody account.

John Ghazvinian's 'America and Iran A History, 1720 to the Present' (2020) p 518

 

Is Hezbollah an Iranian proxy? Is peace between the USA and Iran impossible? Is the US empire dissolving?

I have noticed that people who say Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy when they blame Iran for what Hezbollah does also complain that Hezbollah has no justification attack Israel in retaliation for Israeli attacks on Iran. 

I always assumed Hezbollah was an Iranian ally rather than proxy (or instrument) because proxy is a useful word for justifying verbal and military attacks on Iran. AI thinks it's a proxy but AI just repeats what most people have written. 

In his latest podcast Alastair Crooke, ex MI6, who knows the region as much as any man, is clear that Hezbollah is a free agent and ally of Iran, not a proxy. 

"I think particularly in the case of Hassan Nasrallah Iran not only respected him hugely as a a statesman but as a wise person and and so more often than not I think it was Hassan Nasrallah giving advice to Iran rather than Iran telling him what to do. That certainly didn't happen."

In the same podcast AC says he doesn't think there will be an agreement between the USA and Iran. What we can hope for is "peace without a peace".

Iran's inevitable demands are too much for America to agree to overtly.

It really does look like the world might have changed in as big a way as when the Soviet empire came to an end.

I hope so. The American empire deserves the words which Carlyle put into Cromwell's mouth when he dissolved the Rump Parliament. "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done."

Iran has never been America's enemy

Iran is not the world's leading terrorist state. This is an Israeli falsehood. The big Muslim terrorists have been Sunni. Iran is not much a terrorist state unless you count backing Hezbollah and giving money to Hamas. 

Even the Iranian attempted terrorist atrocities reported in the US and UK media sound suspiciously like false flags to me.

The Americans, except for Obama, come out very badly from their history with Iran starting balefully Eisenhower. 

Since 1990 the Israelis who were previously relaxed about Iran demonised her in order to persuade America to remain involved in the Middle East and then believed their own propaganda. 

What bunglers the Americans are, how clever and malign is Netanyahu. 

But Israel and the Israel lobby are not to blame for US crimes and follies. Only the US is.

I posted this in April 2017.

Obviously, the USA and UK should never have invaded Iraq. They should have launched a short punitive expedition into Afghanistan in 2001, restored the monarchy and then allowed the Taliban to come back. Nation-building was always (a liberal) folly: Afghanistan and Iraq were not post-war Germany, as should have been clear.

But having broken it, as Colin Powell warned, the USA bought Iraq. Leaving it alone led to ISIS. So what is the solution?

I don't know. Unfortunately, the USA may now back the Israeli-Saudi-Sunni alliance against the Shia crescent (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah). I hope Mr. Trump resists this temptation.

Almost all the terrorist atrocities against Western Europe and the USA are committed by Sunnis, yet we are constantly told that Iran, which is fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda, is the great threat. Why? 

Because Iran is a great threat to Israel?

I have no animus against Israel but don't want the UK to fight wars for Israel. Israel is not our business. I don't see why it's the US's but I get it that the US must be loyal to allies like Israel and the monstrous Saudi monarchy.

The Saudis created IS to fight the Shias in Iraq and Syria. Al Qaeda, who fight with the Syrian "moderate" rebels whom the Anglo-American back, is a criminal organisation created and financed by Saudis.

We are told "Iran finances terrorism in the Gulf, Syria, and Lebanon" – though the same could be said of the Saudis. And Syria is a war zone where the Iranians are on the government side, so terrorism is not the mot juste there. 

Iran considers herself at war with Israel and is the reason why the Assad regime did not collapse five years ago. A Syrian Christian friend says that 'Iran is the devil'. Still, Iranians do not plant bombs or mow people down in trucks in Europe. I know they bombed Buenos Aires, but that was 25 years ago.

I fear Trump will turn out to be a traditional Republican with a traditional American foreign policy. I hope I am wrong and bombing Syria was merely a deserved punishment for using chemical weapons. 

I hope very much that the US does not start fighting the Assad-Iran axis. I certainly hope that Great Britain, or England as she used to be called, does not take part on the American side.

How paradoxical that, long before Obama's Iranian detente, George W. Bush overthrew Iran's two great enemies, Saddam and the Taliban, and gave Iraq to the Shias, while proclaiming that Iran was part of the Axis of Evil. Having done so much to aid the horrible Iranian regime it seems rather illogical not to try to rub along with the mullahs if possible.

Yet, in an article headlined How Trump Can Help Cripple the Iranian Regime in the Washington Post, neo-cons Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh depressingly claim that

a consensus has developed in Washington for some“push back” against the Islamic Republic of Iran

and argue for committing American ground troops to fight Iran in Iraq and Syria:

It is way past time for Washington to stoke the volcano under Tehran and to challenge the regime on the limes of its Shiite empire. This will be costly and will entail the use of more American troops in both Syria and Iraq. But if we don’t do this, we will not see an end to the sectarian warfare that nurtures jihadists. We will be counting down the clock on the nuclear accord, waiting for advanced centrifuges to come on line. As with the Soviet Union vs. Ronald Reagan, to confront American resolution, the mullahs will have to pour money into their foreign ventures or suffer humiliating retreat.

And today the Times [what Americans quaintly call the London Times] reports that Mr. Trump has been told 20,000 troops are needed to beat the Taliban, a war that he rightly said last year was unwinnable.

The truth is that Russia and China, which both have very large Sunni Muslim minorities, are very scared of and want to defeat Sunni jihadism. This threat was vastly increased by George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and, to some extent, by Mr Obama calling for regime change in Syria. 

Neocons like Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh persuaded the US Government to make these mistakes. Do these people never tire of trying to squander lives pointlessly?

The answer to that, of course, is no. More importantly, will Donald Trump be true to his instincts and his words in the campaign about America First or will he be turned?

At this point a very traditional pro-Sunni, anti-Iranian foreign policy is emerging.

Donald Trump has announced a review of the Iran nuclear deal.

On Wednesday James Mattis said, speaking of Yemen

We will have to overcome Iran’s efforts to destabilize yet another country and create another militia in their image of Lebanese Hezbollah.

Yet it is arguably the Saudis who are destabilising Yemen.

On the same day, Rex Tillerson said Iran has

“the potential to travel the same path as North Korea and to take the world along with it.”

The refugee question

"We will keep going until we reach our saturation point, because what does it matter if we have to wait another week for a hospital visit or if our class sizes are slightly bigger or if our city is slightly fuller? What does it matter if things are slightly more challenging, if we have to pay a little bit more into the system? Surely it is worth it to see those lives being restored again?" 

British Labour MP Rachael Maskell said this to a pro-refugee rally in York in September 2015, arguing that the government's pledge to take 20,000 refugees was not enough.

She is right that class sizes and waits to go to hospital don't matter compared to saving people but what does matter is saving her country from becoming another country, from invasion. 

Countries are not based on values, at least not in the Old World. 

They are based on blood mostly and history and to a considerable extent religion. 

'Americans use the word nation in the European sense in the phrase Cherokee nation etc.' Discuss.

Luckily rich countries can help asylum seekers by paying countries to which we give aid money to accept them in.

This is something I am very sorry that King Charles III was reported to have said was "appalling". Defending the realm is the first duty of monarchs. 

September 11 was the moment the Americans became serial killers, as French spies told the CIA's John Kiriakou. The US must now be contained somehow

Professor Jiang  won his reputation because in 2024 he predicted that Trump would return to the White House, attack Iran and find himself trapped there. 

In this interview filmed on Monday 1 June with Glenn Diesen he says a peace now between Iran and the United States will be short lived. 

To avoid humiliation and the end of the petrodollar America will resort to a false flag operation, a ground invasion and the draft.

He says Israel is "a pitbull out of control" that wants to attack Turkey and Egypt.

Professor Diesen says Iranian control of the Straits of Hormuz is "perhaps not comparable to the outbreak of the Second World War and the end of Communism", which suggests to me that he thinks it is.

Professor Diesen calls the media empire stenographers, a phrase I think coined by Max Blumenthal.

Yes. The US controlled world media are a huge problem.

The US and Israel are hard to separate now and jointly or severally are the cause of most of the military dangers in the world. 

They have become over 25 years the enemies of the entire world. 

September 11 was the moment Americans became serial killers, as CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou admits.

The rest of the world must find a way to contain them but how?

I suppose by Iran controlling the Straits of Hormuz.

And by the Europeans and Great Britain brokering a lasting peace as quickly as possible in Ukraine that protects Russian and Ukrainian interests.

And by dissolving NATO, as this blog has advocated for years.

But the real hope is a change of thinking among young Americans. 

It's already started. The internet and podcasts play a very important role and the US First Amendment.

Bistrovas is a great Kosice restaurant that deserves to be much better known

This is wonderful. Deep fried langos topped with shredded chicken, paprika sauce, sour cream and fried onions in a Slovak Hungarian fusion restaurant. And I normally don't eat anything fried. 

The staff are lovely. My half Hungarian, half Slovak restaurant said relations between the two communities had been really bad years ago but were better now among young people.

In which our hero changes planes and has four hours in Warsaw

I spent seven weeks travelling around the new world and wanted every moment to blog but failed to do so. Had I worked out how to dictate onto my telephone I might have left a wonderful record of my travels. I don't know. 

Here am I outside the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw where I changed planes on my way from Korsice to Bucharest. I chose to do this rather than travel by the scenic railway route to Budapest. I shall not reopen decisions. The moving finger wrote and all that.

The Hotel Warsaw is famous partly because it's the scene of quite a lot of the first chapter of one of the two books I read in the last 20 years that most live in my mind, Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte, the other being War and Peace. Malaparte dined with Hans Frank the German governor and his entourage night after night and records their conversations with what accuracy no-one can say.

In 1994 when I first visited the old town seemed a toy town of no interest really, but by now it has aged well like Ypres which was rebuilt after the first world war by German labourers. 

But Warsaw smells of death: not just of the terrible horrors of which the Germans were guilty but also the terrible horrors visited on Poland by the communists and the Russians. 

At a moment like this when it's possible that we're about to see the beginning of another world war how sad one feels that Beck the Polish foreign minister did not accept the deal Hitler offered Poland in late 1938. 

Are we equally blind now?

I have my multi-colored umbrella bought all those years ago secondhand because a nice man  brought it to me in the airport and told me I left it in the plane. Only observe was Henry James's advice for writing but it applies to life.

Israeli runs over Arab schoolgirls just for fun.

 Here.

The 6 Days War began 59 years ago today

I and friends of mine had the idea that the Arabs started it but Israel did, with American approval.

The Israeli General Staff had been thinking since 1948 that Israel needed more land. Had Kennedy been US President my guess is he'd probably have vetoed it. He was the last Israel-sceptical American leader.

I saw a cartoon published in an Israeli newspaper in the aftermath of the war. An Israeli tank with two soldiers visible in the turret crosses a desert that is empty except for an old woman in Arab dress on the horizon shaking her fist in anger. One Israeli soldier says to the other: "See even here, antisemitism"

Wolffe was in sheep's clothing when he infiltrated the Trump White House and got material for his first Trump book

Murdoch whom Michael Wolffe had previously stitched up warned Trump, who ignored the warning to his cost.

Trump is of course a terrible negotiator, about the worst, as Mr Wolffe says.

The ghost writer of the Art of the Deal got a wonderful deal for the royalties.

Road trip

I feel rather proud of myself for having found and downloaded an app that lets me dictate on my telephone in gmail and I'm giving it a go. 

The danger is that it makes me prolix which reminds me that in my first job in the House of Lords in the dear bygone time I used to walk down the corridor by the side of the chamber where handwritten diplomatic dispatches taken from the library were displayed. A colleague pointed out that they were very short which was one of the advantages of not having word processors. 

By the way Lytton Strachey said the history of the 19th century will never be written because we know far too much about it. 

What would he have said about 2026? 

Does it really matter what he would have said? I suppose it doesn't.

So by chance I have come from Bucharest to Kosice in Slovakia hitching a lift with a friend who was on his way by car to Riga. For lunch we stopped in Sibiu at a very good Portuguese restaurant called Old Lisbon in Piață Mare, the main square, which I recommend. Then we went to Oradea  where we had a capital dinner at restaurant whose name I forget with a friend of ours. 

I've always had a great respect for him but it turns out that he is more interesting than I knew. Before and during university and in a year off after university he had had an idyllic life in Oradea riding horses and enjoying the 18th century countryside and 18th century way of life which I only glimpsed in 1990 from a car window. 

He was among other things secretary to Laszlo Tokes who started the Romanian revolution in December 1989 and is the Romanian Vaclav Havel.

My friend led a life that seems from the outside more like a novel than reality. When life really feels real it feels like a novel or a film which is a paradox 

Oradea is dominated by the famous Nicula brothers who own a lot of it. I remember Old Man Potter in It's a Wonderful Life would have owned Bedford Falls and called it Pottersville had George Bailey played by James Stewart never lived. I have no reason to think however that Oradea is worse for the brothers. Come to think of it Pottersville looked more fun than Bedford Falls.

Oradea was a Hungarian city, proudly rebuilt during Hungary's fifty brief years as a great power, but now the great majority of people there are Romanian. This is a phenomenon which is repeated around the world, including in Kosice where I type this (though Kosice had a Slovak majority in 1850) with my thumbs and in the great imperial cities of the British Isles, France and Spain. 

The difference is that the Romanians and Slovaks are indigenous and got there first.

Now brown skinned delivery boys rush down the streets of Kosice and Bucharest which until recently we're monochrome.

Some Hungarian historians accept what is undeniable that the Romanians were in Transylvania first but say they left and returned after the Hungarians and Szecklers settled the Crișana, the Banat and Transylvania. 

They adduce evidence from river names but my historian's instinct tells me that this theory is unsound.

Kiriakou on September 11 2001

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou is a man I trust. He says, as I assumed, that Al Qaeda carried out the September 11 atrocities. He suspects that the Israeli secret services knew about it in advance and didn't warn America.

He says this would explain "the dancing Israelis" who seemed overjoyed watching the buildings hit.

I have no doubt that did Mossad know in advance about the plot Israel would have kept schtum as this was obviously in Israel's interests. It was their duty to do so.

Some people think George W Bush was responsible for September 11. This is obviously absurd. Had he tried it it would have gone wrong.

September 11 at the time seemed to me something almost bound to happen because of American support for Israel but Americans instead of distancing themselves from Israel went to war with terrorism and did themselves infinitely more harm than Al Qaeda had.

Please may Iran have the bomb

Larry Johnson and Pepe Escobar report a senior Pakistani source saying the Iranian President has told the Pakistani PM that Iran may have a functioning deliverable functioning nuclear weapons and wants to detonate one of these in the Iranian desert to deter her enemies. John Mearsheimer thinks it very unlikely that any country would give Iran bombs. Chas Freeman has said for some time that Iran could develop the bomb in two weeks.

The one thing we can say is that an Iranian bomb would stabilise the region.

I hope the Senate will vote to stop American actions against Iran and Trump can stop, blaming the Democrats in Congress for stabbing him in the back.

The danger is of Israel exploding a nuclear bomb, obviously.