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The tiny Bucur church close to my first apartment when I came to Bucharest might be 17th century or might have been built in 1416 by Mircea the Elder, which would make it even older than the Catholic church where I just went to Mass, the Baratia church - though that was rebuilt in the 1840s. Most think the church of St Anthony is the oldest church here (built when Queen Mary I was on the English throne so not old by our standards).
Israel has vast influence in the US but the American empire has its own reasons for wanting to control the Middle East, Latin America, North America and to contain or fight China.
It took me a long time to see that America is the world's enemy. It became obvious in Biden's time but Trump has made that clear to the meagrest intelligence.
Russia wants to broker peace between America and Iran and may succeed but it will be only a ceasefire. America and Israel are utterly untrustworthy predators.
I am not sure why Iran would agree to stop the war.
The American empire has its origins with FDR pushing Chamberlain to go to war with Germany and provoking Japan to attack Pearl Harbor and later Truman's creation of Nato.
It's a mistake to imagine that most Romanians are scared of Russia. They are cynics and many or most (less so among the younger graduates) blame America for the war in Ukraine, which shows they are more observant than the British. This is why Calin Georgescu won the first round of the November 2024, an election cancelled by the courts because of his anti Nato views after some pressure from America and France.
These are extracts from a great article by brilliant US analyst Brian Berlertic. I read explanations like this for the American reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine but it took time fully to understand.
The war on Iran is part of a decades-spanning US project to assume complete control over the Middle East and the oil and gas that is produced and exported from the region. This is not as a means of taking the energy for the United States’ own use but to establish and enhance a US monopoly over energy production and exports from the US itself and from the nations and regions the US is assuming control over.
This includes most recently Venezuela in Latin America. The early 2026 US war of aggression against the Venezuelan state, kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, and taking hostage of the remaining Venezuelan government led to the almost immediate cutting of Venezuelan oil exports to China and the distribution of Venezuelan oil wealth to US corporations.
...All of these preparations are taking place ahead of what the US sees as an inevitable confrontation with China itself – which is ultimately the priority driving US conflict against Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and many other nations in the first place, all as a means of first isolating and containing China before confronting it directly.
Considering the costs Europe and Persian Gulf Arab states are paying for their subordination to the US and their role in hosting and facilitating US wars of aggression in their respective regions of the world, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are likewise painting targets on themselves ahead of any confrontation with China.
What the US often refers to as “security guarantees” for its “allies” is merely a euphemism for US military occupation, political capture, and control of what are actually proxies — not allies. The purpose of maintaining a global network of proxies from Europe to the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific is specifically to have other nations pay all the costs for US foreign policy, allowing the US to assume any and all benefits solely for itself.
The prospect of US war around the globe continuously escalating in the near to intermediate future is inevitable because the wars taking place now are being fought specifically to prepare for a future confrontation with China itself. For this reason, the prospects of the US arriving at any sort of “peace” deal with Russia or Iran are near zero.
Until the interests driving US foreign policy — including the arms industry, big oil and gas, big tech, the automotive industry, and many others — are displaced around the globe by the alternatives offered by multipolarism, and until the multipolar world can create sufficient deterrence against not only US military aggression but also the economic coercion, political interference, and capture that lead to that aggression, the US will continue to hold global peace, prosperity, and stability hostage to its demands for continued unipolar hegemony over the planet.
Had America returned to isolationism in 1991 what a world of pain would have been avoided. September 11 Iraq Iran etc etc etc But now is the time for the Americans to revert to the ideas of Calvin Coolidge, their last good president. "The business of America is business." He wasn't only an isolationist. He had good ideas about immigration and tax cuts too.
Miriam Adelson, widow of a Zionist casino owner, who gave Trump campaign $100 million has personally asked him to attack Iran again. Iran is not a threat to the world, she is. In 2016 Trump said because he was rich he didn't need money from donors and was therefore independent of them.
Jamie McIntyre, maverick Australian journalist:
I went to Aegina for the Orthodox Easter more or less by mistake, intending to revisit my beloved Hydra yet again, but it's a happy mistake.
Aegina isn't upmarket. It's in its shirt sleeves and relaxing, very beautiful and no steep climbing.
I visited the archaeological museum, not a good one but topical to see the origins of Western civilisation just as it is falling apart.
Aegina has 4 claims to fame: it was Achilles' kingdom; Athens' naval rival; the first capital of Greece and the closest island to Athens. When I first visited it I thought it a bit tacky but it isn't, nor even too touristy. It's unpretentious.
March 30th
April 14th
'I don’t mind admitting that I hope the US and Israel suffer a crushing, devastating defeat in Iran. I hope this war collapses the entire US empire. My only loyalty is to humanity, and being on Team Human in today’s world means being against the US empire and against Israel.'
Robert Pape says Iran intends to destroy Trump’s presidency so will continue the war at least until November, to develop an atom bomb and be the fourth power in the world. It's hard for me to see how they can fail to achieve these things so I wonder why they have stopped fighting. A war until Christmas is a catastrophe not just for America but the world economy (Russia and Iran excepted). Israel also wants the war to continue.
Pape cannily said that Trump's enemy in this war was not Iran but Obama.
Why does the European Union "president' not talk to Iran or Russia?
(Fun fact. When she visited China she had to go through immigration like an ordinary person which was droll.)
On the one hand, I don't know these human rights claims. Our media have been so poisoned by the lies and propaganda of the intelligence agencies; I don't know what to believe. This is not to say that human rights abuses don't happen, but I can't believe it just by the words of the Western mainstream media that they happen, so I don't know what to believe.
Second, I think our warmongers use these invented or real human rights abuses to make wars on countries that only make the situation worse, as we've seen in the Middle East. I know that, for instance, you talked about the Uyghurs, but I'm not an expert on China. I do know that this has been studied well by people, friends of mine like Piers Robinson, who say that the UK specifically used Islamists to destroy Syria, sided with the really bad guys to destroy the country where I have several acquaintances from. Syria seemed like a pretty normal society, presumably if you didn't cross the regime, but they had a National Health Service and could go to the beach in bikinis and live a pretty normal life. The human rights circus is part of the military industrial complex.
Interestingly, one of the Syrian girls I know was part of the student movement that protested against Assad in 2011. She then got a scholarship to Syracuse University in the US. She's not anti-American by any means, but she said that the student movement was quickly infiltrated by hard men with guns who shot at the Assad security forces.
When they fired back, the Western headline was "Assad shooting his own people, killing peaceful students." Basically, it was the Maidan playbook a few years before the Maidan coup.
There's so much out there reported at face vaue by a credulous and corrupt media. There was a 60 Minutes show where a masked Mossad agent said, "The world's a stage and we are the directors. Everything you see is fake," or something like that.
Glenn Greenwald who's a Jewish American Democrat 4 hours ago on Substack.
"Biden's negotiator and adviser for Israel and Lebanon was Amos Hochstein: born in Israel, served in the IDF, whose family still lives in Israel.
"He said on Face the Nation this Sunday that had Biden won a second term, there was a strong possibility that the US would have bombed Iran's nuclear facilities. Also says he supported Trump’s “Operation Midnight Hammer” last year."
Israel has decided not to prosecute the IDF soldier that desecrated a statue of Jesus Christ in Lebanon. He has merely been rebuked.
Much, much more importantly several Christian villages have been completely destroyed by Israel in southern Lebanon.
John Mearsheimer said in the last two or three days that Israel is a much greater threat to Western values than Iran because Iran is not an apartheid state and never attempted let alone carried out a genocide.
Of course he always uses the word apartheid inexactly (by his definition all the European colonies in Africa would qualify as apartheid states including South Africa before 1948). Nor do I express any opinion on whether the holocaust in Gaza qualifies as genocide. Whether it does or not the IDF certainly killed far more than even the 80,000 Arabs that the Israelis and Hamas agree on. Credible reports indicate that hundreds of thousands of civilians died. One report says 450,000, another 600,000.
Professor Mearsheimer is obviously right that Iran never did anything remotely comparable to that. Nor to the CIA Mossad MI6 regime charge attempt in January or the US-Israeli assault on Iran in February (The UK helped the US.)
I have argued here for many years that Iran is no threat to the West.
But instead European countries made Iran and Russia their enemies because America wants it.
Now America is obviously Europe's enemy too.
We need an end to Nato. Europe and Great Britain should not be dragged by the American chariot into the US deep state's war against multipolarity.
First Principles: Why the US Will Continue War with Iran
The US' primary goal is global primacy.
Attacking Iran is driven by a desire to isolate Russia and China further by eliminating a partner and fully controlling an economically vital region of the world.
Part of this isolation specifically for China involves cutting off energy exports from Iran to China.
The US can also use its own war of aggression against Iran to implement a defacto blockade on all or much of the energy leaving the entire Middle East to China and also many of China's largest and most important trade partners.
A collapse in consumer demand means a collapse in demand for Chinese production the US has been complaining about and desperately trying to target for years.
The US is also using this opportunity to normalize a global blockade of all Iranian ships just as it has the "shadow fleet."
This has always been expanding toward a general, global blockade.
Everything is aimed at a more direct and serious confrontation with both Russia (whom the US is still waging proxy war/covert war on) and China.
Because of this fundamental reality, no "peace" of any kind was EVER possible with Iran unless Iran and its allies could physically impose it on the US which at this point is still not realistic or possible.
So the war will inevitably continue and only the excuses of why it will continue remain to be crafted and presented.
