John Mearsheimer estimates that the USA murdered 38 million people between 1971 and 2021

"From 1971 to 2021, the U.S. murdered 38 million people.”

“38 million.”

"And this is the same U.S. that now wants to 'liberate' Iran."

No British conservatives said they wanted war between America and Iran beforehand but when an illegal war starts for no clear reason they support it

 

Even though it began with almost cold blooded murders of Iranian leaders and continued with the murder of 170 schoolgirls. 

And this is despite the evidence that Epstein was working for Israel.

And the evidence of what the Israelis are doing in Gaza (and in Lebanon, Iran now, etc).

O, is it all forgot?

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

O, is it all forgot?

All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence?

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 3, Sc 2

IN  the  morning  of  our  days,  when  the  senses  are

unworn  and  tender,  when  the  whole  man  is

awake  in  every  part,  and  the  gloss  of  novelty  fresh

upon  all  the  objects  that  surround  us,  how  lively

at  that  time  are  our  sensations,  but  how  false  and

inaccurate  the  judgments  we  form  of  things  !  I

despair  of  ever  receiving  the  same  degree  of

pleasure  from  the  most  excellent  performances  of

genius,  which  I  felt  at  that  age  from  pieces  which

my  present  judgment  regards  as  trifling  and  contemptible. 

3 amazing pieces of news (to me) I heard last night

 

In his latest podcast Ray McGovern  who was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990 and briefed presidents, says the the USA deliberately hit the Iranian school killing over 180 girls, possibly intended to provoke a retaliation by the Iranians that would justify more intense US bombing.

He says the Israelis have admitted that they attacked Egypt in 1967 not because they thought Egypt would attack Israel but because they saw a good opportunity.

He says George W Bush in his autobiography said he intended to attack Iran in 2008 but was deterred by a CIA report saying Iran stopped working on developing an atom bomb in 2003, the same advice Tulsi Gabbard said she received from the CIA a year ago.

Quotations

“As more than 1,000 Iranian men, women and children lay dead after days of bombardment from U.S. and Israeli missiles, the official White House X account on Thursday evening posted a video of scenes from popular action movies spliced with actual strike footage from their war on Iran. The clip was captioned: ‘JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.’ A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game — it’s sickening. Hundreds of people are dead, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, including scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school that day. Six U.S. soldiers have been killed. They are also dishonored by that social media post. Hundreds of thousands displaced, and many millions more are terrified across the Middle East.”

Cardinal Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago yesterday

"It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life."
Edith Hamilton, Saturday Evening Post (27 September 1958)

Jeffrey Sachs: We Are Probably in the Early Days of World War III

I agree with most of what Professor Sachs says but he is a liberal whose heroes are FDR and Kennedy. FDR made so many mistakes because he was a Wilsonian liberal and gave away far, far too much to Stalin. Read Sean McMeekin's 'Stalin's War'. Nixon is much more impressive.


<I think we are absolutely befogged right now when it comes to Washington. The only public outlet we have is Donald Trump's posts on Truth Social. These are the ravings of a madman.>

<We are probably in the early days of World War Three.>

You don't "accidentally" bomb a school TWO TIMES. 168 children and 14 teachers were killed. It was a massacre.

Ben Norton on X:

Reuters confirmed that the elementary school in the Iranian city of Minab was bombed TWICE by the US military, 40 minutes apart.
This was intentional. You don't "accidentally" bomb a school TWO TIMES.
168 children and 14 teachers were killed. It was a massacre.

Netanyahu's Great Escape

After the cold war ended there was and is no reason why America should support or subvent Israel, so the Israelis invented the threat of Iran. Be careful what you wish for because it may come true but before it did the Israelis, people of a nervous disposition, had already believed their own propaganda.

Similarly Hamas was fostered, succoured and paid by Netanyahu to ensure that a two state solution never happened. October 7 2023 was the consequence of that policy and of his gross negligence in withdrawing soldiers from the kibbutzim and ignoring warnings that Hamas was up to something.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor wonders if he knew beforehand what Hamas would do but I do not believe that.

In a normal country his career would have been over but he used Hamas to destroy the Gaza Strip and half a million of its inhabitants and he is using the putative threat from Iran to achieve, as he says, 'my dream for 40 years'.

He is as clever as Bismarck, unfortunately.

What puzzles me is that almost nobody outside Israel wanted the Americans to attack Iran but now they have murdered in cold blood the Iranian head of state and about 48 other leaders, something unprecedented but out of the Israeli playbook, most of the British conservative press and politicians not only strongly approve but suggest that those who don't are traitors: the Reform Party most of all but normally sensible people like Daniel Hannan (he approved of attacking Venezuela too), Alison Pearson, etc etc.

Traitors to England or is our scepter'd isle now considered joined at the hip with the USA and Israel?

Tony Blair is very much in favour of shedding more young men's blood. Sir K Starmer is letting England down badly by raising legal quibbles about the war being illegal or in other words mass murder.

Israelis are now saying they will kill the new leader of Iran and murder anyone involved in appointing him. One country is responsible for all the problems in the Middle East. Great Britain, my country. We created the Jewish homeland in Palestine but  this does not relieve Israel of the responsibility for incessant murders. 

Israel does not have to behave the way she does. 

Trump is a murderous madman but there is method in his madness.

It's clear that Netanyahu would have attacked Iran anyway and Iran would have responded by attacking America bases. America theoretically could have cut off Israel, ended its alliance and reassured Iran - but Iran would not have believed Trump who lied about peace negotiations last summer and anyway this is not how US politics works. US politicians are bought.

Netanyahu had snookered Trump.

Seven hours ago on Truth Social. Trump is murderer and going mad, but there is method in his madness.

Shortly before that was this exchange (I quote the Times of Israel). 

“They are among the most evil people ever on earth. They cut babies’ heads off. They chop women in half — take a look at October 7. Take a look at one they’ve done over the last 47 years,” Trump tells reporters aboard Air Force One, appearing to conflate Iran and Hamas.

“I know nothing about a desalination plant. They’re complaining about a desalination plant. We complain about the fact that they shouldn’t be chopping babies’ heads off,” Trump adds.


While there was initial testimony of babies beheaded on October 7, it was never verified by Israeli authorities.

The forty beheaded babies story was a lie by a settler politician which Biden repeated but it was established to be untrue. One baby died on October 7 2023 in crossfire. (There is no proof, either, after all this time, of any rapes on 7 October by Hamas men.) Iran and Hamas are different things.

Fred Weir, veteran Canadian correspondent in Moscow says 'Unintended consequences are beginning to cascade". There will be very many more

"As recently as last September the Atlantic Council was confidently predicting [https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/.../why-china-and-russia.../] that the project would remain bogged down indefinitely as China kept its options open by stringing Russia along, but never committing to building the thing.'


March 5 (Reuters) - China will push forward early-stage work on the Power of Siberia 2 project, while building the China-Russia Far East natural gas pipeline under its 2026-2030 five-year plan, which was released on Thursday.

Peter Hitchens is right except I do not think America wanted the invasion of 2022

'I cannot think of any important threat to European security since the end of the Cold War, apart from the relentless American goading of Russia which eventually achieved its desired end in 2022.' Peter Hitchens 30 minutes ago 

America has been the threat to European peace for decades. 

Neville Chamberlain told Joseph Kennedy that the Americans were the reason we went to war with Germany, but that's another and murky story.

Phelim McAleer strikes again!

Phelim McAleer: To win the war with Iran, US must have the courage and self-belief to be committed to defeating the enemy - radical Islam

​So, will America win this war? That’s the only question worth asking right now. It seems that since World War II, America has become spectacularly bad at winning wars. From Korea to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, it can fight with all the shock and awe on the planet but always eventually loses.

....It is lucky in one respect: Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq. This is not the last war. The people are more open to America and the West. They are an ancient culture that predates Islam. There is no Sunni/Shia split in the country to fuel unrest and a low-level civil war.

America needs to treat Islamist Iran the way it treated Nazi Germany (one of the last wars it won). Germany was deNazified. They were clear - Nazism was evil and its leaders were imprisoned or executed. Do Americans have the courage and self-belief to do that in Iran?

You cannot have a war against an abstract noun. Michael Frayn said that talking about the war on terrorism. You can't have a war against radical Islam and the war in Iran is not one.

Barbara Amiel spoke for me when she said she would never forgive the Ayatollah Khomeini for making her defend Salman Rushdie. I shan't forgive Donald Trump for making me take the side of the Iranian government. What incredible folly and wickedness on Trump's part - what diabolical cunning on Netanyahu's.

It is obvious that America will lose unless Trump stops now and finds some specious reason to declare a victory. Even then Americans will stink in the world's nostrils as mass murderers and aggressors - I hate Hitler analogies but after 80 years of specious ones (Nasser, Saddam, Milosevic) they finally are apposite and even inescapable with both Trump and Netanyahu.

What is the difference between this war and the German invasion of Poland? 

What is the difference between what the Germans did to the Poles and what the Israelis did, financed by Biden and Trump, to the people in the Gaza Strip?

Having written all this I just realised I knew Phelim from when he was the FT's man in Bucharest. He is - as is very clear from the article - a fool (I am being polite) and a malign one. He said to me in January 1999 that the Serbs were justified in the war in Kosovo because although the majority of people in Kosovo wanted to secede the majority of people in Serbia as a whole, Kosovars included, wanted Kosovo to remain in Serbia. I said that's the argument the British used for keeping Ireland in the UK. He looked startled and replied 'But Ireland's an island!'

We looked at one another both knowing he had said something very stupid and he never forgave me.

He published an article in 2003 in the Spectator entitled The Happy Hookers of Eastern Europe arguing, with little evidence, that girls who are sex trafficked know what they are getting into prior to going. To quote him: "According to the International Office of Migration [IOM] which rescues and shelters these women, there are an estimated 400,000 enduring this existence. But as anyone who works closely with prostitutes and who isn’t infected with victimitis knows, the IOM version of events is nonsense."

I knew nothing about sex trafficking and almost believed him till a few days later I read an article in Bucharest's Business Review (I think) going into very sad-making evidence of what trafficking involves. How does Phelim make a living?

How long will Americans support Israel? For decades to come, I suspect, but nothing is forever

"It was Korea, it was Vietnam, it was the Middle East wars, it was Afghanistan, it was Ukraine, it was Venezuela. On and on! Eventually what happens is empires overspend, overextend, and it collapses." Ron Paul who thinks the collapse of the American empire will be a good thing for America. I agree - and a good thing for the world.

Wall Street Journal two days ago

A mystery

'Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha has accused Hungarian authorities of taking hostage seven employees of Ukraine's state savings bank, Oschadbank.

'Writing on X, Sybiha said: "Today in Budapest, Hungarian authorities took seven Ukrainian citizens hostage. The reasons are still unknown, as well as their current well-being."

'The employees were in two cars carrying $80m (£60m) worth of cash between Austria and Ukraine. The authorities had sent a note demanding the employees' return, Sybiha said.' (BBC)

This is spun as Hungary being a gangster state but I wonder what the truth is.

Hungary is not on the quickest route from Kiev to Vienna. That goes through Poland or Slovakia. It is on the route to Serbia.

Patrick Cockburn in the 'i' paper, 24 February 2016:

An unnecessary, illegal and very wicked war

We have the word of Senator Mark Warner who has heard all the intelligence on the subject that there was no threat to the USA to justify the war.

"The monstrosity of the situation lies both in the very fact of the aggression, the colossal number of victims in these very first days, and the lack of an adequate response from those who are killing innocent people.

"You have probably noticed that no words of sympathy or condolences were spoken. Only aggressive rhetoric.

"They managed to talk about everything except one thing: Not a single word of sympathy for the relatives who suffered the loss. Fathers and mothers who will never see their children again..."

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on the US-Israeli massacre of Iranian schoolgirls


'In Gaza, Israel and Biden normalized war crimes beyond anything we have seen before. And now, Israel and Trump are using that model against Iranian civilians.'
Trita Parsi

"It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when asked how long the Iraq War would last (Feb 7, 2003)

Arnaud Bertrand

Pete Hegseth said this was "the first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since WWII" (which is false, but that's beside the point), so I decided to look at what happened in WW2 and... this might surprise no-one: turns out the Nazis were more humane than the Americans.

Probably the most abject part here is that the warship had many survivors - 32 to be precise (apnews.com/article/sri-…) - and the U.S. made zero effort to rescue them, despite it being required by the laws of naval warfare and simply being the honorable thing to do.

It took little Sri-Lanka, with its very modest means - especially compared to the $1 trillion US defense budget - to do the honorable thing and launch a (successful) rescue operation.

Even the literal Nazis, during WW2, rescued the survivors of ships their U-boats sank. It was considered a matter of basic honor.

The history of this is actually interesting: the Nazis rescued survivors all the way until the so-called Laconia Incident in 1942 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L…).....

Netanyahu has been enormously successful - he can be compared to Bismarck. The other German Chancellor whom he resembles was a complete failure.

I share Charles Moore' philosophy but dislike his political positions, from his enthusiasm for Margaret Thatcher to - much worse - his enthusiasm for Netanyahu. He is right though that Netanyahu has been enormously successful in manipulating the USA and in extending Israeli power to Africa and Latin America.

Protestant Zionism

A US combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing ON Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

US Air Force veteran Mikey Weinstein runs the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and said that since Saturday morning, 'the MRFF has been “inundated” with complaints about euphoria of the commanders about how this new “biblically-sanctioned” war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian “End Times" as vividly described in the New Testament Book of Revelation. Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end of the world eschatology.'

A friend asked me at dinner tonight how long I thought the war would last

I was stumped. If Trump is wise he'll end it in a couple of days but it looks like he will stir up the Kurds, Baluchis and perhaps even the Azeris to rebel. The Kurds I expect will fight and die and be betrayed by the Yanks in Iran as in Iraq and Syria.

All because Trump wanted to score a win and was conned by Netanyahu. The War of Trump's Ear.

"It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when asked how long the Iraq War would last (Feb 7, 2003)

Well done, Sir Keir! Starmer for the first time has done something right

I can't tell you how much I despise Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch for saying Ukraine and Israel are fighting proxy wars on our behalf. 

"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."

Dr. Stephen R. Parsons writes this

[An Iranian woman in Denmark in her early thirties] told me that 40,000 people had been killed in the two-day protest in January, and although her parents still lived in the country, she put her faith in the coming military attack by the US (´the only hope`). Again, a case of my enemy`s enemy is my friend.

First, of all I told her that a figure of 40,000 was absurd and I asked her how she as a scientist could believe in such a number? I said I`m not in doubt that the authorities in Iran are ruthless when it comes to repressing opposition but any serious person knows that such a high number of fatalities would require bombs, tanks, and machineguns and for people not to run away. The Israelis have needed 2 years and an estimated 200,000 tonnes of explosives on a population confined to an area 141 sq. miles to kill about 100,000. Moreover, if really tens of thousands had been killed, mass burials would be necessary, given that every inch of Iran is under satellite observation – the Americans would have released pictures of such a thing. I`m afraid I`m getting crotchety in my old age – it makes me angry when educated people don`t use their common sense and just swallow such obvious propaganda. One believes something because one wants to believe it (on one occasion, another colleague told me she believed the report in her newspaper that the Russians had blown up the Nord Stream pipeline).

If 40,000 had been killed, then an attack using 500 missiles or even a tactical nuclear weapon seems less outrageous. Since when have unprovoked (Iran has not attacked another country – it has been the victim of attacks by Iraq, Israel, and America) aerial attacks not led people in the said countries to back up their government/state? Even if such a military action collapses the existing power structure (which I doubt – recently, an estimated 30% of the population were out on the streets to mark the founding of the Islamic Republic), what would come in its place? As I said to the woman in question, ´don`t think something cannot be worse than it already is`(there needs to be some coherent political strategy that doesn`t mean you end up as a fifth column for foreign powers that are not motivated by the interests of the Iranian people). Ethnic division and bitter civil war, and a splitting up of the country as has happened in Libya and Syria? In Syria, the Kurds (who put their faith in the Americans) are now being militarily suppressed, and the country has a former ISIS/al-Qaeda leader as its president, with areas under Israeli and Turkish occupation. As with Iraq, the historic presence of Christians has now ended.

The United States is now an amoral predator, dropping 2,000 lb bombs on Tehran

America is dropping 2,000 lb bombs on Tehran. 

Bombing open cities used to be considered barbaric. 

It became normal in World War Two but it remained and remains barbaric.

See here the damage being wrought on civilians in a war that has no justification, legal, moral or even pragmatic. 

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima weighed about 9,000 lb but the nuclear device's yield was exponentially higher than conventional 2,000 lb bombs due to fission.

The Iranians will like America after this?

The United States is now "a predatory hegemon", a dominant great power that “views all bilateral relations as inherently zero-sum and seeks to extract the greatest possible benefits from each one”, according to Stephen Walt in February 2026 in an article in Foreign Affairs, house magazine of the US defence establishment. 

You recall that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer wrote the leading book about the Israel Lobby which Jeffrey Epstein got cancelled with the help of Alan Dershowitz.

Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary-General: "NATO is there to protect us collectively against any adversary, be it Russia or whoever, or terrorism. But also it is a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage." 

That's candid, at least. It's as much aggressive as defensive and we'd all be better off without it.

Glenn Diesen

@Glenn_Diesen

·

3h

It's obligatory to refer to NATO as a "defensive alliance" even as it attacks countries that have not even threatened NATO countries. Here Rutte explains that the role of NATO also entails projecting power around the world.

James Surowiecki

@JamesSurowiecki

·

15h

We had air superiority over Vietnam, and spent 8 years dropping millions of tons of bombs on it. They never begged for peace, let alone let us pick their leader.