April Fools

Volpone:

Fools, they are the only nation
Worth men's envy, or admiration:
Free from care or sorrow-taking,
Selves and others merry making:
All they speak or do is sterling.
Your fool he is your great man's darling,
And your ladies' sport and pleasure;
Tongue and bauble are his treasure.
E'en his face begetteth laughter,
And he speaks truth free from slaughter;
He's the grace of every feast,
And sometimes the chiefest guest;
Hath his trencher and his stool,
When wit waits upon the fool:
O, who would not be
He, he, he?

Coleridge: "Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether." 

Irish comedian Dave Allen (1936–2005): "I still think of myself as I was 25 years ago... Then I look in a mirror and see an old bastard and realise it's me".

Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian revolutionary who fought the Bolsheviks: "War is when your government tells you who your enemy is, revolution is when you figure it out for yourself." (Acknowledgements to Christopher Newbury.)

Professor John Mearsheimer yesterday: "If there were Nuremberg trials right now where the Israelis and the Americans were brought before the court President Trump along with President Netanyahu and many of their advisors would be hanged." Netanyahu is a PM. He is right - starting an illegal war was the crime for which the German defendants were hanged.

Netanyahu explains he is working to make Israel a global power. In fact Israel was one of the two most powerful countries in the world until they started this war

Netanyahu today.

"We are working on transforming Israel into a super nation in the region and globally.

"We were able to do so thanks to our soldiers and our captains.

"And all those who fought and those who died."

US has 8,000 missiles. Iran has 45,000 missiles as well as drones and they are making drones cheaply

US Colonel Douglas Macgregor says the US in total has in total about 8,000 missiles of all kinds and Iran is thought to have 45,000 missiles kept underground plus drones which they are making cheaply. The Israelis and Americans used very expensive missiles to down incoming cheap Iranian missiles. Iranians saved their expensive missiles until after their enemies had depleted their supplies.

Michael Hudson

It’s not just fighting against Iran now. It’s fighting against Iran, supported by Russia and China, because they all realize that this is a fight to the end, to decide: Is the United States going to be able to reassert its control over the world economy using monopolies? The oil monopoly, the information technology monopoly that it’s trying to do, the computer chip monopoly, the technology monopoly, also its ability to supply food to other countries, its exports and control of grain.

This is the last chance that it has. And there’s a feeling of desperation that has led the US planners to bet at all.

And that I think that it’s not going to work. All of the generals have told them that it’s not going to work. The generals who have been pessimistic have pretty much been forced out of the military, and the State Department, because, “If you’re pessimistic, well, why aren’t you on board? You know, why aren’t you on the team? Or are you Putin’s puppet? You know, you’ve just gotta have faith”.

America believed that it could not lose any war because its policy of bombing other countries was always going to work.

The American philosophy is, number one, you bomb civilians; you break all the rules of international law which are against that. You bomb civilians to demoralize them.

And if you concentrate, as Trump did along with Israel, a few weeks ago, you bomb the schools; you bomb the hospitals. That’s American policy in foreign countries.

It’s most visible in the case of Israeli policy, in Gaza, and now the West Bank as well. And it is the same policy that the United States has followed in Iran.

Well, the idea was that this would demoralize the population, and the Iranian population would want to get rid of the ayatollahs and say, “We don’t want to be bombed anymore; we want to save the children; let’s make a deal and appoint a leader favorable to the United States so that it will stop bombing us”.

Well, this was nonsense from the beginning, but it was the guiding spirit of American foreign policy: bomb a country, and that will lead to a regime change, and a collapse.

That was what America expected in Russia.

But Iran essentially has the same spirit that Patrick Henry had in America’s revolution against Britain in 1776. He said, “Give me liberty or give me death!”. And that’s exactly what Iran is saying.

For them, this is existential, because they know what the US plans are, since the United States has been so open about what its plans are.

Yes, they want a regime change; they want to break up Iran into parts; they want to take control of Iranian oil and use the oil export revenues to support the US dollar, and to support basically the US economy, and to give American foreign policy the option of turning off the oil to other countries, to say, “We can close down your industry, your chemical industry, all your industries that need electric power, oil, gas; we can do all that, if you take an independent policy, following your own sovereignty. And we in the United States reject the United Nations principle that every nation has its own sovereignty”.

This is the basic principle of Western civilization for the last half century, the basic principle of the United Nations Charter. All of that is being rejected by the United States.

I am against the death penalty mildly but it is a strange hill to die (or argue against deaths) on

Jonathan Cook 

@jonathancook

Israel committed genocide in Gaza, mostly likely killing 100,000s of Palestinians.

Now the UK and European foreign ministers worry that Israel passing an apartheid death penalty law for Palestinians might "undermine Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles".

Jonathan Cook 

2 Mar

@jonathancook

Remember the western media's constant refrain that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was "unprovoked" – despite years of documented western provocations.

Iran did nothing to provoke the Israeli-US attack. Yet notice this: not one media outlet has described the attack as "unprovoked".

A Chinese view: Iran has already won

I think I agree with this substack by a retired Chinese businessman.

Now that a regime change is off the table, the US war objective has changed to keep Strait of Hormuz open.

This change alone tells you the US has already lost the war since the Strait of Hormuz was open before the war. Essentially, the US is prosecuting the war to merely return to the pre-war status quo.

And even this modest goal is unlikely to be achieved without costing thousands of US lives since it has no choice but to send in ground troops.

Gas price, the default barometer of US voters’ ability to absorb pain, has gone from $2.9 per gallon to $3.9.

Amazingly, that society’s focal point about foreign wars is always the impact on gas prices, and never the legality or morality of the atrocities. Or the cost to the nation as a whole.

In a twist of supreme irony, the Trump regime is now un-sanctioning Iranian and Russian oil in an attempt to lower gas prices.

Rather than crippling Iran’s finances, Trump is helping Iran’s finances in the middle of an unprovoked war against it.

It is safe to bet that Iran will emerge as the strongest power in West Asia at the end of the war. It will have a de facto control of Middle Eastern energy supply as it dictates who can or cannot pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

It is hard to see how America can fail to be badly defeated in this tragi-comic war. Will it last years?

Glenn Diesen

"Trump is starting to resemble Yeltsin, but without the ability to blame the vodka."

Eric Kraus

"One of the wonderful things about Trump is that he has rendered even the most obtuse supporters of the Hegemon painfully aware of the dangers of the unipolar dominance model.

"The American body politic is unstable at best, delirious at worst - a country where one half the population expects the Rapture whilst the other half believes that gender is "assigned" at birth - is unlikely to be constrained by considerations of anything quite so banal as reality."

Horace Walpole

"This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel."

Carl Zha

"Iran is exporting oil to China at much greater volume than before the war while Venezuelan oil continues to flow to China. So much for Trump's 5D chess to choke off Chinese energy supply."

Aristotle

“The tyrant is also very ready to make war; for this keeps his subjects occupied and in continued need of a leader…[It is] characteristic of a tyrant’s policy…[that] the flatterer too is held in honor…those who keep him company in an obsequious spirit, which is the function of flattery. This makes tyranny favor the baser sort, in the sense that a tyrant loves to be flattered, and no man of free spirit will oblige him. Respectable men…refrain from flattery, and base men are useful for base deeds…Anyone who shows a rival pride and a spirit of freedom destroys the master-like character of the tyranny. Thus the tyrant hates such people as destroyers of his rule…All these and their like are marks of tyranny and ways of maintaining it; and they are utterly depraved.” (The Politics, Book V, Chapter XI)

Trita Parsi on X

Energy industry insider in Iran tells me the following, and it is STUNNING:

Before the war, Iran produced just shy of 1.1mn barrels of oil per day, and sold it at $65 per barrel minus $18 discount (i.e. $47) 

Today, it produces 1.5mn barrels a day, and sells it at $110 with only $2-4 discount.

 

And this does not include petrochemical sales that not only have increased, but are now being sold to a larger set of customers compared to before the war.

Moreover, Iran is receiving payments through new mechanisms that bypass the UAE, which were set up after the June war. 

In essence, and this is really important to understand, Trump and Israel's war has ended up delivering Iran de facto sanctions relief.

This means that Iran is all the less incentivized to end the war, unless the agreement provides Iran with formal sanctions relief.

Trump says America will next attack Cuba. Former PM Naftali Bennett says Israel's next enemy will be Turkey. Can the world defend itself against rogue states?

REPORTER: "You mentioned that Cuba will be next, what did you mean by that exactly?" 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "Yeah, Cuba's going to be next. Cuba's a mess, it's a failing country, and they're going to be next."

The defining issue of our time is the US-Israeli war against Iran

I didn't think I'd live to see a worse US President than George W Bush, though Biden admittedly ran him pretty close, but Trump has proven far, far worse. 

He may have fatally injured the American empire - which would be a good thing, in case you wondered.

James Buchanan and James Carter can't be compared to Trump. They were merely mediocre, both loved peace and meant well.

Professor Norman Finkelstein has said the attack on Iran is 'probably the most brazen, flagrant breach ever of the UN charter', pointing out that even Hitler bothered to fabricate an excuse before invading Poland. Washington simply bypassed international law.

I just watched Israeli Minister Itamar Ben Gvir call for the assassination of Ahmad Al-Shara (Al-Julani) the new president of Syria.

“The new Syrian president must be killed—he is the head of the snake.
The battle with the new Syria is a fateful one for Israelis, and it is coming.”

Then Erdoğan? 

Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennet, who now says Israel is losing the war, recently said Turkey would be next.

Here is the greatest living Israeli Gideon Levy explaining how Israel's occupation of Southern Lebanon created Hezbollah. Netanyahu we know built up and financed Hamas while imprisoning its moderate members. The interview takes 8 minutes.

Mainstream US journalist Abby Martin about Israeli society:

“Israeli society has gone full fucking fascist. It's like Berlin in the 1930s... They know the kids are starving. They agree with it...”

Mainstream US journalists you notice now criticise Israel. Eventually, slowly, America opinion formers will stop supporting Israel. Voters already have.

Canny and well-informed ex-CIA man Larry Johnson was interesting last night here. He calls Israel a 'terror state'. 

It seems to me that the USA has become a terror state this year if it was not before (and it was).

Iran is waging war superbly and so far with restraint and morality. She is winning the war of minds in the world too. 

Iranians are hitting Israel but I suspect they pull their punches for fear of a nuclear response.

I have opposed war since I started this blog. I oppose this war but I do not want Iran to negotiate now when they are in an overwhelmingly strong position. 

Iran's stopping fighting last year was a big mistake. 

There will be no ceasefire. It is in Iran's interest for the war to go on for many months - and that's not taking into account the Houthis who have finally entered the war and who can block the Red Sea.

Czar Nicholas I was fond of saying that Europe had on its hands a sick man, meaning Turkey. Europe and the rest of the world now has a sick man on its hands, Donald Trump.

The stupidest war in history.

 

Arnaud Bertrand

@RnaudBertrand

The objective of the war has become undoing the consequence of the war. The stupidest war in history.

It took years for everyone to see that Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq were catastrophes.This is a far, far greater disaster and honest journalists say so after four weeks

China has warned Iran that the US is preparing a ground invasion and Washington needs another round of negotiations to gather forces for a landing operation in the region. 

I hope no final decision has been taken. It will at best make incredibly bad much worse. 

This is how a world war starts. I speak as an incurable optimist.

Former Israeli Prime Minister and close associate of Epstein Ehud Barak:

<Can the Strait of Hormuz be opened?

You need to deploy two American divisions there and prepare to stay for months. That’s how the start of the war in Vietnam looked, the start of the war in Iraq, and the same in Afghanistan.

It succeeds at first. By the way, all wars—including this new chapter of ours—one must know: an initiated war starts with a brilliant achievement and impressive damage. 

Then comes the stage of "treading water," which I believe we have entered. 

And if you don't know how to get out of it and cut it short in time, it ends in negotiations under conditions inferior to what existed before it all started, or in defeat.

And America hasn't won a single war—it won almost every battle—but it hasn't won a single war in the last 60 years. 

All of this needs to be considered, and I very much hope I am wrong.>

John Mearsheimer was obviously right to say that an Iranian H bomb would have had a stabilising effect. Why did people not see that? 

Closing the Strait of Hormuz is Iran's bloodless bomb but it hasn't been a deterrent. Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Many missiles are falling on Israel

The Israeli paper Haaretz has confirmed that 8 out of 10 Iranian missiles launched against Israeli targets are reaching their targets, following mounting reports and growing quantities of footage pointing to the failures of Israeli and U.S. ballistic missile defences. The report further noted that success rates have continued to improve as air defences have become increasingly strained. Israeli analysts observed that contributing factors have included the systematic exhaustion of the air defence network, and the destruction of U.S. forward radar systems in allied Arab states such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates which have limited the quantities of cueing data that can be provided. Sources further observed that mass bombardment by Hezbollah paramilitary units in Lebanon has further strained Israeli and U.S. defences.

Haaretz is a far more informative and trustworthy newspaper than any in Great Britain or Romania but the least biassed are the Straits Times and the Times of India.

“The arc of the United States since the 1990s can be described as ‘violent decline.’”

Mao said at the Supreme State Conference on September 8, 1958:

U.S. imperialism invaded China’s territory of Taiwan and has occupied it for the past nine years. A short while ago it sent its armed forces to invade and occupy Lebanon. The United States has set up hundreds of military bases in many countries all over the world. China’s territory of Taiwan, Lebanon and all military bases of the United States on foreign soil are so many nooses round the neck of U.S. imperialism. The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses round their own necks, handing the ends of the ropes to the Chinese people, the peoples of the Arab countries and all the peoples of the world who love peace and oppose aggression. The longer the U.S. aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become.

I was led to this by Michael Lind's article today in Unherd. 

Michael Lind reminds us that China is essential to the Russian war effort. 

He is interesting but should not refer to Russia or Iran as Chinese proxies They are not, any more than Hamas and Hezbollah are Iranian proxies.

They are China's allies, faced in Iran's case with an unprovoked American attack, in Russia's case by American expansion.

It would be fairer to call the United Kingdom America's proxy but even our worm has recently turned slightly.

China is not a threat to Europe or the West. 

Europe and the West have no real interest in Asia, whether Persia or Japan.

America made Iran and Russia threats, of course.

I quote from the article.

Since 1979, when it fought a brief war with Vietnam, China hasn’t fought any wars, although it has engaged in border skirmishes with India and has bullied other countries with shows of force in the South China Sea. By avoiding military quagmires and concentrating on internal development and strategic trade, China in the last three decades has become the dominant manufacturing power on earth.

And here is the absurd result. Even though the United States gets less than 10% of its oil from the Persian Gulf, American soldiers must die or be maimed for life and American taxpayers must spend hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent Iran, whose largest customer is China, from blocking oil shipments to China by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq — all of whose largest trading partner is also China.

Meanwhile, American taxpayers must also spend money on European bases and fund the war in Ukraine to protect the European Union, which imports one and a half times as much from China as it does from the United States, from a hypothetical invasion by Russia, whose largest trading partner is… also China. In East Asia, Washington spends a fortune to defend Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — all of which trade more with China than with America — from a hypothetical attack by China. Why China would want to attack its trading partners is never made clear.