Those who have followed me for a while will know that I have been writing about a ‘coming war on Iran’ for the past year or more. What follows here, and the way I view it, is informed by two previous articles:
1. ‘The psychopath, the puppet and the princeling’: Preparing PR for war on Iran, published at Renegade in September 2017:
2. Tick-Tock: Washington’s coming war on Iran, published at Renegade in April 2017:
https://renegadeinc.com/tick-tock-washingtons-coming-war-iran/
This piece is a brief update on where we are.
On Monday November 5th the US will reintroduce the sanctions withdrawn under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran Nuclear Deal. The truth about sanctions is that they are an act of war. Now, you can deny that until the cows come home, and the politicians who cheer for them do just that, but you cannot change this simple reality:
Sanctions lead to starvation and disease, which kill people
Washington knows this, and does it anyway
Of course this is unacceptable to public opinion, or would be if public opinion were ‘awake’. But the public isn’t. The majority of Americans haven’t got the foggiest idea what Washington’s foreign policy is designed to achieve or how it impacts other nations. They are fed ‘Good Guy-Bad Guy’ crap and for the most part, it goes unchallenged. Even the Democrats, who hate Trump with a vengeance, will attack him on ANYTHING and EVERYTHING…except when he takes hostile action against another sovereign nation. On that, Washington is agreed, with the exception of one or two compassionate and intelligent souls like Rand Paul and Tulsi Gabbard.
Those members of the public who are actively engaged…unless they make an effort to go further afield…get their information from CNN, MSNBC, Fox etc…I.E. They listen to a mixture of warmongering shills and mind-numbing morons with no more idea of how the world functions, than they do how to split the atom.
So…what I am saying is this:
You may be wondering where these images come from. The starving child on the right was photographed in Iraq when Washington was pursuing its ‘sanctions war’ there. The overfed child on the left tweeted it out himself yesterday:
You will see that 176k people liked this tweet, 59k retweeted it, and it got 42k replies. Here’s one of them:
So that’s the Presidential headline for sanctions. How about the attempt at ‘reasonable justification’? Equally full of crap…as I’m sure you are shocked to hear me say. The Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has been ‘on it’ this week. What follows will be familiar to fans of George Orwell, who in ‘1984’ described how propaganda ‘reverses’ objective reality, and also cause & effect, in order to create its ‘narrative’. Here’s Pompeo on 31st October, attempting to lay the blame for the effects of sanctions at the feet the government in Tehran. For those not familiar with Twitter, read Pompeo’s comment at the bottom first, before you read my response:
Here he is again on 2nd November, this time via his very own ‘Media Barby’, Heather Nauert. In this one he is attempting to portray Washington’s actions as being on behalf of the Iranian people:
And finally from Pompeo, here’s one from earlier today (Saturday 3rd November), which repeats the ‘big lie’ about Washington’s motives, and attempts to cover its backside with news of ‘humanitarian exemptions’. The reality of these ‘exemptions’ is that the sanctions process makes it so difficult, and potentially dangerous, to trade with Iran, that food and medicine doesn’t get through in anywhere near the quantity that it would without the sanctions programme. Pompeo knows that:
As I mentioned before, the Democrats have no problem with bloodshed, & no problem with sanctions - they just want to get rid of Trump…at which point they will put a nice ‘liberal’ face on the packaging and carry on with the bloodshed & the sanctions. An example of this moral bankruptcy was provided earlier today with this tweet from Richard Nephew, author of the book ‘The Art of Sanctions’, and former ‘Director for Iran’ on the National Security Staff of Barack Obama, where he was responsible for the expansion of U.S. sanctions during 2011 & 2012. Replying to Trump’s ‘Sanctions are Coming’ tweet, he said this:
This was met with the following splendid response from Iranian author, Hoda Katebi:
It seems that the ‘opposition’ in the US is obsessed with cosmetics. One struggles to imagine that there will be anyone in Tehran who will say: “That Trump fellow is frankly disgusting - it was so much better being starved by that nice Mr Obama…”
In summary: Sanctions are a form of warfare. If this were your child, dressed in a rag, bones sticking out, eating scraps of food off the floor, you wouldn’t have any doubt about that - none whatsoever. Here it is again - look at it and ask yourself: would I call this ‘war’ if that were my child?
But most Americans, and most Brits, are oblivious to what our governments are doing, to why they are doing it, & to how dangerous it is. We are fed the illusion that we are the good guys, the humanitarians, the bringers of light…and we swallow it hook, line, and sinker.
Believe it or not - the people of Iran are under no such illusion. Their government is under no such illusion, and neither is that of Russia and China, who are increasingly convinced that Washington is preparing for war. (I will perhaps go into that in detail in a later piece)…For now, I’ll say this: we are approaching the edge. Do you really think that Iran, Russia &/or China will roll over? Do you really think that they will blink? I don’t.