Category Archives: Iran

UPDATE (3/15): Ukraine: Republicans Revert To The Neoconservative Mean

Bush, Europe, Free Markets, Iran, Iraq, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Trade, War

Conservatism has tragically and unforgivably reverted to the neoconservative mean. Just as in 2016, 14 years after the invasion of Iraq, rose a presidential candidate against Genghis Bush and that man’s destruction of Iraq—in ten years time, perhaps, the GOP will field a presidential candidate who’ll quit moralizing and demonizing; will strive fiercely to negotiate and accommodate, won’t alienate and sanction, and will trade, trade, trade.

But it might be too late by then for realpolitik.

The Republicans are pushing for war and that no-fly zone. They are admonishing Biden for his so-called weakness—for that is how they frame avoiding a nuclear war with Russia. The War Street Journal has only rebuke for Biden’s policy of “containment against Russia.” On Fox News it’s rah-rah for war (i. e., a no-fly zone over Ukraine) all day long. The female journos and pundits, especially, choose to use incendiary verbiage, pregnant with provocation, such as “a red line”; “this was a red line for Obama… will Biden consider it a red line.. blah-blah.”

Translated it’s, “Come on big boy; sock it to Putin.” War porn.

Rand Paul is no Ron Paul. But at least the senator from Kentucky has berated the forever-war, dastardly GOP for rejecting diplomacy with Iran, the mention of which has not even crossed their lips with respect to Russia.

UPDATE (3/15): War always brings the neoconservative to the fore. Victor Davis Hanson is one. A nice man, but never-the-less, a neoconservative, front-and-center in the enunciation of consummate neoconservative abominations known as “The Bush Doctrine,” which was responsible for the noxious bifurcation knows as, “If you are not with us, you are against us.”

The West has been caught sleeping and … an opportunistic dictator … saw a chance and … took it just like he did in 2014. 

Neocons love sanctions, which are as useless in achieving political ends as they are ruthless in their effects on the most vulnerable. As far as their ultimate outcome—embargoed are counterproductive. “Nicholas Mulder, assistant professor in the history department of Cornell University in New York, is the author of ‘The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War’ (2022)'”:

Sanctions alone have a poor record of halting military adventures. During the 20th century, only three out of 19 attempts to use sanctions as a policy to impede war have been successful: two of these were the work of the League of Nations. It nipped in the bud incipient border wars in the Balkans, between Yugoslavia and Albania in 1921 and between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925. The other successful use of sanctions was American financial pressure on sterling, which forced an end to Britain’s Egyptian military expedition in the Suez war of 1956.

Trending On Fox News And Among Republicans: Reversion To The Neoconservative, Warmongering Mean

China, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Iran, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

Mike Waltz, Republican representative from Florida, comfortably fumes against Russia, to applause on both sides of the aisle: “We’re on the edge of a crisis with Russia and Ukraine,” he states formulaically.

That’s the formula. Donald Trump briefly and imperfectly departed from neoconservative foreign-policy dogma to the cheers of the base, which was willing to contemplate “certain national-conservative governments in East Europe” as “natural allies to conservative policy makers, stateside.

Mike Pompeo, a shadow of his former self, having slimmed down to size svelte, swells the chorus on Fox News in advocating muscular threats to Putin, rather than respectful negotiation with a nuclear power with legitimate concerns about the incursion of the US and NATO into its neighborhood. He exhorts the US to “act to make clear to Putin that ‘the cost will be enormous,'” finding the “good” graces to growl against Iran, too.  Starve ’em, sanction them…

Fox is guilty of normalizing the empty-headed, zero-information ditz and ditto-headed split-screen panel in adjudicating matters of life-and-death. It used to be one could expect to hear from deep thinkers on Russia like Stephen Cohen, RIP, or Pat Buchanan, whose foreign-policy knowledge and insights are desperately needed now.

Now it’s Da Idiocracy: Foreign policy “insights” flow on Fox News from Lara Logan (read “No, Lara Logan, Only Simpletons Think Afghanistan Is Simple“), beefcake Rambo types like Pete Hegseth and the deeply dumb Johnny Jones; media writer Howard Kurtz, and from the stoic tabula rasa that is Mollie Hemingway—she’s dour and serious so she must know something, right? Wrong! Humdrum Democratic strategists are a-dime-a-dozen in shouting at the screen about what once used to be the purview of serious, learned people.

Then again, that’s how easy it is to thoughtlessly imbibe the neoconservative-neoliberal, Deep State-stamped foreign policy script.

Above all, let us not forget the war porn: For war paint and trashy, tasteless attire, there is no beating Fox News female personalities. The Fox News war porn—females in war paint, bosoms panting and heaving for blood—helped sex-up and sell the offensive against Iraq. (“TUNED-OUT, TURNED-ON, AND HOT FOR WAR“/2003)

NEW COLUMN: Afghanistan: Bringing The Military-Industrial-Complex Home

America, Asia, China, Foreign Policy, Iran, Military, War

NEW COLUMN: “Bringing The Military-Industrial Complex Home,” or “State Department Still Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola,” is on WND.COM, the Unz Review and The New American (“War Is the Health of the State — and the Statists“).

Excerpt:

Realpolitik: What Modest Foreign Policy Looks Like

Similarly, you are not a good pack animal unless you worry about “the Uyghurs, the Uyghurs. China is oppressing the Uyghurs. Our values, our values.”

Uyghurs are also China’s biggest headache, now that America is no longer mired in Afghanistan. What the dummies on the idiot’s lantern fail to tell you—although analysts at The Economist do—“Uyghurs count among thousands of foreign jihadists active in Afghanistan, mostly enlisted in Taliban ranks.”

So, as the skittish media hounds and politicians, stateside, gnash teeth and beat on breast over Afghanistan, less hysterical countries, abutting Afghanistan, are acting calmly in their national interest, to ensure that Jihad and heroin don’t spill over their borders.

Unlike Lara Kissinger Logan of Fox News, who “thinks” America could have won a war that other superpowers have lost—the Chinese and the Iranians are hip to what just happened. This was “probably one of the best conceived and planned guerrilla campaigns ever,” says Mike Martin, a former British army officer in Helmand province, now at King’s College London. “The Taliban went into every district and flipped all the local militias by doing deals along tribal lines.”

In negotiations with the Taliban, Beijing has thus realistically demanded that Afghanistan not become “a base for ethnic Uyghur separatists.” For their part, “Taliban leaders have pledged to leave Chinese interests in Afghanistan alone and not to harbor any anti-China extremist groups.”

Like Beijing, Tehran, too, is busying itself with realpolitik….

… In all, after Afghanistan, we can all agree that American foreign policy is an angels-and-demons Disney production—starring the prototypical evil dictators killing their noble people, until the US rides to the rescue—and that the producers at Foggy Bottom don’t have the foggiest idea what they are doing. …

… READ ON. “Bringing The Military-Industrial Complex Home,” or “State Department Still Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola,” is on WND.COM, the Unz Review and The New American (“War Is the Health of the State — and the Statists“).

America Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola: Iran (Shia) Worries About Afghanistan Insanity (Sunni)

English, Individual Rights, Iran, Islam, John McCain, Terrorism, The West

The title for this blog post comes from a 2014 column, “Don’t Know Shiite From Shinola,” in which I write that America is “a mulish military power which doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola.” The original expression is 100% American: “Doesn’t know shit from Shinola“:

Shinola was a brand of shoe polish previously manufactured in the USA. The alliteration of the expression ‘doesn’t know shit from Shinola’ partly explains the derivation. Also, without putting too fine a point on it, the two things named in the expression could possibly be confused. However, only one of them would be good to apply to your shoes and only particularly dim people could be expected to muddle them up.

To continue the theme of the previous blog post, “Afghanistan And Its Neighbors; China And Those Uyghurs,” you’re not considered properly American unless you’re carping about “Iran, Iran, Iran.” The John McCain version is, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”


For merely asking, “When last did Iran commit terrorism against the US?,” Tucker Carlson was attacked viciously by Mark Levin. Carlson, however, was on the money. As I chronicled in this 2017 blog post: “Iranians Killed ZERO Americans In Terrorist Attacks In U.S. Between 1975 -2015.”

Iran is neighbor to Afghanistan, sharing a long border with it. And, “Iran … has a more tortured relationship with the Taliban. Its leaders are certainly delighted to see the Great Satan, America, abandon its bases next door.”

As always, The Economist offers informed analysis in, “Afghanistan’s neighbours are preparing for life with the Taliban”:

Shia Muslims … view their own Islamic revolution as a modernising movement.” After all, “Women can study, work and hold office in Iran, so long as they veil.” Yes, Iranians “look askance at the Taliban’s hidebound Sunni fanaticism.”

Swamped for decades with destitute refugees and cheap heroin from Afghanistan, Iran is also worried about a new influx, particularly of Hazaras, a Shia ethnic minority that the Taliban have viciously persecuted in the past.

“With little leverage over the Taliban and no liking for the tottering government in Kabul, Iran is likely instead to lend support to local Afghan militias in the border region, which recently beat off a Taliban assault on the city of Herat.”

What do you know? When compared with the Sunni Islam (Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism), a faction of Islam with whose practitioners the West feels much more simpatico—Shia Islam (Iran’s poison of choice) is more enlightened. Yet America and Israel side with Saudi Arabia, the epitome of Sunni insanity. Go figure. And the title says it all:

America Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola.

Thoughts from Twitter:

We invade and then centralize:

Totally tribal: This would sound like a brand name to our idiots, but it’s how Afghans think and feel.

Our fight for democracy is not necessarily theirs.

 

*Image courtesy LinkedIn