Category Archives: Iran

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

UPDATED (9/29/022): Iranian Mad-Hatter Masih Alinejad: Please, Take Her

Feminism, Gender, Intelligence, Iran, Journalism, Neoconservatism, Propaganda

WARNING: ADULT HUMOR

When Iranian dissidents approach me on LinkedIn, I confess to ignoring them. They are invariably interventionist agitators, and I’m an avid, longtime non-interventionist, as you know.

Loud, banal, with a mad-woman’s tumbleweed hair; mouthing the kind of cliched ideas of which we have an abundance and get a load of incessantly in America from the most tiresome, troublesome #MeToo women—Masih Alinejad, Iranian-American “journalist,” is alleged to have been the object of a kidnapping plot by the Iranian mullahs.

However, I don’t believe the Iranians want her back. (Would you? She’s hardly a keeper.)  I don’t buy the whole hype around the alleged kidnapping plot hatched by Iranians. The FBI says so. Yes: Where have we heard that before without a shred of evidence!? (We go to wars based on the intelligence community’s habitual lies.)

AND:

She said she had been working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation since the agency approached her eight months ago with photographs taken by the plotters.

What do you know? This has been going on for a while. Well, it takes time (and funds) for the FBI to lay a trap.

This sounds like vintage FBI entrapment. Some low IQ Abduls are enticed by out-of-control FBI agents into committing a crime they had no intention of committing until approached.

The woman, Alinejad, is irksome, but she’s irrelevant in the American and Iranian grander scheme.

Just like they need to pick-up the scent and chase after Cuba, the neoconservative press and political establishment likes to push the idea that America—near bankrupt, financially and morally—needs to bestow freedom on Iran. Ludicrous.

Lift embargoes on both Iran and Cuba. Both are impoverished. And with respect to Iran, let the International Atomic Energy Agency do its job. (The IAEA is pretty good, and was spot on about Iraq!) The Europeans don’t want a nuclear Iran in their neighborhood. That’s the best we can do without destroying another country with hubris.

*Image credit

Revolving Door Between Cable Media And DC Duopoly

America, Critique, Democrats, Ethics, Iran, Media, Morality, Republicans

The revolving door between cable media, neoliberal (CNN) or neocon (Fox), and the D.C. duopoly is sickening. Whether practiced by the Left or the Right; this revolving door between politics and the media is indisputably a moral, if not a legal, conflict of interest.

Fox News has hired warmonger Mike Pompeo. The skirts from the Trump administration, ideologically insignificant all, are on the Fox payroll. Corrupt—neither is the content smart: all day long it’s “the poor Uyghurs, invade Iran.”

Naturally, examples abound on the other side.