This was not inevitable. This is a war Israel chose. It could have been prevented. Diplomatic talks were ongoing when the bombers took off for Iran. Israel’s continuing, illegal, unjustified airstrikes are unlikely to achieve their stated aim – permanently ending Tehran’s presumed efforts to build nuclear weapons – and may accelerate it. They must stop now. Likewise, Iran must halt its retaliation immediately and drop its escalatory threats to attack US and UK bases.
This conflict is not limited, as was the case last year, to tit-for-tat exchanges and “precision strikes” on a narrow range of military targets. It’s reached a wholly different level. Potentially nothing is off the table. Civilians are being killed on both sides. Leaders are targets. The rhetoric is out of control. With Israel fighting on several fronts, and Iran’s battered regime backed against a wall, the Middle East is closer than ever to a disastrous conflagration.
Reasons can always be found to go to war. The roots of major conflicts often reach back decades – and this is true of the Israel-Iran vendetta, which dates to the 1979 Islamic revolution. The so-called “shadow war” between the two intensified in recent years. Yet all-out conflict had been avoided, until now. So who is principally to blame for this sudden, unprecedented explosion?
Answer: three angry old men whose behaviour raises serious doubts about their judgment, common sense, motives and even their sanity.
Stacking the antebellum South against Bleeding Kansas and asking which state is the most slave friendly? It’s an easy answer. One of them had men and women fight the encroaching slavers off at gunpoint and declared itself a free state. And they did it while waving a few bibles, which I’m sure is the real sin involved.
Those damned abolitionists were too fucking religious. Therefore, they were just as bad as the slaughterhouses full of mutilated slaves next door.
How did the far more secular Iraq fair when the Texas-born Southerner George W. Bush came calling?
It’s so crazy to see you bring up the American slave system, in the midst of a US-backed jihad on Iranian soil by their proxies in the ethno-nationalist state of Israel. Gee, why would Iranians be so hostile towards these foreigners and so intent on policing themselves against their influence? Is it because every attempt to reach out a hand in pursuit of peace and prosperity, the response is another bombing run?
Iran had a secular democracy. Then all the secularists got butchered and purged by the Shah. The survivors were the Islamists. And when they regained their strength and revolted, the nation that emerged was a sectarian state, born out of the blood and fire of a western backed civil war.
The west is still at war with Iran for all the Iranians’ efforts at peace. And it seems the western raison d’être for this half century of butchery is “Damn, y’all are too Muslim”?
Fuck off.