MAY 10, 2019
What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and
independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the
guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army.
. . Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as
the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and
you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.
President Abraham
Lincoln, September 11, 1858
At this moment the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and a
massive strike group of other war steamers (including the
guided-missile cruiser USS Leyte Gulf and four destroyers: the USS Bainbridge,
Gonzalez, Mason, and Nitze) are deploying to the Persian Gulf to join a
newly-arrived B-52
nuclear-capable bomber group, adding to the already vast US
military presence in that region.
According to the National
Security Adviser John Bolton, all these ships and airplanes and missiles are
there “to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any
attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with
unrelenting force.”
There were a few — very few — warning voices,
such as Senator Tim Kaine who said on May 7 he is “deeply worried that the
Trump administration is leading us toward an unnecessary war with
Iran” but many people and organizations such as the Brookings Institution (“Our Mission is to conduct in-depth
research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the
local, national and global level”) have different views.
One of Brookings’ luminaries, Michael O’Hanlon, declared,
no doubt in-depth, that “I like the decision, to the extent I can understand
the backdrop to it, because it tells Iran they won’t get away with doing
something nasty by proxy. We are on to them. That may or may not suffice
a deterrent and we have to be careful about assuming that a carrier or bomber
can stop a covert operative, but I still favor it – and I also favor reminding
Iran that we aren’t really pivoting out of the Middle East too too
dramatically, either.”
No: the US has no intention
of “pivoting” away from any part of the world in which it persists in meddling,
from the South China Sea via the Gulf, the Black Sea, the Baltic, and, of course,
South America, where Washington’s sights are on Venezuela.
On May 3 President Trump telephoned President Putin and the
Washington Post reported him
as saying “I thought it was a very positive conversation I had with President
Putin on Venezuela.” This was in spite of the fact that when the
wife of the US-backed anti-government rebel chief, Juan Guaido, was the guest of
Trump in the Oval Office on 27 March he promised he would “fix” Venezuela and
insisted that “Russia has to get out.”
On May 1 US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News that regarding
Venezuela, Donald Trump “has been crystal clear and incredibly consistent.
Military action is possible. If that’s what’s required, that’s what the United
States will do.” The same day, the “unmistakable message” man, John Bolton said on CNN that
“The Russians like nothing better than putting a thumb in our eyes. They’d love
to get effective control of a country in this hemisphere. . . . We’ve made it
clear to the Russians . . . why we think that behavior is unacceptable to us.”
They were followed by Senator Lindsey Graham who tweeted “Cuba,
Russia sends troops to prop Maduro up in Venezuela while we talk sanction. Where
is our aircraft carrier?”
Thanks to Washington’s
sanctions, the people of Venezuela are suffering grievously. Children are
starving and medical care is in crisis because it’s always ordinary folk who
suffer when people like Trump’s henchmen, Bolton and Pompeo, try to provoke
revolution.
On April 30 Pompeo tweeted that
“Today interim President Juan Guaido announced the start of Operación Libertad. The
US Government fully supports the Venezuelan people in their quest for freedom
and democracy. Democracy cannot be defeated.”
Yes, it can. It is
being defeated in many countries by the intrigues of the Washington War Machine
which zooms, rolls and blasts its way from country to country, causing economic
chaos and untold human misery along its blood-spattered route.
One of the latest coup-supporting allegations came from Bolton,
a major supporter of
the 2003 Iraq war fiasco, about which it might be remembered that four weeks
before the US invaded Iraq the newspaper Haaretz reported that “US Undersecretary of
State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials on [17 February 2003]
that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to
deal with threats from Syria, Iran, and North Korea afterward.” He
didn’t mention Venezuela at that time, but it has now appeared on his target
screen, and on May 2 he told the media “We have been planning
for what we call the day after — the day after Maduro — for quite some time.
It’s been very much on our mind that we can provide a lot of assistance to the
Guaido government when he assumes the power to try to get the Venezuelan [sic] out of the ditch that Maduro has put
it in.” Then he claimed that there are 25,000 Cuban
troops in Venezuela.
This prompted Sean Hannity of Fox News (greatly admired by Trump)
to announce that
“Maduro is backed by Russia. It [sic] is backed by Iran, Hezbollah. The
terrorist group funded by Iran has been training government forces in Venezuela
now for years. Cuba is providing 20,000 troops to protect Maduro from his own
people.”
Hannity didn’t lose the
opportunity to include Iran in his tirade because it is always
important to make such links, as it prepares ordinary Americans for
the day when the Pentagon takes military action against the Security State’s the target of the moment. Should Venezuela collapse under US pressure, the way will
be open to getting on with achieving the main mission — bombing, rocketing and
destroying the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose very name is spine-shivering to
all God-fearing Christian and Jewish people.
It looks as if it won’t be long before this happens, because on
May 1 (two days before telephoning President Putin) Trump told Fox News that
Venezuela is “an incredible mess . . . The place is so bad and so dangerous . .
. so something is going to have to be done.” When asked what
Washington’s options could be, he replied “Well, some of them I don’t even like
to mention to you because they are pretty tough. A lot of things will be going
on over the next week and sooner than that. We will see what happens.”
So we can take it that no matter how resurgent President Maduro
appeared, following the failed coup attempt by US-supported Juan Guaido, he is
destined for overthrow and death. It could be another case of “We came; We saw;
He died”, as when Libya’s president was murdered in 2011 after
eight months of aerial bombardment by the US and its allies.
Then it will be the turn of Iran where, as pointed out by
Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation, Washington “continues to
use economic sanctions to target the Iranian people with impoverishment and
death as a way of hopefully effecting another regime change within the
country.”
During its regime-change fandangos, the Trump Security State
unilaterally repealed the July 2015 arrangement with Iran, the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was aimed at ensuring that
“Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful.” The accord
lifted sanctions that affected almost every aspect of Iranian life. Iran, in
turn, agreed that “under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire
any nuclear weapons,” and approved a strict international monitoring system
which permitted access by inspectors to any site that could possibly be
associated with nuclear weapons-related activities.
Trump’s SS ripped up the agreement, in spite of the fact that
Iran was complying with it to the letter, as made clear by
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which conducts inspections of
Iranian facilities. It went so far as to state that “Timely and proactive
cooperation by Iran in providing such access facilitates the implementation of the
Additional Protocol and enhances confidence.” The IAEA’s report of February 2019 says
the Agency has had access to “all the sites and locations in Iran which it
needed to visit” and its Director General, the admirable Yukiya Amano, said on 4 March that
“Iran is implementing its nuclear commitments.”
But Washington has spurned
Iran’s compliance, and intensified a savage sanctions regime with the aim of
encouraging an uprising to overthrow the government.
At a White House media conference on May 3, Trump declared that “Getting along with
countries is a good thing and we want to have good relations with
everybody.” Everybody, that is, except those countries the
Washington War Machine intends to target, ensuring that the world will suffer
ever more suffering, death, and destruction.
On May 8 Trump signed an
executive order sanctioning Iran’s iron, steel, aluminum and copper
industries, saying “We are successfully imposing the most powerful maximum
pressure campaign ever witnessed, which today’s action will further
strengthen.”
Trump, Bolton, Pompeo and
their uninformed puppets are confronting, taunting and goading Iran in the hope
that its government will react military, whereupon Washington will rejoice and
let loose the dogs of war.
Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and military affairs. He
lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario