WAR: Emergency post, attack on Iran

Foreign conflicts are none of our business. This one is particularly dangerous

You may have thought that Israel has started a war on Iran all by itself, having not even finished the war in Gaza yet.

But overnight, US President Trump started tweeting demands for Iran to ‘unconditionally surrender’, claiming that “we” now have complete control over Iran’s airspace. He said Iran should have taken his offer of a deal in 60 days.

Trump made it clear that the US and Israel planned the attack on Iran together, as Glenn Greenwald has documented on System Update.

CIA whistleblower John Kyriakou told Alex Jones today that the US has crossed the point of no return and will go to war directly with Iran as soon as Thursday (US time), citing naval movements.

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has warned Americans urgently to leave Israel via evacuation flights and cruise ship departures.

It seems to me that the US used Israel, the world’s only Jewish homeland, surrounded by hostile Islamic countries, utterly dependent on US military support for its survival, to attack Iran.

That way if Iran strikes the US in retaliation, they can claim moral indignation and mobilise the country for the war that they themselves wanted.

Tulsi Gabbard, US Director of National Intelligence has the job of informing the President of intelligence assessments.

She testified before Congress in March that while Iran had an “unprecedented” pile of weapons-grade uranium, it did not appear to be building a nuclear weapon, as The Hill reported.

When asked about that on Tuesday, Trump responded: “I don’t care what she said.”

This is no longer about removing Iran’s nuclear capability, it’s a regime-change war.

US President Trump ran on a platform of being the peacemaker, the only President not to start new wars. The Maga movement supported his campaign specifically to end the foreign wars that are bleeding ordinary Americans dry. Big name journalists, politicians, activists – some former Democrats – crossed the floor to support a Republican candidate so he could put America First and end the influence of the military-intelligence-corporate Deep State that has been running the country’s foreign policy for years regardless of the elected government or the wishes of the people. Everyone from journalists Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson, congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, podcast king Joe Rogan, lawyer and health campaigner Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and the world’s favourite conspiracy theorist Alex Jones - all supported Trump on this basis.

Trump simply turned on them, calling Carlson “kooky” and reportedly excluding Tulsi Gabbard from decision making.

This war is particularly dangerous because it risks dragging everyone in. The Islamic world is on the brink of joining forces to destroy Israel, after a year of disturbing images from Hamas’s war, which it deliberately prolonged in the hopes of acheiving exactly that outcome. Pakistan has threatened to nuke Israel if Israel nukes Iran. They’re just itching for it. Trump told everyone in Tehran to immediately evacuate, implying that a nuke might fall on the Iranian capital.

Even if no nukes fall, and a conventional war is begun, Iran is a large and organised country with a modern military. It’s not like dropping bombs on primitive villagers - something even the Houthis seem to withstand.

We don’t want a decade of terrible war, with death and destruction.

So who are the chief pushers of this?

We are not mind-readers. We are not privy to the inner machinations of geopolitics, and yet we must try to understand what is going on in the world around us, all while knowing that our newspapers only report regime lies to us and that our elected governments don’t even appear to be making these decisions anymore.

All we can do is ask: who benefits? And bear in mind that not everyone values the same things.

PROPAGANDA

The cover-story is that Israel attacked Iran to deprive it of nuclear capabilities, which does make superficial sense as Israel can expect to be nuked the second that the Ayatollahs have that capability.

This is because the Shia theocracy officially holds a weird eschatology, as Robert Spencer writes.

The Shia believe their saviour, the 12^th imam, the last heir of Mohammad, fell down a well in Qom as a five-year-old child in 874, but will reappear when the Muslims are in their moment of greatest suffering, to bring the apocalypse and kill all the enemies of Islam.

A fervent Ayatollah would therefore not balk at the loss of millions of lives in a nuclear war, with Israel the first target.

Most Persians don’t believe this nonsense. Christopher Hitchens gives a wonderful description of the inhabitants of Tehran, who try to live “as if” they are free of religious nutbaggery in his 2005 Vanity Fair masterpiece.

The cover story is usually not the real reason, or is partly true but distorted - and as we see from the public tweets of Donald J. Trump, the US planned this. So it wasn’t Israel alone.

GEOPOLITICS

China-Iran-Pakistan-Russia were forming a corridor of influence to the Mediterranean, challenging the Middle Eastern order set up by the British after World War One.

Britain never gave Israel to the Jews – but they did stir up the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Muslims in World War One. After they won the war and the Ottoman Empire fell apart, the British gave several large countries to the Sunni Arab Muslims, including Qatar (to the al-Thani family), Jordan and Iraq (both to the Hashemite clan). Their grateful allies then controlled the territory. The Saudis ended up with Arabia – which is why it is Saudi Arabia and not Hashemite Arabia.

The Anglo-American alliance wants to retain dominance – but the US is wholly dependent on the Saudi-backed petrodollar which forces the rest of the world to buy dollars to swap for Saudi oil.

It has been the basis of the Anglo-American financial order since the 1970s.

After years of rampant money-printing the US is now drowning in debt and excess dollars. The petrodollar has allowed the US to escape the inflationary consequences, providing international demand to soak up those dollars like a sponge.

To put it bluntly, if the Saudis dropped the petro-dollar, the US would be issuing trillion-dollar notes just like Zimbabwe because the rest of the world would dump dollars.

In June last year, the Saudis allowed the petrodollar agreement to expire, and joined the BRICS, as Kitco reported.

It’s not broken but it’s badly cracked. The Saudis hold the whip hand.

Do you doubt this? Who was the first foreign leader that Trump called on entering the White House for his second Presidential term?

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

RELIGIOUS SCHISM BURNS HOTTER THAN MONEY

Remember the cold war between Russia and the US? That was an ideological struggle between communism and capitalism.

Those were only economic systems without the emotive explosiveness of religion. A religious war is far more brutal.

The Sunni and Shia hate each other even more than the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland.

The split began on the death of Mohammad in 632.

Sunni Muslims said that the best man among them should then become leader, but the Party of Ali or Shiat Ali said Mohammad had named his son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib as his successor.

Therefore the Shia believe that their leader must be a member of Mohammad’s household.

So the Sunnis began killing the heirs of Mohammad, beheading and poisoning them for hundreds of years until the last one – the five-year-old boy that the Shia believe is their 12^th imam – disappeared in 874.

They’ve been fighting each other since the day Mohammad died.

The Sunni world-leader is Saudi Arabia. Qatar is a wealthy contender that owns the influential propaganda network al Jazeera and backs the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas).

The Saudis have been fighting the Shia Houthis in neighbouring Yemen for years, occasionally roping in the West to do the dirty work.

This Islamic civil war is dragging us all in just like the Cold War did.

America might have the world’s biggest military but it’s Saudi Arabia that holds the whip hand.

They are vastly wealthy and have bought influence in the West. How much is difficult to quantify as they don’t have to report their wealth anywhere.

It is unknown how many billionaire princes have been minted from Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Muslim oil states after 100 years of energy production, but Forbes magazine has listed at least 15, Saudi Expatriates reports.

Kingdom Holding Company, chaired by Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal, owns significant stakes in international banking firm Citigroup, the Four Seasons Hotel and has previously bought large portions of 21^st Century Fox, Amazon and Apple.

Kingdom Holdings is a World Economic Forum partner and is active, with its CEO Talal Al-Maiman frequently giving speeches.

It is the second-largest holder of Elon Musk’s X (Twitter) and xAI, with a US$400 million stake in the tech firm. Qatar also owns a stake as does the Oman Investment Authority – showing Musk’s enterprises to be yet another joint venture of the Sunni oil sheikhs and the Anglo-American alliance.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund chaired by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman wields nearly a trillion dollars and is tied to human rights abuses.

Perhaps the Saudis and Qataris would simply like to punish Israel for the destruction of Gaza, and so have goaded the Americans into hurling Israel against Iran, laughing as their enemies bomb each other. The Sunnis hate the Jews on religious grounds even more than they hate the Shia.

So the Israelis launched the first missiles and took the blame – and they may well lose their country in such a risky gambit against a large adversary. This would be a disaster. Israel has a right to exist on its ancestral land, none of which was stolen, and on which they have maintained a presence since before the Romans.

CORPORATE PROFITEERING

As Mike Benz has explained, US corporations profit from a US-led world order. They get the contracts. Visa, Google, Blackrock, ExxonMobil all move in, slip-streaming behind the US military intervention to rebuild.

It’s a lot like corporatism. Public-private partnerships. Government and corporations working together.

In the actual shooting war, it’s the military contractors who profit – and has been since the days of Smedley Butler, greatest US war hero of all time.

Butler won 16 medals, five for heroism and the only US marine to ever win the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions.

In 1935, he wrote in his pamphlet, War is a Racket:

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns.

How many other war millionaires falsified their income tax returns no one knows. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried the bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

An important note about Smedley Butler is that he was not a pacifist. He certainly believed in war to protect your own country - but not to go into other nations for the profit of corporations.

I agree with him. This is why I have no problem with Israel continuing to fight the war that Hamas started when it invaded Israel on October 7, until either Hamas surrender or Gaza is defeated utterly and taken as territory.

But launching wars of aggression into Iran is another matter entirely.

Today the corporate profiteers are Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Lockheed Martin who will all profit from dropping bombs.

Butler said the only way to prevent wars was to take the profit out of them by first conscripting capital, labor and industry at the minimum soldier’s wage, then putting the war to a vote - limited to the men who would fight it.

Another name for corporatism, the marriage of corporation and state is fascism.

Interestingly, in 1933, Smedley Butler blew the whistle on the first fascist plot by Wall Street interests to seize the US Government.

The fascist plot was backed by banks including JP Morgan, wealthy industrialists such as the Du Ponts, and front-organisations such as the American Legion. It was officially confirmed by a Congressional investigation, but the media including Time magazine (owned by JP Morgan at that time) ran cover by denying it or ridiculing it.

National fascism has now been replaced by global corporatism as represented by the World Economic Forum and its manifesto of the fourth industrial revolution.

INTERNAL US POLITICS

The deep-state neocons despised as “war-pigs” by the America First faction include Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney and the Bush clan.

Other neocons include commentator Mark Levin, former deputy president Mike Pence and Trump’s former ambassador to the UN John Bolton, who tweeted “The only lasting foundation for Middle East peace and security is overthrowing the ayatollahs. America’s declared objective should be just that.”

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has long documented the fever dreams of the corporatist Washington swamp, such as in this 2024 interview where he names Nikki Haley, US Senators Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, Congressman Dan Crenshaw (eyepatch), and basically the entire Republican establishment that hated Trump. Glenn Greenwald is the expert - listen to System Update on Rumble and he will expose them meticulously every week this conflict rolls on.

This war will destroy Trump’s support base giving the neocons two things they have long wanted: control of the Republican party and a war with Iran that will profit their corporate donors.

Just like everything else in life, it’s likely to be a murky confluence of interests, a mix of several things, and where interests align the oligarchs and the corporates will jump to take advantage.

This war has nothing to do with Australia. We need to shut the borders to migration until our housing crisis stabilises. That way we won’t import the world’s problems.

WHAT WE CAN DO

We can build community with positive events - for example, this weekend a Country Barn Dance is on for the freedom-minded out at Rosehill, in Sydney’s west. Great stuff. Let’s have colonial dress-ups in Hyde Park for Australia Day and other fun things. When we build strong community links, we reduce fear and make it harder for the government to push us around.

We must prevent our government from declaring an emergency to bypass our laws and civil rights again.

We must make it hard for them to pass emergency powers. No emergency powers - and if such a thing is passed it must be set to automatically expire within a short time-frame (eg a week), and to require a full parliamentary vote to renew it. It must be extremely limited.

Update: there has been a lot of division over Hamas’s war on Israel that is ongoing. On Tuesday night, The Greens (who want Hamas to win) made a motion to Northern Beaches Council to side with Hamas by supporting demands for an immediate ceasefire, leaving Hamas in power.

My submission against the Greens motion is here in PDF form:

Northern Beaches Council Submission

265KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The 1988 Hamas founding charter spells out who they are, what they want and how they mean to get it. This document explains their behaviour, in their own words. Translated by Yale University, you can see it online here and below in PDF form:

1988 Hamas Founding Charter

597KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Edits: 18 June - corrected two typos: Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holdings has a $400 million stake in Elon Musk’s xAI, and fixed ExxonMobil’s name. 19 June: Added urgent US evacuation order, fixed another typo, changed paragraph order before first image. Added Hamas founding charter, council submission, added par on extra neocons including John Bolton, and what we can do section.