Fear of war is not the best adviser. If they want
war, give them a war. At home!
Fear Not
By Israel Shamir
1. Crying
Wolf
So many people have circulated so many warnings of the
forthcoming US-Israeli attack on Iran that it is hard to ignore them. A
piece written by a few ex-spooks warning of a new
round of war is one of these messages. In our view, spooks, ex or not, are not
the most reliable people, and the CIA is not the best reference. However, this
item fits with the dire
predictions of Fidel Castro. It fits with the
recent heating up of the Gaza and Lebanon borders. It fits with the
relocation of some American warships and
accompanying Israeli U-boats to the shores of Iran. Rumours of Israeli advance
forces being placed in Azerbaijan and even
Saudi Arabia are used as supportive evidence. The
Lobby's agents relentlessly call for war. They blackmail America, saying: if
Obama will not attack, Netanyahu will, and the US will anyway be forced to
fight. This is the bottom line of
Jeffrey Goldberg’s long piece in the Atlantic magazine..
On the other hand, we have heard the cry "wolf" so many
times from so many people that now we are perfectly blasé. For quite a few
years now, hardly a month has gone by without a serious warning of an impending
attack on Iran.
Though these warnings are usually sounded by friends, they
do serve the enemy as well. They amount to
psychological pressure on Iran. For this reason alone I am ready to bet: there
will be no attack on Iran. Israel has never gone to war without its centre-left
parties in the government. So as long as Israeli government includes only right
and far-right parties, no war is foreseeable. It would be like driving without
insurance. (Ehud Barak’s Labour Party is too weak to count. If Tsipi Livni
should join the government – run for cover, but not until then.)
I am amazed by the strong nerves of President Ahmadinejad: a
weaker person in his place might flinch and pre-empt the imminent attack. He
does not – apparently he thinks that the jaw-jaw is not likely to become
war-war. This is also the view of the well-informed Egyptian newspaper Al
Ahram: The current escalation of US and Israeli sabre-rattling against Iran
is probably no more than that, writes
Amani Maged.
The main reason: there is no love lost between Obama and
Netanyahu. They do not trust one other. In Israel there is a hidden fear that
should Netanyahu follow Goldberg’s advice, the US president will not rush in to
save and defend it. Obama certainly did not promise he would help in case of
Israeli aggression; and he has no knee-jerk instinct to defend Tel Aviv come
what may. 90% of Israeli Jews dislike him; he is hated by right-wing American
Jews – “friends of Israel.” A year ago, after his Cairo speech, there was a
universal feeling that Obama’s administration will not chop wood and draw water
for Israel.
Now this illusion of America’s independence is gone. Israelis
are notorious for their “kiss and tell” indiscretion (“larutz lesaper lehevre”,
in Hebrew). A confidante of Netanyahu, Ari Shavit, has
told us that “the Israeli leader applied hidden
pressure to the American leader,” which made him fall to his knees and beg for
mercy. The name of the “hidden pressure” could be a Jewish billionaire from
Chicago, one Lester Crown, who “made Obama” and supposedly retains full control
over his creature, or
alternatively, another Jewish Chicagoan named
Marty Nesbitt. However, even if the US President was forced by his Jewish
benefactors to do a volte-face, he certainly bears a grudge for this
humiliating turn.
The worst-case scenario as seen from Israel unrolls as
follows: Netanyahu mistakes the vague remarks of Obama for an iron-clad promise,
and launches an attack. Then Obama sits tight while Israel bleeds under the
Iranian response. Israelis remember that this was the US tactic for dealing with
Saddam Hussein: this best friend of America and recipient of US military aid was
led to believe that Washington would permit the takeover of Kuwait.
The most likely interpretation for all the sabre-rattling is
that Israelis plan yet another invasion of Lebanon, while hoping that Iran will
be scared into immobility by the threat of an all-out war. Like all previous
invasions of Lebanon, this would be a great crime and a huge mistake, but hardly
an apocalyptic event.
Indeed, to all appearances it is a re-run of 2006, when
predictions of an American attack on Iran were also running high, but eventually
Bush got cold feet and the Israeli army was roundly defeated in the mountain
valleys of South Lebanon.
2. If It
Comes
However, if this optimistic prognosis goes the way of some
weather broadcasts, and instead of a sunny day with rainy spells we get a
full-blown storm, the whole fabric of the Middle East will unravel. This
juggernaut will be unstoppable. After Iran, Syria will fall. After Syria, Saudi
Arabia. It will be the classic domino game: Iran rejoiced when Iraq fell. Saudis
wish Iran to fall. Israel wants to break Saudi Arabia to pieces, and then the
rest of the Middle East. This is inscribed in their
Clean Break paper and its source,
Oded Yinon’s paper,
which they follow religiously.
If Saudis have too poor a memory, let us remind them: A few
months after 9/11, Rand Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec briefed Richard
Perle’s Defence Policy Board, calling upon the US to break up Saudi Arabia. Its
oil fields should be targeted and its financial assets seized, advised this
neocon. I wrote back then, in an essay appropriately called
Take your Money and Run:
“The riches of the Arabian Peninsula hoodwink the Jews, being
tantalisingly within the reach of IDF Merkaba tanks. They have too many good
reasons to undo Saudi Arabia.
-
Saudis have too much money, too much
oil and too few friends.
-
Elimination of all Saudi financial
assets will invigorate the flabby Dow Jones average and strengthen the weakened
dollar.
-
This prosperous and well-armed
country must be reduced before Israel takes its most important step, the seizure
and destruction of the beautiful Umayyad Mosques in Jerusalem.”
With the destruction of Iran, the countdown for the takeover
of Saudi Arabia would begin. In the words of a neocon: “Everyone wants to take
out Tehran. But a real mensch wants to take out ar-Riyadh”. Provided that no
attack on Iran is possible without Saudi connivance, the “irony of history” will
be complete. The enemies of Israel will be taken out one after another, each
with help of the next still unsuspecting victim.
3. The Second
Shoe
But an attack on Lebanon is not a sure thing, and that will
not be the end of the story, predicts one of the best experts, David Hirst, an
old Eastern hand and a brilliant British journalist, the like of Robert Fisk and
Patrick Seale. He had written arguably the best book ever about Palestine/Israel
called The Gun and the Olive Branch years ago, and ever since then I have
been waiting for this second book as one waits for the second shoe to drop. Now
he has delivered it and unravelled all the mysteries of this extremely confusing
country where alliances do not last, and expectations come to nought.
If you read one book a year, this year read Beware of
Small States by David Hirst, and you’ll understand why Israeli invasions of
Lebanon always have been and always will be an unmitigated disaster for all
parties involved. Lebanon is small, but the advice of Bismarck, “Do not ever
invade it” (he meant Russia), is perfectly applicable to it as well.
Hirst predicts that the next, the Seventh Arab-Israeli
War, will begin like a second round of 2006 (by an Israeli attack on Lebanon),
but that this war will spread to Syria and Gaza. It will be a missile war, like
2006 written large. Afterwards, it will likely spread over all of the Middle
East, until the Zionist aggression is repulsed.
Hirst predicts: “…a seemingly interminable [Israeli – Arab]
conflict which began with the sword the sword will end, but it may have to
administer many a bloody and painful, yet inconclusive blow before it finally
does so”.
4. Give them
war
However small the chances for all-out war, we should not sit
by, wail and wait for the enemy to act. But fear of war is not the best adviser.
If they want war, give them war. Attack the chief warmonger, and we know who
that is. Name him ‘the Lobby’ with Mearsheimer, or the ‘Zionist Power
Configuration’ with Petras, or ‘Masters of Discourse’ as this writer or
whatever. They are calling the shots, let them foot the bill. For years there
was a discussion whether the Dog (American imperialism) wags the tail (Israel
Lobby) or other way around. Now the debate is over. “This is not a case of the
Tail wagging the Dog,” quipped Anatole Lieven, “but of the Tail wagging the
unfortunate Dog around the room and banging its head against the ceiling”.
What is the secret of its success? It is alchemy, of sorts.
Not in vain did the Jews stand at the cradle of alchemy. However, the alchemists
of old tried to transmute base metals into gold. The modern alchemists of the
Lobby transmute the real gold of your labour into Fools Gold and pay others with
it. Instead of bubbling retorts and overflowing alembics, they use shares,
bonds, loans, mortgages, derivatives and other instruments by which
Goldman-Sachs and
Madoff and hundreds of other banksters rob you of
your livelihood. This alchemy is nothing more than counterfeiting. They borrow a
hundred dollars from you, turn it into a hundred thousand dollars debt and force
the Treasury (staffed by their own guys) to repay the debt in full at your
expense.
Deal with them, and you will save yourselves. As a bonus,
you’ll save the world, too. It is them, not the Iranians or Iraqis, you
Americans should fight. The great American, Eugene Debs has said: “If you are
given weapons, do not use them against far-away strangers. Turn them against
your true enemy at home. Expropriate the expropriators, rob the robbers.”
5. Alchemical
Wedding
The Alchemist’s exploits do not end with transmuting your
labour into Fools Gold for others and real gold for himself. Miraculously the
Alchemist weds the most reactionary forces to the most enlightened liberals in a
mock-alchemical marriage. The real thing is a mystical union of King and Queen,
of Logos and Soul, of Masculine and Feminine. The Lobby's version is a Fools
wedding.
Their King is the Lobby’s new
ally: the Tea-Party mob of pseudo-right
Republicans with an admixture of European fascists like Geert Wilders. These men
and women, united by their hatred of Islam, of communists, of China and Russia,
have recently sworn obedience to Israel and supported an attack on Iran. This is
a
new Far Right that chooses to make friends with
Jews, just like Mussolini and Franco did.
For the feminine soulful element, the wonderful alchemists of
the Lobby chose gender activists. Not the Queen, but a Drag Queen. They are as
destructive as fascists. Remember, the attack on Afghanistan was preceded by a
verbal barrage from the gender activists, as I
wrote at the time. They justified the forthcoming
slaughter and occupation by saying that “Afghani men mistreat their women and
gays”. The horrors of burka were enlarged upon endlessly.
It is repeated now. Here are three most recent headlines on
Iran from the Guardian, the best paper of the moderate Left:
-
Iranian facing stoning speaks:
'It's because I'm a woman';
-
When adultery means death,
-
Iran set to execute 18-year-old on false charge of sodomy.
It is a replay of the treatment they gave to the Soviet
communism. On the right, President Reagan wished to bomb Moscow; the pseudo-left
prepared the ground by condemning the Soviets for their lack of democracy and
treatment of dissidents and Jews. What a wonderful division of labour: the
pseudo Right calls to kill the Bolshies or the gooks, the false Left (now gender
activists) justifies the killing.
Gender activists are not men and women with certain sexual
preferences. We do not care about people’s private lives. Let it remain private.
Gender activists use gender as their key factor. It is not woman but feminists.
It is not practitioners of same-sex relations but gay-activists, or Gay
International of Joseph Massad.
Why gender activism became so important in the war against
Islam (and with the Church)? Why this media-promoted obsession with gender
activism? This is not due to compassion. They are chosen and protected because,
by the brazenness of their actions, they mock the sanctity of marriage in
general, and ultimately that of archetypical sacred marriage, of the union of
Heaven and Earth in order to undermine the sacral fabric of the world. They help
to profane the world, to remove the last vestiges of holiness, and that is the
true ultimate goal of the Masters of Discourse.
In the name of profanation the Judeo-Americans go to fight
the pious puritans of Persia and the warrior monks of Lebanon, for their
faith-based society is impervious to the rot. The Masters could overlook Iranian
nuclear reactors, like they overlooked the Pakistani bomb. It is Iranians’
belief in God they can’t tolerate.