CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Catastrophe in the Gulf: Trump’s War on Iran

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

So Donald Trump finally did it: he started a major war on Iran at the behest of the Israel lobby. Already U.S. bases in the Gulf states have gone up in flames, with confirmation from Bahrain that every building in the U.S. navy fifth fleet (near Manama) has been destroyed, U.S. servicemen are dead, the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier hastily retreated, Iraqis have risen up against their American occupiers, Israel is getting bombed to smithereens, Iranian ballistic missiles have hit the U.K. airbase in Cyprus, Hezbollah has entered the chat by targeting northern Israel with its cruise missiles, and that’s just for starters. Trump already asked the Iranians for a ceasefire, but they said no dice. They know damn well they were too nice back in June, that consenting to the ceasefire Israel begged for was taken as a sign of weakness rather than what it was, namely decency and restraint. They will not make the same mistake twice.

The U.S. and Israel were imbecilic enough to start this war, but Iran will finish it. Iran is not interested in a truce, especially after the assassination of the ayatollah and other war crimes, among them the U.S. bombing of a girls’ school. Tehran aims to keep firing its many hypersonic missiles – for which U.S. air defense is useless and so is any U.S. or Israeli counterattack, since we in the west have zero hypersonic missiles and have been incapable of developing them, despite deceitful pentagon hype – and Iran will keep firing those missiles until the entire security architecture of West Asia is permanently altered: in other words, Iran aims to smash the base of U.S. power in the Gulf, basically to evict the U.S., which, with all the alerts for Americans to leave every country in the region, is already well underway. Iran will wage this war on its own terms and will conclude it, when it’s darn ready to, on its own terms.

As if this weren’t enough of a debacle for the U.S., Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz – as it threatened to do if attacked. The only ships getting through are Russian and Chinese, Iran’s allies, as I predicted on this site weeks ago. As of March 2, first day of business since the Strait closed........

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