CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Idiocy Never Ends: the U.S. Plans to Blockade the Strait of Hormuz

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Over the weekend, vice president J.D. Vance sojourned to Islamabad to negotiate an end to the Iran War. Given that the U.S. and Israel sabotaged the two previous negotiations with the Persian nation, Iran had good reason to be skeptical. It was correct. The U.S. diplomatic amateurs utterly failed to understand who has the upper hand in this imbroglio, namely Iran, and thus made shockingly unrealistic demands. Now we’ll see whether Tehran’s diplomats survive the usually fatal process of negotiating with Trump’s team of jokers.

After Vance called it quits and despite Trump’s threats to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, which would tank the world economy pronto, and his vociferations against China supplying weapons to Iran (Hello? Where has he been for the past month? Napping? Who does he think has been unpacking literally dozens of planeloads of military equipment in Tehran? I can tell you it’s not Santa Claus, unless he’s moved to Beijing), Washington wants peace, because, suffice it to say, its little “in/out” war on Iran did not go as planned. By the second month of the Iran War, the U.S. had lost planes – a not insignificant number – while six Russian submarines patrolled the Strait of Hormuz, two of them nuclear.  On April 7, Russia and China vetoed a UN security council resolution to open the Strait, thus finally striking back at the Empire’s security council abuses. This veto just might have had something to do with Donald “Stone Age” Trump’s fulminations the day before about terminating Iranian civilization. After all, Russia, China and Iran are de facto allies, regardless of the fine print in their security pacts, and Moscow and Tehran have lately been on the receiving end of some of Washington’s very bloody nastiness, while Beijing knows full well its number is up next.

None of these contortions – bloviations about the stone age, lousy security council proposals targeting Iran or the sudden appearance of Russian submarines – were a recipe for global harmony leading to American success, if not renewed hegemony. No. With seven planes shot down over Iran, three pilots extracted, at least one seriously wounded, the IRGC hammering Israel and the Gulf sheikdoms, while literally champing at the bit for an American invasion, for which they’d been training for decades, the U.S. was ready to throw in the towel. American assets in the region were torched, while Hezbollah, the Houthis, the IRGC and Iraqi militias all shocked Washington and Jerusalem by turning out to be formidable opponents. Well, live and learn. Maybe next time the geniuses in the white house will listen to the........

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