CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Roaming Charges: Calling All Angels!

Battle of the Angels, woodcut from the Apocalypse series, Albrecht Dürer (1497-1498). The wall on which the prophets wrote Is cracking at the seams Upon the instruments of death The sunlight brightly gleams When everyman is torn apart With nightmares and with dreams Will no one lay the laurel wreath When silence drowns the screams? Confusion will be my epitaph – Peter Sinfield, King Crimson, “Epitaph”

Battle of the Angels, woodcut from the Apocalypse series, Albrecht Dürer (1497-1498).

The wall on which the prophets wrote Is cracking at the seams Upon the instruments of death The sunlight brightly gleams When everyman is torn apart With nightmares and with dreams Will no one lay the laurel wreath When silence drowns the screams?

Confusion will be my epitaph

– Peter Sinfield, King Crimson, “Epitaph”

Let’s review the shifting rationales (all fallacious) for Trump/Netanyahu’s criminal attack on Iran that has quickly engulfed much of the Middle East: Israel was going to attack Iran and Iran would respond by attacking the US; Iran was going to launch a pre-emptive attack on Israel; Iran was going to launch a preemptive attack on the US; Iran was close to having a nuclear weapon; Iran was close to having intercontinental missiles capable of striking the US; Iran was governed by lunatics. Netanyahu talked Trump into doing it. MBS convinced Trump to do it. Trump convinced Netanyahu to do it. Let confusion be their epitaph.

Marco Rubio: “The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked [by Israel], that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit, sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.”

CNN Reporter: Yesterday, you told us Israel was going to strike Iran and that’s why we needed to get involved. But today the president said Iran– Rubio: No. Were you there yesterday? CNN Reporter: Yes. I asked the question.

CNN Reporter: Yesterday, you told us Israel was going to strike Iran and that’s why we needed to get involved. But today the president said Iran–

Rubio: No. Were you there yesterday?

CNN Reporter: Yes. I asked the question.

The “preventative war” rationale, whichever of the shifting versions you choose, is preposterous. A preemptive strike on US targets by Iran would have done minimal damage to the US arsenal in the region and ensured the massive counter-attack the Iranians were seeking to prevent. And, even the Pentagon knows it wasn’t true…

Reporter: Thousands of Americans are stranded. Why wasn’t there an evacuation plan? Trump: Well, because it happened all very quickly, we thought, and I thought maybe more so than most. I could ask Marco, but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack….If anything, I forced Israel’s hand.”

Reporter: Thousands of Americans are stranded. Why wasn’t there an evacuation plan?

Trump: Well, because it happened all very quickly, we thought, and I thought maybe more so than most. I could ask Marco, but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack….If anything, I forced Israel’s hand.”

Sen. Mark Warner: “There was no imminent threat to the United States by the Iranians. There was a threat to Israel. If we equate a threat to Israel as the equivalent of an imminent threat to the US, then we are in uncharted territory.”

Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons. Iran has none. If Iran were really planning a preemptive strike on Israel, that would pretty much invalidate the notion of nuclear deterrence. Let’s get rid of them all! On the other hand, would Trump and Israel have risked launching a preemptive attack on Iran if the Islamic Republic possessed its own nuclear arsenal? Unlikely. (It’s more likely Trump would have written love letters to the Ayatollah, ala his endearing correspondence with Kim Jong-Un.) I think it’s safe to conclude that Iran had no plans to preemptively attack Israel or the US.

Rafael Grossi, Director General of the IAEA, told the nuclear inspection agency’s board on March 2 that inspectors found no structured effort by Iran to build nuclear weapons, despite ongoing strikes on sites like Natanz. The U.S. and Israel launched operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury on February 28, damaging above-ground structures but sparing underground centrifuges and causing no radiation leaks. While leaders like Trump and Netanyahu cited imminent threats, U.S. intelligence sources and Russia disputed the urgency, and Grossi called for diplomacy to prevent escalation.

Reporter: “So, why did the US attack?” Rubio:  “Iran is run by lunatics.”

Reporter: “So, why did the US attack?”

Rubio:  “Iran is run by lunatics.”

Speaking of lunatics, Paul White, the spiritual advisor to Trump and head of the White House Faith Office, spoke in tongues to call down angels from Africa and South America to strike Iran…

Mike Johnson is doing his best to inflame all of Islam against the US: “We’re the Great Satan in their misguided religion. And there is no way to appease them.” Meanwhile, Netanyahu was once again comparing Iran to the Amaleks and vowing to enact Deuteronomy’s injunction to “blot them out” (Ie, genocide them).

Is there some profound moral distinction between Iran calling the US the Great Satan and the US calling Iran the Axis of Evil?

“President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark His [Jesus’s] return to Earth”. No country this backward should be allowed to possess nuclear weapons…

US commanders told their troops that Trump had been “anointed by Jesus” to bring down the Iranian regime, set off the Apocalypse and summon Jesus back to Earth. So the bombs across Iran may wake Jesus from his 2000-year-long slumber–during which he dozed soundly through the Black Death, the Inquisition, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, genocide against aboriginal peoples, Nietzsche’s pronouncement of his father’s death, wars using poison gas, the Holocaust, atomic bombings and the ethnic cleansing of his own descendants in Gaza–but why are they convinced he’d come back on the side of the bombers?

This morning, our commander…urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.

This morning, our commander…urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.

In launching the forever wars, the Bush crowd tried to avoid inevitable comparisons to the Crusades, fearing the fiery backlash such analogies would rightly engender among the predominantly Muslim people they were claiming to “liberate.” Not so, the Trumpers, who have not only eagerly embraced the absurd image of themselves as born-spurred crusaders, but also as apocalyptic agents of End Timer fantasies about Armageddon and the Rapture. Bush’s PNAC cabal, which included many Jewish Neo-cons, has been replaced with Trump’s team of Christian Nationalist nutters who are itching to send Jewish “Christ-killers” (their doctrinal anti-Semitism has never been in doubt) up in the same mushroom cloud of radioactive smoke as the Muslim infidels.

Maybe Jesus hasn’t been sleeping all these years, but has instead simply become terminally bored by the blood-soaked antics of his Dad’s favorite creatures–especially annoyed by the noisome claque of souls who claim to worship him–and has chosen to remain aloof from it all, like the Supreme Deity described by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as lurking “within or behind or above the handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Sounds about right. We see the celestial clippings all around us, though Trump’s EPA refuses to classify them as toxic waste.

So why did they attack Iran? My theory: they bombed Iran is that Iran was willing to give up or scale back its nuclear program, which would have removed any justification for the regime change war Netanyahu craves…

You can’t get much more explicit than this.

The public statements are mostly just play-acting. None of these people feels they need to explain themselves to anyone, not even to Sean Hannity. If Congress doesn’t care (and it doesn’t) that its constitutional authority has been usurped, why should the Trump Syndicate bother coming up with a serious justification for usurping it? Tell them something new every day. Keep them guessing. Who will stop them?

Reporter: Do you have someone in mind right now to lead a new Iranian government, because you said all the people you did have in mind have been taken out? Trump: We had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.

Reporter: Do you have someone in mind right now to lead a new Iranian government, because you said all the people you did have in mind have been taken out?

Trump: We had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.

Trump’s statement that the US may have killed the people it wanted to take over the government of Iran after it killed the current leadership of Iran must rank as one of the most astounding confessions of imperial incompetence in history.

Here’s Seymour Hersh on how Trump’s loose lips may have gotten the CIA’s own assets inside the IRG and IRI killed:

Before the attacks on Iran commenced, US and Israeli operatives inside the country worked intensely under deep cover to recruit future leaders of Iran from various groups, including, perhaps, from inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that is responsible for protecting the Ayatollah. The president apparently spoke without recalling that this fact is top secret. I have been told Trump’s casual comment has led to a Revolutionary Guard witch hunt to search out the insiders who may have been dealing directly or indirectly with Israeli or American intelligence agencies.

Before the attacks on Iran commenced, US and Israeli operatives inside the country worked intensely under deep cover to recruit future leaders of Iran from various groups, including, perhaps, from inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps........

© CounterPunch