War on Iran

My review of the last week’s events relating to the US and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked war on Iran, beginning with the ceasefire talks in Pakistan between the US and Iran, which were derailed by the US’s undeserved arrogance, and in which questions were raised about whether or not Benjamin Netanyahu played a disruptive role from afar. I also examine the confusing response of Donald Trump who, in between lauding himself as Jesus and launching bitter attacks on the Pope, decided that blocking the already blocked Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t blocked before the war began, was a good idea. This, however, can only add to the growing global energy crisis that it’s already too late to avert, but that will only get worse until the US and Israel are somehow persuaded to back down. I also look at the forthcoming negotiations between Israel and Lebanon in Washington, D.C., which look doomed to fail, because Israel, fresh from its sickening day of massacres in Lebanon last week, is apparently insistent on carving up the whole of southern Lebanon into a deserted buffer zone and an active military zone lasting for an unspecified amount of time, while leaving the Lebanese government with an unfulfillable requirement to disarm and dismantle Hezbollah in the north, or face further military action. As always, the most disturbing aspect of this entire chaotic situation is Israel’s obsession with endless, murderous aggression, which must be curbed if the entire region is to have any opportunity for any kind of peace.

My reflections on the last five days of horrors, from Donald Trump’s expletive-filled post threatening Iran on Easter Sunday to his even more disturbing post on April 7 when he threatened Iran with nuclear annihilation, stating, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”, and the widespread revulsion that greeted both posts, to the ceasefire deal agreed that evening, brokered with Pakistan, establishing a two-week period for negotiations aimed at ensuring a lasting peace. Israel, excluded from the negotiations, immediately launched attacks on Lebanon of unprecedented savagery, even though ending its hostilities in Lebanon was included in the ceasefire deal, either in an effort to sabotage the deal or to indulge in a last burst of sickening genocidal fury before complying. My feeling, as I describe it, is that, “Whatever comes next, it seems pretty clear that Iran has won, and that both Trump and Netanyahu have suffered spectacularly resounding defeats”, from which neither may recover. I can only hope that this will happen. As I explain, although it “wouldn’t fundamentally change the juggernauts of horror in either country, it might be enough of a break to pull us back from what, otherwise, looks like nothing less than an ever-growing and all-compassing darkness of bottomless depravity.”

Today marks 900 days since Israel began its genocide in the Gaza Strip, a sustained assault of such naked and self-glorifying depravity, shamefully supported by most of the west, that it has left billions of us struggling to cope with what the very notion of our humanity means. It also marks the first anniversary of Israel’s targeted assassination in Gaza of Hossam Shabat, one of over 270 Palestinian journalists murdered by Israel. To mark these grim anniversaries, I cycle though Israel’s atrocities, almost unbroken for two years, with the exception of a six-week ceasefire in January and February last year, noting how every red line regarding appropriate conduct in war has been eviscerated, and how Israel’s crimes are so numerous that it’s hard to even remember them all. I also update the story of Gaza since a supposedly permanent ceasefire was declared on October 10 last year. This brought to an end Israel’s relentless carpet-bombing, but in every other respect the genocide has continued, albeit more slowly. Crucially, humanitarian aid — and especially medical supplies — are still severely restricted, and Israel has retained complete control of 60% of the Gaza Strip, hemming the surviving Palestinian population into the remaining 40%, where they largely live in subsistence-level squalor. Crucially, I note how the template of Gaza’s extermination — the relentless killing of civilians and the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure — has now expanded to Iran, since the US-Israeli “war” began three weeks ago, while Israel also seeks to replicate the Gaza model in Lebanon, and has also stepped up its violence in the West Bank. Where we go from here is still unknown. While Israel has very clearly descended into a psychotic mania that seeks the death of their “enemies” at every moment, I suggest that Trump’s supreme folly was allowing himself to be talked into joining Netanyahu in his deranged 40-year dream of destroying Iran, and wonder if there can be an “off-ramp” before he is held responsible for what, through the massive disruption to oil and gas supplies, is looking like a looming global economic crisis on an unprecedented scale.

My detailed analysis of a burning topic that ought to be of huge concern to us all — the rise of AI-driven targeting in warfare, which generates military targets hundreds or thousands of times faster than human analysts, but which is both unreliable, and dependent on parameters for targeting that are overly broad, and which, crucially, are generated so fast that, to secure “results”, the essential need for significant human oversight is being ignored. I trace the development of AI in warfare from its roots in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, as revealed through groundbreaking reports by Israel’s +972 Magazine, which showed how any sense of proportionality in wartime — avoiding the targeting of civilians in military actions, or their deaths as “collateral damage” — has been completely swept aside, along with almost all human checks on the AI’s targeting, leading to an unparalleled situation in which, according to the Israeli military, 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians — although my own assessment is that it may be closer to 95%. I also examine the deep involvement of US tech and AI companies in Israel’s genocide — including Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Anthropic and Palantir — and bring the story up to date with the US’s direct participation in the genocidal Gaza model of AI targeting in its war on Iran, with inaccurate targeting exposed on the very first day of hostilities, when an elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, was hit, killing at least 168 people, most of them children, girls aged seven to 12. I conclude by stating that none of the major tech and AI companies can be trusted, because they are all, to varying degrees, embedded within our governments, and are all complicit in implementing, or seeking to implement sweeping programs of surveillance and control, which, as I describe it, “redefine not only war, but also peace; a peace that will not exist unless everyone in the countries they control live lives of quiet and docile obedience, with no dissent allowed.”

As the illegal US-Israeli “war” on Iran continues, with, last night, horrific attacks on Tehran’s oil refineries that enveloped the city in a toxic, apocalyptic black fossil fuel cloud, I examine what has led to this point: the grotesque convergence of the two most malignant ideologies in the world today — Zionism, under the malignant leadership of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Christian Zionism, its absurd but deadly offshoot in the US, whose adherents believe that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine and the wider Levant region is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. In prayer meetings in the White House, Christian Zionists lay hands on Trump and worship him as though he is Christ reborn, but while the godless Trump gave the go-ahead for the US to join Israel in its deadly crusade, he is growing noticeably more incoherent, and it is Pete Hegseth, the woefully unqualified Secretary of Defense (rebranded as the Secretary of War), who has become the more prominent face of the “war”, embracing Christian Zionism, and delivering grotesquely vile and violent speeches at press conferences, enthusing about the genocidal slaughter of the entire Iranian people. Can anyone rein in these dark forces before they collapse the global economy, through the massive disruption to the production of, and distribution of the fossil fuels on which the entire edifice of global civilization depends, or are we witnessing an unprecedented manifestation of extreme evil, which, between Trump, the Zionists and the Christian Zionists, now exists solely to rain down apocalyptic genocidal extermination not only on Iran and the rest of the Middle East, but on the whole world?

My analysis of how the US and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked “war” on Iran demonstrates extraordinary hubris on the part of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu — the Ancient Greek concept of fatal overreach through excessive pride and arrogance. For Netanyahu, this is the fulfilment of a dream he has cherished for 40 years, into which he has, one way or another, dragged Donald Trump, who has, increasingly, during his deranged second term, become deluded by his own self-importance. So blinded are both men by their own blinkered obsessions that they failed to take into account Iran’s size, its population, and its long and proud history, or how its first actions — assassinating Ayatollah Khameini and his family, as well as other senior officials — would make him a martyr and increase national solidarity, rather than encouraging regime change. So blinded are they by their hubris that they also failed to recognize that, since their 12-day war on Iran last June, the Iranians have been preparing for renewed attacks, stockpiling weapons and identifying targets in Israel and on US bases throughout the Middle East at least as assiduously as their enemies. They also failed to realize that their “war” would have unintended consequences — leading insurers to stop insuring vessels carrying essential oil and gas supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, and also leading countries in the Gulf to suspend production for safety reasons, causing an economic crisis that will bring misery to much of the world unless they can be prevailed upon to withdraw. Will they recognize their dangerous hubristic folly, or are they determined to do nothing but destroy, no matter the cost, even if it leads to their own destruction?

On day three of Donald Trump’s cataclysmically stupid decision to indulge Benjamin Netanyahu in his malignant 40-year dream of destroying Iran, I explain how, in some key respects, it’s starting to look as though it will backfire on him spectacularly. Firstly, Pentagon officials have stated that “Iran was not planning to strike US forces or bases in the Middle East unless Israel attacked Iran first”, undermining Trump’s claim that the joint US-Israeli attacks were aimed at “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”, leaving him particularly vulnerable because he neither sought nor received approval for his unprovoked attacks from either Congress or the UN Security Council. Secondly, US allies throughout the Gulf have, as I describe it, “discovered that their long-standing alliances with the US, in which they were offered protection in exchange for allowing the US to establish military bases on their soil, have turned out, when tested, to be nothing but a mirage.” And, thirdly, Trump’s indifference to US casualties, which he announced when the military operation began, and reiterated last night in a video message in which he breezily dismissed further US military deaths as “that’s just the way it is”, will not reassure the majority of US voters who are opposed to the attacks that Trump has any fundamental interest whatsoever in the lives of US military personnel. As the fallout from the US’s selfishness continues to test the strength of long-held alliances in the Gulf, perhaps the most burning question concerns the reasons for Trump’s support of Netanyahu’s long-cherished dream. Can it really be that this is the US’s first pedophile blackmail war, undertaken because Israel has evidence of Trump’s sexual crimes that were deliberately hidden in the recent release of millions of pages from the Epstein Files?

My analysis of the shameful launch, this morning, of unprovoked military action against Iran, undertaken in joint attacks by the US and Israel, which were defended by Donald Trump, in a pre-recorded video message on social media, as “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”, even though no “imminent threats” exist, and this is blatantly a “war” of choice. Amongst the most sickening aspects of this unprovoked war are Trump’s complete sidelining of Congress, even though no war can legally be launched without Congressional approval, his disturbing suggestions that US military personnel might be killed, and fundamental questions about why he is so willing to support attacks that are a long-cherished dream of Benjamin Netanyahu, but that have no evident upside for the US. Is it because he has been bought? Is it because of blackmail, based on the Israelis’ possession of incriminating evidence from the Epstein Files? Or is is, as I suggest, because, like Netanyahu, Trump is a vile old man, nearing the end of his wretched existence, who clings to life solely to deliver as much death and misery as he can to as many people as possible?

When an Israeli hospital was struck by a missile yesterday — whether deliberately or not is difficult to ascertain — it nevertheless prompted a wave of hysteria and unparalleled hypocrisy in Israel. Even though no one was killed in the attack, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about how Iran’s aim was “to destroy every one of us”, and defense minister Israel Katz said that Ayatollah Khameini “can no longer be allowed to exist”, and called the hospital attack “war crimes.” Attacking a hospital is indeed a war crime, but nowhere in Israel’s response to the attack was there even the slightest scintilla of recognition that, if the attack on the Soroka Hospital was a war crime, Israel’s war crimes in relation to hospitals in Gaza are of a magnitude that is so much greater that it is almost incalculable. Last October, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory found that “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.” Over the last 20 months, Israel has attacked all 36 hospitals in Gaza, often repeatedly, destroying many, and decommissioning all but one, Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which is now the last surviving hospital for 2 million people, although it too is on the verge of collapse. As Israeli officials were whining, the WHO warned that, even as Nasser Hospital is overwhelmed with casualties from the ongoing aid massacres, fuel will run out within the next few days, with premature babies on incubators particularly vulnerable, not only because of the need for fuel for their incubators, but also because the hospital is running out of milk for them because of Israel’s ongoing siege. As I also note, Israel has also attacked hospitals and healthcare facilities in Lebanon, and, in the last week, has also attacked two hospitals in Iran.

Five days since Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran, which led to immediate military retaliation, I examine the shameful hypocrisy of the west, which has been insisting yet again that Israel has “the right to defend itself”, even though Israel is very clearly not the victim in this scenario, having launched its unprovoked attack on the spurious basis that Iran was about to secure nuclear weapons. In particular, I note how, 20 months ago, the west’s unconditional support opened the door to all the horrors that have been taking place ever since, and especially the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which, until this latest development, had become so severe that western leaders were finally beginning to condemn Israel. Shamefully, as the situation in Gaza deteriorates still further, the west’s sudden indifference is especially despicable. I also focus on the crucial role of the US, under Donald Trump, who faces a divided Republican Party — on the one hand, fanatical supporters of Israel, and neo-cons who have long hoped to wage war on Iran, and, on the other, opposition from MAGA isolationists within his own Party who support his “America First” policy, which was supposed to eschew any further involvement in ruinously expensive foreign wars. I also mock Israeli efforts to make themselves the victims, as they finally face some blowback from their monstrous actions over the last 20 months, and I end by examining whether one imminent problem, not much discussed, is that the supply of the very expensive weapons for this type of conflict may soon run out.