This post by u/Vwar on r/WayOfTheBern was retroactively removed by reddit, probably when they began to prohibit links to The Saker which the post includes. Vwar was also subsequently suspended by reddit and I can only hope he or she has found their way here because of their terrific contributions to discussions on WOTB.
I'm copy/pasting the original post here and here's the original link so that you can at least read the comments.
(SaidIt keeps adding Haass's photo, I really wish they wouldn't do that)
Council on Foreign Relations head Richard N. Haas just tweeted out the following:
"Any war with Iran will not look like the 1990 Gulf war or the 2003 Iraq wars...The region (and possibly the world) will be the battlefield."
"The result will be greater Iranian influence, terrorism, and Iraqi infighting."
link
The quote by the CFR head shows a schism of sorts in the ruling class. Something similar happened before the Iraq war, when the media would occasionally allow some anti-war voices on television. Bernie Sanders rightly stated a year ago that a war against Iran would make the Iraq war look like a "cakewalk". No credible military analyst claims otherwise.
Remember that the assault against Iraq constituted and continues to constitute the "greatest crime under international law," according to the Geneva Conventions that the US itself helped set up. My grandfather fought in WWII and my great uncle was killed fighting the fascists.
Naturally the ruling class is united in one goal: to maintain their obscene wealth and power and reduce the global population to serfdom. There are however differences of opinion on how to achieve this.
Haas represents the faction that desires a higher degree of "stability." They prefer coups, "people power" revolutions, "limited" drone strikes, covert assassinations, sanctions, bribery, blackmail etc. vs. brazen full-out military assaults. This is not to say that stability is their primary goal. Eg they have no problem throwing entire countries into chaos via their austerity "reforms" through institutions like the IMF and World Bank. But they have enough sense to realize that too much fire and blood could produce a runaway-train effect and ultimately threaten their own exalted position if not their very lives.
The Pentagon of course desires American hegemony -- period. That's their job. They wouldn't be satisfied with a thousand military basis in every country in the world including the Vatican and Palau; they would still want more. "Wealth is like seawater: the more you drink the thirstier you get," said Schopenhauer. The same applies to power, which is largely interchangeable with wealth. Despite the Pentagon's oft-sophisticated tactics it has a very, very simple calculus: America must dominate. This worldview is not unique to the US of course: it is the worldview of any chimp, and indeed every great empire in world history. It was NOT the worldview of our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors, who embraced a reverse-dominance hierarchy in which attempts to hoard wealth or sexual access were considered the greatest form of social deviance. More on that in a minute.
When it comes to Iran and WWIII, Israel is the wildcard.
The Pentagon tends to view Israel as a "vital partner" if not simply an extension of American power. Thus Alexander Haig once referred to Israel as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier."
Then there are the neocons. The neocon faction is the most dangerous and possibly the most powerful. They are the most loudly patriotic but also the least patriotic: their goal is to eliminate Israel's regional rivals and they don't mind destroying the US to do it. Thus Benjamin Netanyahu was caught on video saying "America is an easy thing to move" (this wasn't reported in a single western mainstream media outlet, but you can watch the clip online.) Former US General Wesley Clark famously stated during the early stages of the Iraq war [on Democracy Now!] that deputy defense secretary and later World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz told him there were seven countries on their shit list:
"Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." [to repeat: Clarke spoke of this conversation before Libya, Syria and now Iran]
Note that this is essentially an updated version of the shit-list developed by Israeli strategic planner Oded Yinon during the early 80's. Indeed Netanyahu himself coined the phrase "war on terror" during the same time period (see Diana Ralph, Jewish voices for Peace). Ronald Reagan and former CIA chief/VP George H.W. Bush appropriated Netanyahu's rhetoric to frame their genocidal wars against South American peasants -- which they claimed were "against terrorists." Young people know these "wars" -- which were actually just mass butchering exercises -- under terms like "Iran Contra."
Yinon had a genocidal plan, described here by Israeli dissident scholar Israel Shahak:
The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel's satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation.
source
The plan included targeting countries like Iraq. As per Wiki:
In 2017, Ted Becker, former Walter Meyer Professor of Law at New York University and Brian Polkinghorn, distinguished professor of Conflict Analysis and Dispute Resolution at Salisbury University, argued that Yinon's plan was adopted and refined in a 1996 policy document entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written by a research group at the Israeli-affiliated Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Washington. The group was directed by Richard Perle, who, some years later, became one of the key figures in the formulation of the Iraq War strategy adopted during the administration of George W. Bush in 2003.[12]
Both Becker and Polkinhorn admit that avowed enemies of Israel in the Middle East take the sequence of events—Israel's occupation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, its encirclement of Gaza, the invasion of Lebanon, its bombing of Iraq, airstrikes in Syria and its attempts at containing Iran's nuclear capacities—when read in the light of the Yinon Plan and the Clean break analysis, to be proof that Israel is engaged in a modern version of The Great Game, with the backing of Zionist currents in the American neoconservative and Christian fundamentalist movements. They also conclude that Likud Party appears to have implemented both plans.[41]
wiki link
Hillary Clinton also shed light on the "special relationship" between Israel and the US in one of her emails:
Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel's security, it would also ease Israel's understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted.
wikileaks link
Leftists tend to downplay potential Israeli influence on US foreign policy and instead focus on oil and pipelines and US hegemony (and on a fundamental level -- hierarchy and capitalism). Chomsky best epitomizes this view: he is entirely hostile to Israeli aggression against Palestinians and her other neighbors/victims but essentially views Israel as an American proxy like Colombia in South America; Israel is a beachhead to project American power. Thus Chomsky's analysis is highly similar to that of Alexander Haig, except he opposes rather than supports the strategy.
Paleoconservatives and right-libertarians go in the opposite direction, arguing that Israel has had an extremely pernicious influence on American policy, which would otherwise be much more peaceful (at least vis a vis the Middle East). Proponents of this view include Pat Bachunan, as well as the authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer (Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Professor of International Relations at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University).
I dislike the fallacy of the golden mean but in this case I think the truth is indeed somewhere in-between. Israel has a more nefarious influence on US foreign policy than some leftists recognize, but US policy in the Middle East would probably look somewhat similar even in the absence of a Zionist state. The reason it's important to acknowledge Israeli influence is that "small" differences in strategy can suddenly because very big ones when dealing with a global super-power threatening WWIII; because Israel has a disturbing history of using "false flag operations" targeting Western interests to project blame on Muslims; because Israel has a history of espionage targeting the US; because Israel is a highly paranoid and highly powerful ethno-religious sumpreacist state; and because American politicians must express fealty to said state lest their opponents get a sudden influx of campaign funding.
The differences in worldview vis a vis Israel and war are now expressing themselves among Trump's base. IMO, most of Trump's support derives from people opposed to immigration, followed by people who fell for his fake populist and anti-war rhetoric. However there is significant overlap between the two groups, and they are both heavily influenced by the alt-right. The alt-right believes in the "great replacement" theory -- which is essentially that Jews are trying to "destroy the west" by gradually replacing white people with "Muslim hoards" and "inferior" black people with allegedly inferior IQ's. This will "Balkanize" the entire world and allow Ashkenazi Jews (whom they sometimes claim have higher IQ's than whites and Asians) to rule over the ruins of Christendom.
Ironically, the alt-right tends to view Israel (their greatest enemy) as simultaneously the best model of preserving "western civilization." We just need to do what the Zionists are doing. Zionists and fascists (but I repeat myself) actually have a very peculiar relationship that seems exceedingly odd when first encountered. Thus we find that former Italian PM Berlusconi was given an award by a Jewish group (was it the ADL? I can't remember) despite his openly praising Mussolini; the Christchurch killer, in his manifesto, praised Israel; and going back to the origins of the Israeli state we find extensive collaboration between the Nazis and Zionists (see 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis by Jewish anti-Zionist Lenni Brenner).
According to Max Blumenthal, the alt-right is none-too-pleased with Trump's attack against Iran because they see it as a means by which Israel will substantially weaken America and Europe while eliminating Israel's last major regional rival. I don't make a habit of following alt-right sites but I'm guessing they're torn over supporting the war due to the potential for even more genocide against Muslims vs. weakening Europe/America.
Naturally there are also the zombified idiots who watch Fox News and would support Trump even if he killed their own children (very similar to the zombified neoliberals who watch MSNBC and CNN. "But they dun broke the windows of our embassy in a country we've been occupying for 20 years! hurr durr!").
(there is already an ongoing genocide of Muslims and has been for decades: see Nazeez Ahmed's Unworthy Victims:
According to the figures explored here, total deaths from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s - from direct killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation - likely constitute around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2 million from the “war on terror”), and could be as high as 6-8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan.
source
There is a still a remote possibility that WWIII can be averted. Iran would have to refrain from a major (or possibly even minor) counter-attack. However as The Saker points out, even in the unlikely event that Iran does nothing at all, other rebels against the empire will retaliate, and said retaliation with then be blamed on Iran even if there is no connection to the Iranian government. And even in the even less likely event that no rebels attack the empire in response, Israel and/or the US could simply stage a false flag.
A plausible reason has now been established for Iran, or Hezbollah etc., to attack US soil. If such an attack occurs it will be followed up by another "counter-attack" by the US, and so on. As soon as a bomb explodes on domestic American soil producing substantial casualties -- it's game over.
It's crucial for Americans to understand that killing more brown people is not going to improve your lot in life; indeed a WWIII scenario will eliminate what few civil liberties you have left.
Iran is four times larger than Iraq, is a source of oil for powers like Russia and China, is highly cosmopolitan in its urban centers, has been provided weaponry by American adversaries, has not yet been substantially wrecked by sanctions, and actually has the ability to defend itself. It also has a very proud population with an incredibly rich history of defending itself against foreign aggression. There is no possible way the US could occupy Iran absent a massive draft, which in turn would all but collapse the United States, and said draft would accomplish nothing except killing untold numbers of Americans as well as Iranians. Iran also has an enormous geo-strategic asset given its de facto control over the straight of Hormuz and its ability to block oil tankers.
So occupying Iran is a non-starter. The only means of waging war against Iran would be MASSIVE bombing killing millions of civilians combined with the use of "Next-level" weaponry currently being developed/hidden by the likes of DARPA. This would create a conflagration that makes the Australian bush fires look like a flick from a Bic lighter.
The Iraqi government is now in virtual open revolt against the American occupation. Tens of millions of dollars are now presumably being transferred from American tax payers via the Pentagon/CIA to the off-share bank accounts of Iraqi politicians and other VIP's. But Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr has just called on his militias (Army of Imam Mahdi) to prepare to protect Iraq from Americans, and "Death to America" chants were heard in morning prayers across that tortured country.
The greatest threat, from a human-survival perspective, is not that millions of Iranians will die -- a prospect shrugged off by disgusting Keyboard warriors who view genocide in the manner of a video game -- it is the possibility of accidental nuclear war. Consider that we barely got through the Cold War without annihilation (see Vasili Arkhipov during the Cuban missile crisis, Able Danger under Reagan, and the Pristina Airbase Incident after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the war against the former Yugoslavia).
Is there a real solution? In the short term: shut down the vast majority of US military basis; slash the military budget (no need to eliminate actual defense spending); shut down the CIA, NSA and related fascist orgs; indeed shut down most US intelligence agencies; imprison US war criminals etc. Establish democratic socialism, establish workplace democracy, establish direct democracy, help people rather than kill people.
It's not that complicated. But it would require a level of courage that most of us lack. In fact it's not so much about courage; it's about the perceived possibility of success. Faced with such an awesome foe that flaunts their power in our collective face on a daily basis most of us will naturally say, "uh, no thanks -- you go ahead and lead the revolution, I'd rather stay alive." Ironically Trump's monumental blunder may lead to the very conditions that compel Americans to initiate a second American revolution. As Orwell wrote, "when it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic." Orwell fought the fascists in Spain prior to WWII. He didn't have to but he did.
Violence begets violence. Imagine if the US military was fighting the fires in Australia instead of slaughtering civilians for oil and Israel; they would be beloved around the world instead of despised as terrorists.
Is the most dangerous country in the world the United States of America? According to a new poll from WIN and Gallup International, the U.S. represents the largest threat to world peace today...
Electoral politics won't do the trick: the only solution is a mass international popular uprising that re-imagines what "democracy" means. If you want to learn about the causes of war don't read fraudulent academics like psychologist Steven Pinker, whose work The Better Angels of our Nature has been entirely savagely debunked. Read credible experts like R. Brian Ferguson, who notes that war developed with hierarchy, surplus and the end of egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is our natural state of being. If we want to survive as a species we'll have to recapture the egalitarian spirit. No more psychopaths ruling over us.
there doesn't seem to be anything here