Cartoon by Joep Bertrams
Trump’s threats to Iran are a distraction from a clearer danger
David Gardner
Financial Times: The salvoes of rhetoric between Donald Trump and Iranian leaders last week were incendiary. The US president tweeted at his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani — who had warned that “peace with Iran is the mother of all peace and war with Iran is the mother of all wars” — that any more threats and Iran would “suffer consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered”.
Iran’s response was unrestrained. General Qassem Soleimani, chief of the Quds Force, the expeditionary branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard that has cut a swath through Arab lands, boasted that he would hit the US in places Mr Trump could not imagine. “You may start this war, but it will be us who decide how to end it,” said Tehran’s paladin of paramilitarism in a speech.
Inflammatory stuff. Yet after a flurry of headlines the threats fizzled out. Even after Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen reportedly attacked two Saudi oil tankers and Riyadh suspended crude exports through the Red Sea, the sense of gathering crisis dissipated. What might have become a replay of US and western intervention in the so-called “tanker war” in the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 looked more like a Saudi attempt to dramatise the need for the US to act against Iran.
Yet there is hardly room for complacency. Mr Trump is playing with fire in a region carpeted with tinder. There is widespread speculation that his screeching was merely an effort to change the subject, after being pilloried for his shameful capitulation to Vladimir Putin at a bizarre July summit with the Russian president in Helsinki. In this context, his tweets seem more like pathology than policy. In light of that, he can be reasonably confident Iran is unlikely to take up his off-the-cuff offer of “unconditional talks” this week.
Insofar as the Trump administration has a policy towards Iran it seems to be all-round aggression — spearheaded by Mr Trump’s loud withdrawal in May from the 2015 nuclear accord Tehran signed with the US and five other world powers, and the subsequent reimposition of sanctions to strangle the Iranian economy.
Mr Trump’s shrillness towards Mr Rouhani, the moderate Iranian president behind the nuclear deal, does not mean that he warmed towards Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader at the pinnacle of the Islamic Republic’s theocracy. The Trump entourage sees no difference between the vested interests hiding behind a fossilised ideology and the pragmatists and reformers seeking to end Iran’s isolation. If hardliners such as Gen Soleimani regain the initiative at home, in the Trumpian worldview that is a welcome milestone on the road to regime change and the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.
The Trumpists and the Khameneists are images of each other in mutual dislike of the 2015 deal. The former refuse to see that it was the nuclear agreement that re-energised the drive for change inside Iran. The latter always feared the change promised by the deal was a slippery slope to regime change, and are relieved that in scuppering it Mr Trump has forced their domestic rivals to close ranks behind them.
Yet for all the bellicose noise, direct conflict between the US and Iran leading to open war still looks unlikely. Indeed, the real action this month was elsewhere: in a series of negotiations between Russia and Israel. Presidents Trump and Putin are said to have agreed to co-operate in Syria and the Middle East. It is hard to know whether that is so. What we do know is that — incited by Mr Trump — Israel has stepped up its air war against Iran and its paramilitary allies inside Syria.
Russia, the only state that has close relations with both Israel and Iran, is caught in the middle. Russian air power, and ground forces supplied by the Revolutionary Guard, Lebanon’s Hizbollah and Iran-trained Iraqi Shia militias, enabled Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime to survive a bloody seven-year rebellion. Now that the Assads are winning, Israel is demanding the total military withdrawal from Syria of Iran and its proxies — Moscow’s allies on the ground.
Mr Putin also met with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Moscow in July, and last week he sent his foreign minister and army chief of staff to Israel. High on the agenda was Russia’s attempt to separate Israel and Iran on the Syrian battlefield.
Straight after Mr Trump pulled the US out of the nuclear deal in May, Israel and Iran traded heavy fire across the Syrian border in their first direct confrontation. Since then, Israeli jets have regularly attacked Iranian-related targets inside Syria. This is the clear and present danger in the Middle East: the danger of a new regional conflict spinning out of the vortex of the Syrian civil war — not the US president’s histrionic tweets and their hyperbolic Iranian echoes.
;)
You never know; he might be mullahs’ guardian angel...
If there's one thing that everybody agrees on about Trump, it's the fact that Trump is totally infatuated with dictator thugs.
"Trump is totally infatuated with dictator thugs"
Birds of a feather flock together
Muller is making America great again
tRump is helping to make Russia great again
Reject occupation, If the bar code starts with 7 29 put it back on the shelf
Buy American, say NO to Chinese madeTrump
“The time is always right to do what is right” – Martin Luther King
“peace with Iran is the mother of all peace and war with Iran is the mother of all wars”. The middle eastern leader who used "the mother of this" and "the mother of that" in his entanglement with the US and is no longer among us is no other than, Saddam Hussein!
By all accounts, protests and strikes have escalated in the past few months in Iran's major cities with a recent uncofirmed report that the majority of Tehran's Bazzar shops have closed.
Since Iran's economy - save for oil - still lingers mainly in the 17th century, that COULD prompt a potential change either in regime's overall behavior, or "persuade" them to play by the rules!
It could also mean didley squat as this regime has learned that there has been no consequences to its actions in the past 40 years for it is the indirect broker for the prolifiration of arms sales in the Middle-Fucking-East fanning the flames of assbackwardness between the sheets and the turbans!
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Source: iJET International
Social media accounts are reporting anti-government protests in several cities in Iran Aug. 2, including Ahvaz, Arak, Esfahan (New Shapur area), Kermanshah (Azadi Square), Mashhad, Shahin Shahr, Sari, and Shiraz. Security forces have reportedly deployed in Tehran's Tajrish Square to prevent planned protests during the afternoon of Aug. 2. Elsewhere in Tehran, unconfirmed reports suggest that storekeepers at the Tehran Bazaar have gone on strike and have closed. Thousands of people are participating in the third day of protests over worsening economic conditions and government policies.
Security forces are likely to remain deployed to monitor the protests. Clashes between demonstrators and police are likely. Road disruptions are likely to continue to disrupt travel. Business closures in protest-affected areas are likely. Closures are typically in response to or in support of protests. Further protests are likely through the course of Aug. 2 and in the coming days, including in cities not listed above. Prominent public squares, government buildings, and major thoroughfares are likely gathering areas.