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Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Donald
Trump’s Reckless Gamble with Iran to Distract From His Domestic Political
Problems
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
“Don’t let Obama play the Iran card in order to
start a war in order to get elected. —Be careful Republicans! Donald Trump (1946-
), 45th American president and hotel and casino
owner, (statement made in a tweet, on
Mon., Oct. 22, 2012)
“You can fool all the people some of
the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot
fool all the people all the time.”
Jacques Abbadie (1654-1727), French Protestant, in1684. (N.B.: Often wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln)
“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own
people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies’, ‘one against all’, that a
fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its
people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically
the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the
humanity of man.“
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), in 1951.
“Before mass leaders seize
the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its
extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely
on the power of man who can fabricate it.“
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), in 1951.
I
have long suspected that Donald Trump would
do anything to save his political skin, and I mean anything, including murder
and assassination — if threatened with impeachment, — and even commit an act of
war against a foreign country. — Well, as I feared, he just did that against Iran.
Such is the level of public morality in the United States these days. It
is pretty low. The cynical ‘wag-the-dog’
scheme is alive and well in
the United States and it is used by unscrupulous politicians when they are in
political trouble. Some people fall for it all the time.
Over the years, the United States
government has waged a very aggressive campaign against Iran:
1- Indeed, the current U.S. President has
used very threatening
language against Iran and its population of 80
million. The list of Mr. Trump’s menacing statements is very long:
In 2012, while still a private citizen, he declared that the United States
“could blow them away to the Stone Age!”
Similarly, on September 5, 2013, he made another outlandish comment, saying
that “maybe we should knock the hell out of
Iran and their nuclear capabilities!” And, as recently as Sunday, January
5, Donald Trump declared on Twitter that he was ready to destroy 52 Iranian cultural
sites, a deed that could constitute a war crime, etc., etc.
2- Let us add to the picture the cascade of severe economic
and financial sanctions that the U.S. government has imposed on Iran. These
sanctions, described by President Trump as "the toughest sanctions ever against a
country", have ranged from an embargo on Iranian exports of
oil, steel, aluminum, etc. up to a complete ban to any country on using the U.S.
dollar in its commercial transactions with Iran. It goes without saying that
such sanctions have had devastating effects on the Iranian economy.
In 1955, however, the United States signed a friendship treaty with
Iran. Since that treaty has never been terminated, the fifteen judges of the International
Court of Justice, located in The Hague, unanimously decided, on
October 3, 2018, that the trade sanctions imposed by the United States on Iran
constituted a violation of the treaty. However, the Trump’s administration has
ignored the court’s decision.
3- May 8, 2018 is also a fateful date
because it marks another provocation against Iran and an insult to several other
countries. This is indeed the date when U.S. President Donald Trump announced
that the United States was withdrawing from the Iran
nuclear Deal, an agreement signed on Nov. 24, 2013, by Iran and the six countries of China,
France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States and Germany, and whose main purpose was to stabilize the
Middle East. This ominous decision has opened a Pandora’s Box of disasters to come. But Donald Trump wanted to please
his rich Zionist donors and build for himself the image of a strong man, and …
damn the consequences!
4- Of course, the biggest provocation yet of Donald Trump has been to do what no
previous American president had done before, i.e. to give an order to
assassinate a highly ranked Iranian general, and a member of the Iranian
government. This was done seemingly in coordination
with the Israeli government.
Indeed, the ordering of the assassination of General
Qassem Soleimani, and also of Iraqi
militia leader Abu
Mahdi al-Muhandis, with
a U.S. drone strike on the Baghdad airport, on January 2, 2020, has been labeled ‘an
act of war’ and, as it should have been expected, it has inflamed the entire
Middle East.
Perhaps in doing so, American politician Trump has attempted to
transform himself into a ‘wartime commander in
chief’. He may have believed that such a development
would benefit him personally in his trial for impeachment in the
U.S. Senate and during the coming 2020 presidential election.
That political ploy worked well for George W. Bush in 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, an illegal and costly war of aggression, and which the U.S. is still saddled with, 17 years later. Now, it is well known that the Iraq war was based on big
lies, i.e. about nonexistent weapons of mass destructions (WMD) in Iraq.
Since 2018, and with his military decision at the start of this year, Trump hopes to repeat the same 2003 Bush-Cheney scam, and he aims at reaping the same political and monetary benefits from warmongers among the American electorate.
Conclusion
It remains to be seen how far the military brinkmanship between the two
countries will go. It also remains to be seen whether the American people and
the U.S. Congress will follow Donald Trump in his risky gamble against Iran.
His declaration of January 8 was empty of content and it hardly inspires
optimism for the future.
[To be continued]
International
economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is
the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, of
the book “The New American Empire”, and the
recent book, in French « La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018 ».
Please
visit Dr. Tremblay’s site:
Posted, Wednesday,
January 8, 2020, at 12:30 pm
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© 2020
by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay