Arsonist Washington is shouting ‘Fire’ in a region it is blowing up.
How absurd! U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is “frenetically” crisscrossing the Middle East “warning” that the conflict is escalating to engulf the region.
Arsonist Washington is shouting ‘Fire’ in a region it is blowing up.
This is while Washington is fueling Israel’s non-stop genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. And while the United States and Israel assassinate top Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian commanders in Lebanon and Iraq.
This is while the United States blatantly blocks calls at the United Nations for a ceasefire, and while it dispatches warships and warplanes to the region.
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Blinken is touring nine countries this week including Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Israel. It’s his fifth trip to the region since October 7.
A headline on NBC declared: ‘Violence spikes in West Bank as Blinken aims to limit spread of conflict’.
As with much of the Western media coverage, Washington is portrayed as some kind of hapless peace advocate. The delusional posturing is stomach-churning when the reality is that the United States is fully complicit in the genocide against Palestinians. And it is fully complicit in dangerously escalating the region-wide conflict.
It is a sick joke to present Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden as trying to tamp down regional tensions that have reached boiling point precisely because of U.S. policy supporting and arming Israel’s relentless massacres.
Washington has pointedly refused to demand that Israel call a ceasefire to the slaughter that began on October 7 following Hamas attacks on Israel. The genocidal offensive by Israel is now going into its fourth month with a death toll estimated at nearly 30,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, according to Euro-Med Monitor.
The U.S. is insanely militarizing the region adding more fuel to the inferno. The deployment of naval forces in the Red Sea to counter Yemen’s blockade of Israeli shipping is just part of the broader militarization in support of Israel. There’s no need for a naval flotilla if a ceasefire were implemented.
The Biden administration has again this week rebuffed Arab and Islamic leaders calling for a ceasefire and urgent access for humanitarian aid to Gaza and the West Bank, where conditions have deteriorated to a wretched famine for nearly two million people. Still, Washington does nothing even as Israeli politicians openly talk about ethnically cleansing the occupied Palestinian territories.
If the Middle East slides into a conflagration, make no mistake, the disaster will be owned by Washington. The appeasement of the Israeli regime by the United States has been going on for decades and has fully stoked the tinderbox situation of injustice and oppression. But the last four months of total indulgence of a lawless genocidal regime is the final trigger.
One possible get-out for the U.S. is to blame Iran and its regional allies and in that way try to divide and rule the Arab nations.
Under the headline, ‘The threat of a broader conflict with Iran’, the New York Times editorialized: “Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip have emboldened a newly aggressive Iran. After launching scores of attacks across the region, Iranian proxy groups have come into direct conflict with U.S. forces twice in the past week, and Washington is openly threatening airstrikes if the violence does not abate.”
That’s an astounding feat of reality-inversion by the Times. The slaughter by Israel fully enabled by the United States is somehow projected onto Iran as being “emboldened and newly aggressive”.
But you can easily discern what Washington is getting at here. It’s trying to divert the growing region-wide hostility and disgust towards America and its hypocritical European accomplices by playing the Iranian card.
CNN reported: “Many of Blinken’s conversations with Arab leaders will focus on the specter of Iran, which is believed, experts and officials say [sic], to be trying to stir the pot while stopping short of provoking an outright war.” (That’s CNN quoting U.S. intelligence propaganda sources, by the way.)
The Americans urgently need to puncture the accumulating anger against Washington and Israel across the region by scapegoating Iran as the villain. This is an attempt to rile up past sectarian rivalries between the Sunni Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran.
Washington is trying to make out that Iran and its regional allies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraq, as well as the Houthis in Yemen and the Syrian state led by Assad, are the enemy of peace in the region. It is an audacious move.
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This week the New York Times resurrected fears of Iran being close to building a nuclear bomb. It claimed that Tehran was only “weeks” from converting enriched uranium into three weapons. The CIA’s favorite newspaper platform also in the same article sought to portray Iran in a new alliance with Russia and China implying that the latter was now helping Iran build a bomb.
This could be the ultimate reckless gamble by Washington and its Israeli proxy.
The Israelis are unhinged enough to launch airstrikes on Iran to purportedly take out alleged nuclear facilities. Israel has threatened to do so in the past. Even though Iran has repeatedly denied having any intention of building a nuclear weapon. And, in any case, so what if Iran did? Israel has an estimated 150 nuclear bombs, all obtained illegally.
The abominable genocide that is going on in Gaza and the West Bank is demonstrating the rank exposure of American imperialist crimes. The world can see more than ever the complicity of Washington in Israel’s war crimes. Not just complicity but full-on culpability.
In its desperation to divert global attention from its blood-soaked hands, Washington and its Israeli attack dog see one way out: to escalate the conflict with Iran.
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.
