Renee Parsons
“The U.S. conflicts in the Middle East keep escalating. What are our soldiers doing at a remote post in Jordan—with 35 more U.S. military installations in the backyards of these countries—that the American people are required to fund without their knowledge? This is Empire.”
— Ralph Nader
It has been some time since the Paragon Shift predicted as a global happening, a Shift of the Ages and even a Great Reset before Klaus Schwab grabbed the designation as a clever marketing tool. Today, even the disintegration of the Roman Empire comes to mind as the US, once considered a Republic before it became an Empire, is showing stressful signs of internal decay having created its own perpetual struggle in pursuit of incessant forever wars.
It is apparent that, like the American Empire, Rome struggled with an unsustainably weakened economy, an immigration crisis that even Aurelian’s wall around Rome could not contain and an internal corruption all leading to an implacable civil instability – as Martin Armstrong reminds us: History Always Repeats.
The US Constitutional breakdown continues with the Congress allowing the President to initiate military conflict without conforming to the Constitutionally required War Powers Resolution (also found in Article 1, section 8). The War Powers Resolution has not been enacted since 1950 when the US participated in a ‘police action’ in Korea. While members of Congress need to be reminded as Biden orders air strikes on Yemen and gears up for a Pentagon response to an alleged drone attack in Jordan, he cannot pursue a military response to the Houthis or anyone else until he obtains authorization from Congress. Lots of Luck with that….
For those citizens who remember such archaic prerequisites, it is a bitter pill to recall that the Korea war accumulated 33,000 US fatalities and over 100 K injured – all without a declaration of war. It is generations worth of wars that depend on Congressional indifference to its Constitutional duty as it continues to be historically out of compliance.
On January 24th, there was a potential false flag drone attack allegedly fired by an Iraq resistance group that killed three American servicemen in Jordan or perhaps it was in Syria. There remains some irreconcilable inconsistencies about the source of the attack: where is the proof/evidence? why would Iran launch a drone attack directly on American forces, how did the drone have access to a US air base, was the base undefended by the Americans or was there an intelligence failure. US presence in Syria has been illegal since it forced its way into the country a decade ago and still refuses to depart.
The Department of Defense has confirmed that all three Americans were assigned to the 718th Engineer Company, 926th Engineer Battalion, 926th Engineer Brigade, based in Fort Moore, Georgia and all were members of the Army Reserve. In other words, they were members of the Georgia National Guard, once referred to as ‘weekend warriors’ before Congress turned them into deployable members of the US military to participate in mid eastern wars.
Additionally, the Pentagon confirms that ‘more than forty’ other Americans were injured in the attack on Tower 22 of the Jordan Defense Network in Jordan’s northeast corner, ideally situated between Iraq and Syria. Reuters reports that Jordan is recipient of millions of US foreign aid to establish an elaborate surveillance system known as the Border Security Program to monitor militant infiltration from Iraq and Syria. Tower 22 is approximately six miles from the Iraq border with the American garrison at al Tanf, Syria twelve miles away. A key American ally in the Mid East, Jordan has an American presence of approximately 3000 military personnel while three million Palestinians are at home in Jordan.
While President Biden’s response was that speedy retribution to hold Iran responsible is in the works perhaps against Iranian naval targets since “they’re supplying the weapons to the people who did it.” In other words, the US, the UK, NATO and others could be held responsible for the Ukraine war and all its fatalities since their weapons enabled the war to continue. Secretary of State Blinken went further when he responded that ‘this is the most incredibly volatile time in middle east since 1973’ (yom kippur war) and that the US “response could be multi leveled, come in stages and be sustained over time.” Now US officials are saying “over the course of several days.”
All of which is indicative of a more long term, collective response confirming that there will be war with multiple targets in multiple stages and on a sustained basis. Do we dare believe that Iran will not respond in kind and that Russia and China will also resist American stupidity.
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The US relationship with Iran began in 1953 with a CIA coup against democratically elected President Mossadegh’s attempt to nationalize Iran’s oil fields which was followed by the Shah’s overthrow with the American hostage crisis in 1979. At that point, Ayatollah Khomeini took charge. Since then, as a Persian state, Iran has become a powerful Shia branch of Islam recently solidifying its international position by joining BRICS II.
While the US State Department labelled Iran a terrorist state in 1984, it is essential to understand Israel’s influence on US foreign policy as painstakingly articulated in “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy”; thoroughly examining the Lobby’s extended adverse history regarding Iran’s efforts to find rapport with the US during the Clinton and again during the GW Bush Administration. By the mid 1990’s Israel stepped up its efforts to encourage the US to adopt a strategically foolish policy toward Iran; even as the Clinton Administration attempted to find common ground to negotiate through its Iran Study Group.
In 1989, new Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanhani was committed to improve relations while the US adopted a nonsensical hard line as Israel demanded a “more confrontational policy.” In 1997 Mohammad Khatami was elected president, espousing conciliatory remarks such as ‘terrorism should be condemned in all its forms and manifestations” were dismissed at the Lobby’s initiative.
As former Cabinet officer James Schlesinger remarked “It is scarcely possible to overstate the influence of Israel’s supporters on our policy in the Middle East.” That statement is still as true today as it was when Schlesinger spoke it.
In other words, to paraphrase The Lobby, “US policy toward the Palestinians, the tragic decision to invade Iraq, the confrontational approach to Syria, the Lobby’s influence on American policy toward Iran has been and remains harmful to US national interest.”
An essential piece of that history is understanding that US and Israel antipathy to Iran refused to engage diplomatically in normalizing a relationship, where the US took its lead from Israel. As isolating Iran with accusations and threats suggested a valid perception that Iran needed to develop its own nuclear deterrent in order to independently protect its interests.
And now President Biden has confirmed that US troops are on the ground in Yemen, less than reassuring as the Pentagon and White House disagreed about US troops in a remote country like Yemen although we are still not assured that the Defense Secretary is back on the job and up to his usual…quality. While the Pentagon denies there are no American boots on the ground in Yemen, the Biden White House sent its most recent WPA to Congress on December 7th clarifying current US military operations pursuant to 2001 AUMF with a long list of counter terrorism deployments:
“Arabian Peninsula Region. A small number of United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS. The United States military continues to work closely with the Republic of Yemen government and regional partner forces to degrade the terrorist threat posed by those groups.”
As former NSA employee/whistleblower Edward Snowden: “The British and American intelligence along with the Israel Mossad worked to create the Islamic State of Iraq & Syria (ISIS) It is created to protect the Zionist Entity of Israel by creating it with religious and islamic slogans.”
The US-Israel partnership continued through myriad military mis-adventures with the US jumping through Israel’s hoop in its refusal to recognize Palestine’s legitimate aspirations, the Six Day War with Israel assuming control of Syria’s Golan Heights and its attack on the USS Liberty, beginning of multiple wars in Iraq for more than a decade, Israel’s 2006 war against Lebanon as the US built its global reputation as no Bringer of Peace instead of a Bringer of Violence.