Weekly Grounding #130
Special edition on Iran
In light of the US-Israeli war on Iran, today’s Weekly Grounding is a Special Edition featuring articles and interviews that I have found interesting, important, or insightful in one way or another on the topic of Iran. Some of these are recent and some of them are years old but have taken on newfound relevance in recent days. I hope you find this Grounding helpful in making sense of current events.
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“Going to War, Again, for Israel”
At The Chris Hedges Report, Chris Hedges writes that, “Once again, America is going to war for Israel. Once again, many will die for the Zionist state, including American service members. Once again, we will stumble blindly into a military fiasco. Once again, we will do the bidding of a foreign power whose interests are not our interests, but whose lobbyists have bought up our political class, including Donald Trump. Once again, we will violate the U.N. charter by attacking a country that does not pose an imminent threat. This is not our war. This is part of Israel’s demented vision of Greater Israel, of dominating the Middle East. But Israel needs our military, our taxpayer dollars, our weapons to do it. And we have handed them the keys to our formidable arsenal.”
Hedges continues: “Israel’s lackeys in the political class, along with their courtiers in the media, including former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employee Wolf Blitzer, as well as academia, are shining examples of Israel’s transparent and often illegal meddling in the American political system. Forget Russia. Forget China. No foreign government comes close to exerting Israel’s influence.”
“The steady losses, and a huge spike in oil prices, will compound the frustrations of Trump and his Israeli allies,” Hedges continues. “These frustrations, like those during the two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, will ignite a protracted regional war. Iran, under sustained attack, could eventually fragment and splinter, sending millions of refugees over its border and igniting the chaos we engineered in Libya. But Israel, whose goal is to degrade the military capabilities of its neighbors, will get what it wants. We will be left with the mess.”
“The U.S.-Israeli War of Aggression Against Iran”
This video at Drop Site News was recorded last July after the Trump administration’s initial bombing of Iran. Jeremy Scahill interviews Iranian legal scholar, Helyeh Doutaghi, about Iran’s response to this earlier attack and the broader political context in the region.
Doutaghi notes that “unlike Israel, that turned to the United States as its proxy…, Iran has not requested, in fact, military intervention—at least publicly—from China or Russia. Iran’s strategy remains firmly rooted in autonomous, homegrown defense capacity. And to expect Beijing or Moscow to intervene militarily uninvited is, rather, to misunderstand both the regional balances of the power in the region, but also the terms on which Iran engages with its allies.”
She states that Iran deals with “a lot of infiltrators and Mossad agents domestically” who form a key part of “hybrid warfare…of psychological warfare, propaganda, and also domestic and external attacks...But the intelligence assessments assumed that the shock of the military escalation immediately combined with the cumulative impact years of sanctions and economic hardship, and lower electoral participation (it was less than 50% in the latest election), and the memory of the previous attempts of color revolutions, including imperialist campaigns such as “Women, Life, Freedom,” which was hijacked by imperialist forces from what was [sic] legitimate grievances of Iranian women, but it was very much hijacked and took away [sic] from them. So they [the Israelis] were counting on this in their assessments that the [Iranian] state was really weak and the conditions for revolt were ready. And they were hoping that this push would bring people to the streets to facilitate collapse or…regime change.”
“U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for ‘Armageddon,’ Return of Jesus”
Jonathan Larsen reports at The Fucking News that “A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was ‘anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,’ according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer. From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.”
“[Pete] Hegseth sponsors the weekly White House Bible study that preaches support for Israel. Some Christians claim biblical prophecy requires Israel to exist for Jesus to return. But Hegseth’s Bible study leader, preacher Ralph Drollinger, teaches that the reason to support Israel is that God still blesses Israel’s allies and curses Israel’s enemies…After Israel’s attack on Iran last year, Drollinger dedicated two weeks of lessons to preaching support for Israel. His lessons went out to White House cabinet members and members of Congress even as Israel, too, was lobbying for U.S. engagement.”
“Khamenei’s Killing Is Neocolonialism’s Final Gambit”
At Asia Times, Jan Krikke argues that “Iran tragically bookends the rise and potential fall of neocolonialism. The 1953 coup that overthrew [Mohammad] Mossadegh inaugurated the modern era of American-led economic domination in the Middle East, establishing the template for subsequent interventions in Guatemala, Chile and dozens of other countries. The assassination of Khamenei could potentially signal a significant shift.”
“The importance of the petrodollar system to the US goes a long way in explaining why US President Donald Trump risked a regional war to eliminate Iran’s spiritual leader,” he continues. “After the 1971 collapse of the Bretton Woods gold standard, the US secured an arrangement with Saudi Arabia in 1974 whereby oil would be priced exclusively in US dollars. This created an artificial and perpetual demand for American currency: any nation needing oil must first acquire dollars, effectively forcing the world to subsidize American economic dominance.”
Krikke writes that “Iran has always been the weak link in this architecture. When Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh dared to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum), the CIA and MI6 orchestrated a coup. The UK’s leader at the time, Winston Churchill, worked for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company before entering politics. After deposing Mossadegh, the US installed the Shah’s brutal dictatorship, which ruled for 26 years until the 1979 Islamic Revolution ejected American influence. That religious revolution created the only major regional power that did not subordinate its oil policy to American interests.
“Today, the six quasi-feudal Gulf states are crucial to the petrodollar system. All host American military bases and participate in the petrodollar bargain, recycling their oil wealth into US securities and weapons systems. Gulf States’ holdings of American securities exceed US $1 trillion, with sovereign wealth funds managing another $4.9 trillion in assets deeply integrated with Western markets. Iran stands outside this arrangement, trading oil in euros, yuan and rupees while actively encouraging trading partners to abandon the dollar.”
“Norman Finkelstein on Teaching John Stuart Mill in Iran”
Danny Postel interviews Norman Finkelstein about the latter’s experience teaching a course on John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in Iran in 2014. Finkelstein states that his students were “very smart, clever, for sure, and I would say the main concern of theirs as we were looking at Mill is there’s a kind of defensiveness about Islam. There’s a sense that any Western book must in some way undermine Islam. And so there was, at the beginning, a certain amount of tension with students I think trying to defend against an enemy that wasn’t really at the gate.”
“I said [to the students] that the questions that Mill raises come up in any society regardless of whether or not it’s Islamic,” Finkelstein continues. “It’s just question of where you draw the line at what point does government interference become unacceptable and at what point does the state of have the right to restrict or limit individual liberty. And different societies may draw it in different places, but that’s just a problem in any society, it has nothing in particular to do with Iran, with Islam. But once we got over that particular obstacle, it was a very satisfying teaching experience.”
Reflecting on a conversation he had with a Shia seminarian in Qom, Finkelstein reports that his interlocutor “mentioned that he doesn’t own a cell phone. And I said ‘that’s a coincidence, I think we’re probably the last two people on earth.’ And I asked ‘why don’t you own a cell phone?’ And he says, ‘Why do you need a cell phone? All it enables you do to is to talk to people horizontally all around you, whereas if you read a book, you can have a direct connection to God.’ And I thought that was pretty impressive. You don’t hear young people saying things like that. For me, it was a special moment.”
“Iran and the Fulfillment of History”
Sayed Hadi and Babaee Habibollah’s interview with Alexander Dugin at Geopolitika illustrates the significance of Iran for the Russian traditionalist philosopher. Dugin argues that “Iran is one of the key metaphysical elements in global culture. Iran is really an underestimated factor in the emergence of culture, philosophy, art, history and so on. Historically we—that is the West and all of humanity—traditionally see the history of Iran through Greek eyes. The Greeks were the enemies of Persia. The Greeks suffered from Iranian interventions, and Iranians suffered from Greek interventions. But the main interpretation of Iran and its identity in the past has been the Greek one. That gave a perverted image of Iranian culture as something ‘barbaric.’ This is pardonable because of Greek ethnocentrism, but it is totally incorrect.”
“We need to restore the dignity of Iranian civilization,” he continues. “In order to do that, we need to get through all the limitations—transcending Western-centric limitations and modernist traditions in Iran itself. Iran is also touched by this anti-Iranian understanding. It has nothing to do with nationalism, but Iranian civilization is misunderstood by modern Iranians themselves. We need to restore the real treasure of Iranian identity. Iranian identity is almost unknown. But starting from pre-Islamic times and going through all the types of Islamic history this identity is so beautiful, so profound, so paradoxical... And in all these phases, all the ages of Iran’s history, there are so many ignored treasures of this civilization.”
Dugin states that “We should understand Iran not just as country, not just as a State, but as a Civilization, as the core of the Islamic—and, more broadly, planetary—awakening in the end times. But sometimes Iran behaves like just a nation-state, and that confines the scale of Iran, and creates artificial obstacles that do not allow seeing the universal mission of the Iranian Revolution. The Great Iranian Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini was not only an Iranian or Shi’a event, it was the beginning of a global awakening, the last call (da‘wah) to fight against the Great Shaitan, against Dajjal. In order to make this mission universal, we need to keep it alive, to live with it, to constantly interpret it anew.”
“We have modernization deep inside our societies,” he says of Russia and Iran. “From the standpoint of sacred Tradition, Modernity is poison, a deadly virus. It is the creation of the West. We have Modernity in the way of thinking, in behavior, in technology. Modern science is poisoned by the Western understanding of reality, which is based on the denial of the Creator, of God. It is not reality, it is illusion. So, we have to restore the sacred, spiritual, theological understanding of being, of reality, of matter, of the soul, of the spirit. We have to revise our science in order to accept the existence of demons and angels. We can’t fight against Satan and demons if we deny their existence. So, we have to restore the traditional understanding of reality, and reject Modernity with its perverted image of reality. That is one more obstacle preventing us from creating this front, because this front should be based on a perfect and correct ontology, the teaching of being with its transcendental dimension. Modern Western science, with its corrupted ontology, prevents that. We need make revisions of science and liberate our societies from its colonial and ‘universalist’ presumptions.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
I have to differ with the perspectives offered in the articles, which appear to be those of promoters of the "Multipolar World Order" narrative, which poses as an alternative for the existing US unipolar global empire but is in fact just another packaging for what amounts to worsening crap for the 99+% of us and increasing implementation of the 4IR while the world enters WW3.
When i use terms like Iran or Qatar, i am referring to state/business entities, not to peoples. All such entities are oppressive to the populations they control. The 99+% have no homeland, only different oppressors.
This is not a "totally irrational unnecessary war," at least not per the rationality of the reigning global system. Regarding claims that the US and Iran were close to a deal: they were not remotely close. , Iran. asserted it has a right to enrichment and also would not discuss missiles program, proxies. The US demanded zero enrichment, discussion of missiles, proxies. Iran claimed they were close to a deal, as was Oman, the mediator, hoping to prevent a war. There is a reason for this war, but no one is being honest about what it is. Global financial markets as well as jobs markets have been a mess lately, i’ve been posting Eurodollar University videos in this regard in my Lockdown Times newsletters,….
This war is not a distraction from something (a friend of mine told me it’s a distraction from the Epstein matter. LOL!), but is a part of the opening phases of World War 3. And it is not a war which Israel is dragging the US into, Chris Hedges and the like are delusional. It is the global capitalist system's competitive logic playing itself out once again.
The China state/business entity has heavily committed to investing in Iran, some $400 billion! and Iran is its main supplier of oil. Iran is a key component of China’s planned Belt and Road Initiative, the core of what would be the China-dominated “Multipolar World Order.” I would not have called Wars 1 and 2 distractions or aberrations either. They were inevitable results of worsening global capitalist crises, one in the early 1910s (analyzed by Rosa Luxemburg in her 1915 book The Junius Pamphlet, written while she, a member of the Reichstag, the German parliament, was in prison in Germany) and one in the 1930s, analyzed at by many people. Luxemburg presciently predicted it in The Junius Pamphlet as well." The world doesn't need it, but the global capitalist industrial system demands it. Don't like it? Hat it? Then get rid of this EFFING system, before it kills us all.