"waring parties, they lie as part of the war"

I DON'T FOLLOW THE OLYMPICS,  so I don't know if the miracle that happens every four years has happened yet,  the one in which an audience whose expertise consists of ignoring competitive figure skating for four years suddenly become experts in the sport based on their disapproval of those the judges choose to give the the gold medals to.   Aside from not caring about it as sport and finding figure skating pretty vulgar as art,  I figure that anyone who chooses to waste their youth on the sport have agreed to its invented and chosen rules of how the spectacle is judged and, so have consented to be judged by those judges.   You play the game, you agree to the rules, no matter how crooked those are. 

Something similar happens whenever the US opens up a major war in a place in the world that the notably geography and history ignorant US population,  including the elites apart from a very few specialists, many of them having everything like an interested and partisan view of it, suddenly figure that they've got it all figured out.   Including some members of Congress, the kind who couldn't tell you the difference between "A-rabs" and "I-ranians."   Many of them and their constituients not aware that there is any difference.   That's part of what the Bush II regime weaponized to sell the Iraq and Afghanistan forever wars that they opened up,  the kind that until last week Trump claimed he wouldn't engage in.

I don't think that it's just because the damned Olympics is going on now that I've been reminded not to get too far over my skis in commenting on the war except what I know, that various Arab, Sunni governments - some of them imposed on Shite majorities in some of the countries, and the Israeli government bought this war from Trump and that it is going to be a catastrophe, likely one that will make the Iraq and Afghanistan wars look like the mere prelude to what could become WWIII.   The talk this monring that Turkey is claiming an Iranian drone attacked its territory and they were going to invoke the NATO agreement chilled my blood like this old-fashioned Maine winter hasn't managed to yet. 

I'll give you this discussion with Trita Parsi and Owen Jones (he gets some of the best interviews there are, these days).  I've edited part of the machine translation of it, not going over it in the way I normally would like to because,  in the enormously even-handed and vastly informed responses of Mr.Parsi, you are presented with just some of the enormously complex issues that, as far as I can see, the Trump regime and its supporters in the media (virtually all of the American so-called free press, that is) and the Republicans in Congress, have no to little clue of and which it would seem they're saying exactly what it will take to make an even more clueless bloodbath of a mess they've created,  the liklihood of it being an even worse catastrophe than the Bush II war in Iraq, looking ever higher.  

Trita Parsi:  I don't know if the  Iranians are now suddenly shifting their strategy to something else. But I would be very careful from either side, either side making any of these declarations that they're really winning the war.

That is part of the conduct of war to spread that type of propaganda. 

The a key political figure in Iran, Ali Larani just tweeted earlier this morning that the Iranis have killed more than 500 American soldiers. I don't find that credible. I think there's a likelihood that they've killed quite a bit more than the six that the administration hasn admitted. And I think that the Trump administration will try to pace the announcement of any of these deaths in order not to shock the country, a country that already is overwhelmingly opposed to this war. 

But I find it extremely unlikely that the Iranians have managed to kill that many  American soldiers and that the Pentagon has managed to keep that more or less a secret. I find that very unlikely. 

And I also find some of the speculation of how the US has already managed to take out x amount of what the Iranians are doing unlikely or at least not credible until they have been verified by other sources because waring parties, they lie as part of the war.

Owen Jones:  In terms of the regime, I mean do you see any signs of cracks or do you think it's actually rallied and and in terms of the support base people often estimate 20 to 30% of the country still supports the regime in some form or other. they have managed to mobilize big crowds which they weren't doing before the war began. Do you think there is a kind of rallying of their of their base and that strengthened the regime from   where it was?

Trita Parsi:  I've spoken to people in Iran including this morning who said that a lot of people have now left Tehran because the indiscriminate bombing by  the Israelis.  

[Note:  I've read elsewhere that the Israelis are doing the same kind of indiscriminate bombing that they did in Gaza.   Whether or not that's true, I don't know.  Warring parties lie, media lie as much.  What I do know is that the claim that they did has to be taken as credible after seeing what they've done to Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and to Lebanon.  Israel is a genocide state, now.]

They're out in other cities. Those cities tend to be calm and every night there's like parades or some sort of a demonstrations in favor of the country as well as the regime at least in some of those instances. And he said that he's not seeing any signs of counterprotest or anything like that. 

I don't think we've seen a clear rallying around the flag sentiment. In fact, we saw it much more clearly in June than what we see today. 

But I think more importantly perhaps from the standpoint of the US, we're not seeing the cracks. We're not seeing people pouring out in the streets thinking that this is the moment to do a revolution. I think the calculation or the plan was that after a week or two of taking and I'm talking about the plan of some of the folks on the opposition side [that?] exiled the monarchies for instance. They believe that a couple of weeks of war would have led to enough of the IRGC and the basie [?] and the police being weakened so that people could take to the streets and overthrow the government. 

That may have been their calculation, but that's a calculation that also means that in the meantime, the country is more or less blown up to uh into pieces. 

It also means that  this war would go on much longer than the Trump administration wanted and perhaps can afford. So there seems to be a lot of conflicting  calculations when it comes to this, but so far we're not seeing the uprising in the manner that I think the opposition or the administration wanted. 

Nor are we seeing dramatic signs of nationalism at the level at least that we saw when the Israelis surprised Iran with an attack in June. 

One factor that may change all of this to the detriment of the Trump administration is the announcement that they are now going to go in or they're going to be supporting Kurdish separatist groups in the western part of the country. And I think frankly based on the comments that came out of many members of Congress yesterday after they were briefed by the administration. To me it sounded very clearly that the classified briefing said that the US is going to go in with ground troops asm well.

And if you now have ground troops from the United States in support of separatists, that is a factor that I think will definitely play much more into the line of rallying around the flag fueling nationalism because this really justifies validates a narrative that is very strong in Iran that ultimately the objective of the United States and Western powers is not democracy. I mean, very few people in Iran would believe it is, but that it actually is the separation of Iran, the disintegration of Iran, turning Iran into six smaller countries. This is a very strong narrative in the Iranian mind because there's plenty of evidence of this. Infact, this is one of the things that Tariq Ali Aziz, the foreign minister of Saddam Hussein, said  a couple of months into the [Iraq-Iran]war, that it would be preferable for Iraq at the time to have six small Irans as a neighbor rather than one big Iran.

This is something that Bernard Lewis had been writing about and talking about ever since the 1970s. So, this is not taken out of thin air. And when the US is now suddenly because of frankly in my view scrambling for a plan B talks about supporting Kurdish separatist groups and revealing that the CIA has already been arming and training them for some time. That is definitely going to  go more in the direction of fueling nationalism and rallying around the flag because it's striking . . .  I mean the exiled crown prince Resa Palvi who's been abandoned by Donald Trump, I mean he denounces those separatists doesn't he?

So it's kind of amongst you know the kind of pro- US opposition they they oppose that because theyunderstand that that's anathema to the population of Iran. 

I will guarantee to you that Iranians, seeing that Trump is destroying democracy here have no reason at all to believe claims that that is their goal anywhere.   It's a point I made when Bush II claimed that was its goal in Iraq,  that is the Bush II regime that lost the election and was installed by collusion between the Jeb Bush machine in Florida and five Republican-fascists on the Rehnquist Court.  

I will also guarantee you that no one in the Trump regime, which is staffed with idiots, the lowest that cabloid TV put in front of the real life TEEVEE Mike who rules us, has any notion of most of what this Iran expert has pointed out.   For myself,  given how the American government from Bush I to Trump has betrayed those who they encouraged and even armed to fight against the former Iraqi, Syrian and the present Iranian regime after they decided they didn't need them,  I would doubt many Kurds would trust the biggest crook and liar of them all,  Trump to help them.   I'll remind you that a few months ago,  Trump assired the Iranian opposition that he had their back,  that wasn't worth the lying words that he tried to con them with.  It wasn't worth the spaces between the words. 

And I can assure you, the American People have been kept so ignorant of history and geography that a dangerous number of them will fall for the stream of lying slogans they're going to get fed.   

Update:  Bernard Lewis was an example of those thoroughly biased and partisan - and racist - elite experts of the kind you'd hear asked to be interviewed and whose advice, when it turned out to produce one of the biggest disasters in US history,  the Bush II Iraq invasion,  he lied claiming he opposed it. 

Lewis's influence continues to this day. US Secretary of State and former CIA boss Mike Pompeo declared on 20 May: "I owe a great deal of my understanding of the Middle East to his work." Regime change in Iran was one of Bernard Lewis’s political projects and, inspired by his intellectual hero, Pompeo may be about to have a go at achieving it.

We have been here before. Lewis was the moral leader of the small group of intellectuals who argued for the Iraq invasion of 2003. Within days of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, he was agitating for the downfall of Saddam Hussein, expressing opinions which delighted the neoconservatives pressing for military action in the Middle East.

Lewis's mistake over Iraq was just one manifestation of a hideous world view which included a nakedly racist approach to the Middle East

He later deceitfully claimed that he had been against the Iraq invasion. This is rubbish. He was directly involved. Even before 9/11 he'd pressed for regime change in Iraq, and after the attack he seized his chance. Lewis was there when the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board held its notorious meeting to consider military action against Iraq at the end of September 2001.

Lewis told the board that the United States should support so-called democratic reformers in the Middle East, "such as my friend here, Ahmed Chalabi". As one of the world's leading experts on Islam, Bernard Lewis had no excuse for falling for Chalabi, the charlatan who led the Iraqi National Congress.  

Note:  Chalabi was almost certainly acting as an Iranian agent both in the United States and in Iraq after the US invasion that he played such a big role in peddling to the US public.   That such an expert as Lewis could buy what he was peddling shows how much his expertise was worth.

Yet he did - hook line and sinker -  with terrible consequences that the Middle East lives with to this day.

Lewis's mistake over Iraq was just one manifestation of a hideous world view that included a nakedly racist approach to the Middle East. He told Vice President Dick Cheney: "I believe that one of the things you've got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power."