BEFORE I begin, I would urge you to read this post on Substack by Robert Reich, which provides an extremely incisive explanation of the quagmire the US (and, by inference, most of the world) finds itself in as a result of President Donald Jane Shit for Brains’ allowing the US to be drawn into a war of aggression against Iran by Israel.
Reich is one of the few authors I follow daily on Substack, and I have always been a fan. For those who don’t know, he is one of the last truly liberal icons in the US, best known for being the Secretary of Labor during the first term of Bill Clinton in 1992-1996. A lawyer, economist, and historian by education, Reich, although Jewish himself and a supporter of Israel, has been one of the few high-profile critics of Israel’s violent expansionism and genocidal campaign against the Palestinians brave enough to speak up about it these days; on numerous occasions, he has publicly called for the US government to cease arms sales to Israel. He has also been a professor for decades, having taught at Harvard, Brandeis University, and until his retirement from active professor-ing a couple of years ago, the University of California at Berkeley.
He’s also really short. Back in the day, during my sojourn in the Bay Area when I lived on the outskirts of Berkeley, I saw him from about four feet away (didn’t actually get to meet him, more’s the pity) after an evening lecture he gave at UC about the looming collapse of the Dot-Com bubble. That topic was interesting to me because a lot of money was flowing into my pocket because of that Dot-Com boom at the time, and it was partly because of what I learned at that lecture that I began making plans – which, as it would turn out later, were exquisitely well-timed – to find a different posting and get the hell out of California.
But yes, he is a munchkin of a person, which only shows that being a giant is not dependent on size.
Let’s start a war, because reasons
Reading Reich’s piece on Substack got me thinking about the root causes of the current war – which for us here in the Philippines is causing a great deal more stress and suffering than the government wants to acknowledge, as well as the quickly growing global crisis it is causing.
Philippine President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.
Mango Mussolini, of course, has no justification for US involvement, other than the somewhat shaky promise of having access to Iran’s oil and gas. He has weakly argued that US attacks on Iran are intended to finally destroy Iran’s nuclear program (despite it having been “obliterated” by US airstrikes last year), or to force regime change, or to counteract an “imminent threat” to the US from Iran.
None of that was convincing coming from Trump, because none of it is actually true. Iran had not restarted its uranium enrichment program after the US airstrikes last year – in part as a show of some good faith in negotiations over its nuclear program that followed, which Trump simply used as a smokescreen to attack Iran – Trump and his administration could give a shit about regime change in Iran, because a new more “acceptable” democratic regime would actually be harder to control; and the US government’s own intelligence apparatus, although hollowed out and not as sharp as it once was because of Trump’s insistence that everyone in the government from top to bottom be an absolute fanatic loyalist to him personally, has been unequivocal (no matter how reluctant they may have been to actually tell their talking bag of diarrhea of a boss) that Iran posed no threat whatsoever to the US or US assets overseas, unless some trouble like what is happening now started.
Israel, on the other hand, who is really one driving this train, has long seen Iran as its most mortal threat; which is understandable, because ever since the current regime in Iran seized power in 1979, the destruction of Israel has been a cornerstone of Iranian state policy aspirations. The ultra-right-wing fascist-Zionist bloc now controlling Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to destroy Iran once and for all; permanently remove the clerical regime, permanently cripple its military capabilities, cut it off from its proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the irregular groups operating in Syria and Iraq, and cripple its main economic engine – the oil and gas sector – just enough that it cannot function without outside help. The Israeli leadership has had to wait for a long time for a US leadership stupid enough and easily enough manipulated by greed to believe Israel’s bullshit – because the US has the firepower Israel needs to realize its goals – but it found it in Trump, the quintessential weakling: The stupid person’s idea of a smart man, the weak person’s idea of a strong man, and the pathetic failure’s idea of a successful man.
For Trump there is one other factor, and it directly echoes history, and is probably the fundamental reason the world has to put up with this bullshit in the first place. Trump owes the oil industry for his position now. In May 2024, he openly lobbied them for $1 billion in support for his reelection, promising that he would do whatever necessary to give them a business advantage. He didn’t quite get that, but the best estimates (which are only estimates because neither the Trump machine or his benefactors pay any mind whatsoever to campaign finance laws) are that the petroleum sector in the US contributed about $445 million, much of it to him personally, and now he has to make good on that ‘investment.’
He tried to do that with the ridiculous adventure in Venezuela, but none of the big oil interests in the US were happy about that. Venezuela has the world’s largest petroleum reserves, but the infrastructure is now such a mess that a colonizing oil concern would have to spend billions of dollars and years of effort to make it work. Iran is then the next best option, and Netanyahu’s hard-on for expanding Zionist hegemony provided the perfect excuse for Trump to pursue it.
It’s always been oil
The thing that makes the current war against Iran particularly mind-boggling is that every threat from Iran, real or contrived, to Israel or the West is the West’s own doing. In the chaos after World War II, a semblance of a democratic government emerged in Iran – which was until that time largely under the thumb of the British, although that was contested to some degree by the Russians and later the Soviets – and in 1951, the left-leaning Mohammed Mosaddegh was elected Prime Minister. Mosaddegh marginalized the Shah, and later that same year, he engineered the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which was controlled by the British government and would eventually morph into part of the BP conglomerate.
This was obviously not cool as far as Great Britain was concerned, which sought help from the US, leading to the infamous Operation Ajax, the joint MI6-CIA operation to engineer a coup in Iran. One part of that complex scheme involved stirring up dissent against Mosaddegh’s government among the Shia clergy, who were already miffed at Mosaddegh’s secular orientation. Mosaddegh was forced from office (and would spend the rest of his life under house arrest) and replaced by a military-led government that soon restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s full authority, changing Iran from what was essentially a constitutional monarchy into an absolute one. To ensure that the Shah remained in power – the clergy and its followers, as well as other dissident groups and organized crime enterprises the CIA and MI6 had used to undermine and then force out Mosaddegh were now threats to be eliminated – the US trained the first several hundred of what would become the Shah’s dreaded secret police, the SAVAK.
The price of power for the Shah was the surrender of control over Iran’s oil under the 1954 Consortium Agreement, which gave American oil companies a 40-percent share, 40 percent to British Petroleum (i.e., the former AIOC), 14 percent to Royal Dutch Shell, and 6 percent to the French oil company CFP, under a 25-year agreement until 1979 with the stipulation that the consortium could renew it (at its prerogative, not the Shah’s) for another 15 years.
Despite being economically colonized, it worked okay for Iran for a while; the country (and the Shah personally) became fantastically wealthy from the oil royalties, and had the highest standard of living in the Middle East. But the Shah’s repressive rule – brutally enforced by the SAVAK – began rapidly eroding public support, and when he started making noise in the early 1970s about not renewing the Consortium Agreement and wanting it overhauled, the heretofore strong backing for him by the US began to wane as well. A replacement agreement was signed in 1973, but already plans were being made to replace the Shah as well, and the CIA – this time with some assistance from Israel’s Mossad – began cultivating Iranian agitators, including the loose organization led by the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose mentor had been the leading figure among the rebellious clergy in the early 1950s.
When the Iranian Revolution broke out in 1979, bringing the Shia clerics to power and forcing the Shah into exile, the US and the Israelis discovered that these people, and the vast number of young Iranians who supported them, were not stupid enough to fall for being used in Western shenanigans a second time, and so now here we are.
The US and Israel are entangled in a problem of their own making, one that has been simmering for more than 70 years. When you kick a hornets’ nest, the hornets are going to decide when that fight’s over, not you.
