Six on the Impending "Iranian" Imbroglio: The Caliphate of Trump And a Planet in Ruins; Iranians Fear Deeper Crisis as Trump
philip panaritis
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"Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned for eighteen years for blowing the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. It was said that he “felt an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs” at a nuclear research facility, which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Of those eighteen years, eleven were spent in solitary confinement.
President Donald Trump’s strategy on Iran, announced on Friday, brings Vanunu’s long isolation and sacrificial commitment to truth-telling to mind.
Trump promised to “deny the Iranian regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.” But it is Israel, which possesses an estimated eighty nuclear warheads, with fissile material for up to 200, which poses the major nuclear threat in the region. And Israel is allied to the nation with the world's largest nuclear arsenal: the United States.
Israel doesn’t publicly acknowledge its nuclear arsenal, nor does it allow weapons inspectors into its nuclear weapons facilities. Along with India and Pakistan, Israel refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. And it has used conventional weapons in numerous destabilizing wars, including the aerial bombing of Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank.
Vanunu, designated by anti-nuclear activist Daniel Ellsberg as the “the pre-eminent hero of the nuclear era,” helped many people envision a nuclear weapons-free Middle East."
"This subject came to my mind recently thanks to a story I noticed about another extreme wedding slaughter -- this one not by ISIS but thanks to a Saudi “double-tap” airstrike on a wedding in Yemen, first on the groom’s party, then on the bride’s. The bride and possibly the groom died along with 31 other wedding goers (including children). And keep in mind that this wasn’t the first or most devastating Saudi attack on a wedding in the course of its brutal air war in Yemen since 2015.
To take out a wedding, even in wartime, is -- I think you could find general agreement on this -- an extreme act. Two weddings? More so. And nowhere near the war’s battle lines? More so yet. Of course, given the nature of the Saudi regime, it could easily be counted as another of the extreme governments on this planet. But remember one thing when it comes to that recent wedding slaughter, another country has backed the Saudi royals to the hilt in their war in Yemen: the United States. Washington has supported the Saudi war effort in just about every way imaginable -- from refueling their planes in mid-air to providing targeting intelligence to selling them billions of dollars of weaponry and munitions of every sort (including cluster bombs) used in that war. This was true in the Obama years and is, if anything, doubly so at a moment when President Trump has put so much energy and attention into plying the Saudis with arms. So tell me, given that the staggering suffering of civilians in Yemen is common knowledge, shouldn’t our support for the Saudi air war be considered an extreme policy?
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