Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.
Today, as we record, is the 6th of March. The war in Iran that has long been predicted broke out on Saturday?
It was the day after we recorded our last piece. In the last episode I made a few remarks about the fact that it was looking increasingly likely that the United States was talking itself into open conflict with Iran.
A number of fairly obvious consequences followed from that. Lo and behold, within a matter of days, the invasion did indeed go ahead, and it had almost exactly the immediate responses I predicted. We’ll go through that in a bit more detail.
How many White House insiders happened to invest in oil and military companies right before these things happened?
There is that. Although Robert Anton Wilson made a remark on a number of occasions, more or less to the effect that the more powerful an individual is, the less they are in touch with reality. The reason being that they are increasingly surrounded by people who are either too frightened to contradict the powerful actor, or are simply sycophantic by nature.
They are trying to advance themselves by ingratiating themselves. The consequence is that they get no objective advice about anything and retreat further into a world of their own imagination.
Catherine Austin Fitz recently said this in a conversation with Tucker Carlson. She said she has lived it all — having been very wealthy, moderately wealthy, and completely poor. She reckons that as you go higher up the wealth spectrum, people are less in touch with reality, with what is going on, and with what people think of them.
Quite apart from Donald Trump’s obvious lack of intellectual strength, he has surrounded himself with similar intellectual mediocrities. He has also surrounded himself with people who seem utterly devoid of any moral principles. The most extraordinary thing to me is that events of this consequence can be set in motion without any coherent notion of the strategic goals you are trying to achieve.
I wonder if World War I was instigated in the same fashion.
Probably. There does not seem to be any clear definition of what the end of this exercise is intended to look like.
It has all the hallmarks of “two weeks to flatten the curve”, hasn’t it?
Absolutely. Another thing is that the negotiations going on with Iran were utterly cynical. There was no sign of any good faith — it was simply lulling them into a false sense of confidence ready for the attack.
Ever since the 12-day war last June, it is pretty clear that Iran had been expecting this.
If we were expecting this, surely Iran was expecting this.
Not only that, they were well prepared in any number of ways. For instance, by comparison, if somebody had succeeded in assassinating Hitler, it would obviously have brought an end to the Second World War because pretty well everybody else had a more realistic grasp of the situation than he did.
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein obviously had a very tight top-down grip on the country. In Libya, you could say the same of Gaddafi. Regardless of what you think of their policies, the intervention clearly did destabilise those countries.
If you look at all of these attempts at regime change, there is not a single one you can point to that resulted in replacing a dictatorship with a healthy democratic liberal society. They either replaced it with another dictator, or more often, Syria being the most extreme case, it resulted in the total destruction of civil society in any form. Whether that was the United States’ intention in Iran, I don’t know. It almost certainly is Israel’s endgame. Although how they imagine they are going to have a safe little bubble of a society to their liking, surrounded by people they have spent decades antagonising and wreaking destruction on, I cannot imagine.
One of the almost certain consequences that was easy to see in advance was that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed. This is exactly what happened. There have been seven tankers hit and either sunk or severely damaged. Fully loaded tankers are now apparently stranded in the Persian Gulf, valued at something like 10 to 20 billion dollars, which has already been paid by traders around the world to the authorities in the Gulf monarchies.
The arrangement is that the contract is set up several months in advance and the funds transferred at that point. The buyers of the oil on those tankers have already paid for it. They are not going to get the oil, and I should think they are extremely unlikely to get their money back. The damage to American bases within the Gulf monarchies is obviously considerable.
None of us can know exactly how much that damage is. It has obviously been far more severe than any of the American military personnel responsible for this decision could have imagined. It is going to go on. There is plainly no coherent political opposition inside Iran.
Regardless of the humanity or otherwise of the murder of Ayatollah Khamenei, it was a tactical and strategic blunder of the highest order. Rather than decapitating the country and giving the population space to rise up against the government, it had exactly the opposite effect. The street demonstrations in Iran following that assassination are absolutely massive and clearly in support of his memory.
Once again, the projection of him as some kind of evil ruthless dictator appears to be a highly partisan judgement.
He wasn’t exactly carpet bombing cities in America, was he? Or ripping school children to shreds with military explosives?
On the first or second day, one of the immediate targets was next to a girls’ primary school. There has been no sign of any remorse or apology, no explanation that it was not actually the intended target. That was an act of sheer barbarism.
I don’t know to what extent the population of our country, or of any of the other supporters of America, goes along with this. Even within our own populations, there is increasing alienation from these actions and from our government’s spineless support of them. What’s your take?
It is so difficult to know how much we live in our own echo chambers. From my home office here, what do I actually know? You try to triangulate different things you have read or seen. A lot of people just go with whatever is on the news.
I think there is quite a big age divide here. Increasingly large proportions of the under-40s just don’t slavishly absorb the mainstream news media. They might get it from social media, which can be an echo chamber of its own.
We certainly don’t buy newspapers and things like that.
No, but I am heartened by the quantity and quality of independent journalism online. Without even going onto Substack, Rumble, and fully alternative channels, even on YouTube — which is obviously censored to a significant degree — there is a huge amount of content against the official narrative.
There is a huge amount of really high-quality journalism of the sort that, a few decades back, we could get on the BBC. It has been a long time since there has been anything of that impartiality or intellectual rigour.
The consequences of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will be absolutely devastating for the world economy. Last Sunday morning I went out at about nine o’clock to fill the car up. It was completely normal and petrol at the local station was still 134 pence a litre. There were no queues.
Going out this morning, it has only gone up by three pence in the last week. But we are going to be back to two pounds a litre of petrol any day soon. We are also going to be in the situation we seem to have already forgotten about a few years ago, when large numbers of forecourts were simply closed and the ones that were open had cars queuing up along the street. That is only the most immediate effect. It will have a knock-on effect on the availability and prices of everything else.
The liquefied natural gas plant in Qatar, which was the main supplier, has now been shut down. Even when it starts up again, it will take a great deal of time to stabilise that situation. There is also an aluminium smelter there that has been shut down, and that can take anything up to 12 months to get operational again. Aluminium smelting is a continuous process — once it is interrupted, the entire factory is full of solidified aluminium.
It is not like a tap.
No. We have not even really begun to see this, nor the knock-on effects on public sentiment once we all start to be affected personally.
What I was saying about the assassination of Khomeini being a strategic blunder is that it not only rallied the entire Iranian population in a unified show of national solidarity. He was also the second-most senior cleric in the Shia religion for all Shia Muslims worldwide. Whatever misgivings they may or may not have had about America have immediately aroused their implacable enmity against the United States and its allies. How we come out of this is anybody’s guess, but it is not going to be to any of our advantage.
No, that much is fairly obvious.
The only hope I have is that the consequences of this move will lead the entire population of the planet to a wholehearted rejection of these methods for resolving disputes. We’ll have to see how that goes.
Shall we leave it there for this week?
Yes. As usual, we sign off by saying watch this space, and we’ll see where we are next week.
The other thing I would say about that assassination: it was trumpeted as a major intelligence coup to locate his position. Of course it wasn’t. He publicly announced that he would not hide anywhere. He said he was in sympathy with other people who had nowhere to go, and he was not going to scurry off to a bunker. He was in his home, working. It not only wiped out him and his immediate advisors, but also his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter. Truly callous by any standards, as well as being counterproductive.
I don’t know if you remember the film ‘Team America’, but I was thinking I need to go and re-watch it. It has just got better with age.
I do remember it. It is painfully accurate, I’m afraid.
Painfully accurate, yes — as characterised with puppets.
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