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There are moments when diplomacy doesn’t just fail, it exposes itself as the hollow, performative farce it always was. This grotesque little summit in Pakistan, with JD Vance shuttled in like a substitute teacher handed a room full of hostile actors, is exactly that moment. Twenty-plus hours of talks with the Iranian delegation, paraded as “serious engagement,” dressed up with red carpets, flags, and breathless regional optimism, and what do we get at the end of it? Absolutely nothing. Not a framework, not a breakthrough, not even a believable lie about progress. Just exhaustion, vague language, and the unmistakable stench of failure.
Let’s be clear about the setting, because it matters. Pakistan, acting as mediator, playing host to this so-called high-level engagement, while the Iranian delegation sits across the table knowing full well they hold the leverage. They didn’t come to concede. They came to watch the United States negotiate with itself in real time, watching a superpower that can’t decide whether it’s threatening annihilation or begging for cooperation. And Vance, after twenty hours of this diplomatic hostage situation, steps up to the podium and offers us the same lifeless, recycled garbage: “We were quite flexible.” Flexible? That’s what you say when you’ve been bent into a pretzel and still walked away empty-handed.
What actually happened in those rooms in Pakistan wasn’t negotiation, it was exposure. Exposure of a strategy that never existed, of leadership that confuses motion with progress, and of an administration so addicted to optics that it thinks showing up counts as success. The Iranians didn’t reject the deal because it needed fine-tuning. They rejected it because it was built on fantasy, on the delusion that the United States still dictates terms in a conflict it stumbled into without a plan and now cannot control.
And while all of this is unfolding, while Vance is burning through the night chasing a ghost of a deal with Iranian officials, the so-called leader of the free world is parked cageside at a UFC fight. Let that sink in. The United States is entangled in a volatile, escalating war in the Middle East, negotiations are collapsing in Pakistan after nearly a full day of talks, and Donald Trump is watching grown men beat each other senseless under bright lights, grinning like it’s just another Saturday night spectacle. Because to him, it is. War, diplomacy, human lives, it’s all just content. All just another episode in the never-ending reality show of his own ego.
And then, like clockwork, he’s off to Florida. Of course he is. Because nothing complements a collapsing diplomatic effort and a war with no exit strategy quite like a leisurely round of golf. The Golfer in Chief, slicing drives while the world burns, pretending that declaring “we win” somehow makes it true. There is a level of detachment here that goes beyond negligence, it borders on sociopathy. A man so insulated by his own delusion that he believes optics are outcomes, that presence is leadership, that words alone can bend reality to his will.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the one that exists outside of Trump’s fantasy bubble, the war grinds on. There is no ceasefire worth the paper it’s not written on. There is no agreement on the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran continues to control while the United States blusters about “clearing it out” like a drunk at the end of the bar. There is no consensus, no shared framework, no mutual understanding, just two sides staring at each other across a widening chasm of mistrust and irreconcilable demands.
And this is the part they don’t want to say out loud: there is no exit. None. You don’t back your way into peace after launching a conflict without a defined objective. You don’t threaten entire civilizations and then pivot to diplomacy like nothing happened. You don’t get to cosplay as both arsonist and firefighter and expect the world to take you seriously.
Iran knows it. Pakistan knows it. Every serious diplomat watching this circus knows it. The only people who don’t seem to grasp the depth of this failure are the ones currently running the show.
So Vance flies out of Pakistan with nothing but talking points and fatigue. Trump flies to Florida with his golf clubs and his delusions intact. And the American people are left with the bill, for the chaos, for the instability, for the lives already lost and the ones inevitably to come.
Twenty hours of talks. Zero hours of progress. A war with no beginning anyone can clearly justify and no end anyone can credibly define. And a leadership structure so fundamentally unserious that it treats all of it, every last, deadly, consequential piece of it, as just another day on the schedule.
Par for the course doesn’t even begin to cover it.
—Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition. On FacebookOn Substack
Hungary has a general election tomorrow. Hungary is a relatively small country with less than 10m in population and with a GDP of just $220bn and with just 8.2m registered to vote. This election is pivotal, not just for Hungarians, but also for the EU Commission and the core European governments. The incumbent Fidesz government led by PM Victor Orban has been a thorn in the side of the EU for years. Orban has opposed EU sanctions on Russia and recently blocked the implementation of the latest round of agreed E96bn EU funding for Ukraine on the grounds that Ukraine has been stopping imports of Russian gas. The EU has responded by holding back Hungary’s share of structural and support funds.
Domestically, Orban’s party has been in power for 16 years, including a landslide victory in the 2022 election. It is claimed that over its period of rule, the government has gradually reduced democratic institutions like an independent media and courts; and adopted cronyist procurement policies for government spending and for foreign investors, with a high level of corruption. According to the EU, Hungary is an autocracy, not a democracy.
Not surprisingly,, Orban’s policies have attracted strong support from US President Trump and the MAGA movement. In the election campaign, US Vice-President Vance visited Hungary to give Orban the full backing. President Trump posted in his usual style: “GET OUT AND VOTE FOR VIKTOR ORBÁN. He is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement. I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY!”
The EU leaders are desperate to defeat Orban and break the logjam that he is causing over the funding of the Ukraine war and on EU policies in general. They are backing to the hilt the main opposition party Tisza, led by Peter Magyar. Magyar was a former Fidesz loyalist with family and friends still in the government. He broke from Orban two years ago, accusing it of corruption and cronyism. Magyar recently added in a social media post: “The ongoing election fraud carried out for months by Fidesz, along with criminal acts, intelligence operations, disinformation and fake news cannot change the fact that Tisza is going to win this election.”
Magyar’s message on corruption resonated with people. After an estimated 35,000 people turned up to a protest organised by Magyar in March 2024, he launched his movement. Currently, independent polls suggest that Tisza is leading in the vote. In 2025, Hungary was again ranked at the bottom of the European Union, according to the annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) compiled by the Secretariat of Transparency International in Berlin. The poor result reflects “the continued failure to remedy rule of law deficiencies and to curb systemic corruption, manifested in the organized theft of public funds”
EU economists and Magyar claim that corruption is the main reason behind the country’s now persistent economic decline. But is it? As always, it is the structural economic issues that are more important. Since 2019, Hungary‘s real GDP growth has been highly volatile, marked by a sharp pandemic-induced contraction followed by strong but short-lived rebounds. Since mid-2022, the economy has largely fluctuated in a “no-growth zone,” characterized by stagnation or very limited expansion.
Capital investment and productivity has stagnated and unemployment has reached its highest level since 2016.
After the end of Soviet control in the early 1990s, foreign investment into Hungary by European and US multi-nationals flooded in to use cheap Hungarian labour in new factories (autos and electronics). This led to a sharp rise in the profitability of capital. But that investment petered off by the beginning of the 21st century as ‘globalisation’ slowed. Profitability fell back, particularly after the Great Recession of the 2008-9 and in the Long Depression of the 2010s.
Source: Penn World Tables 11.0
The Hungarian economy remains very reliant on foreign investment and so is vulnerable to international crises, like the Global Financial Crash of 2008 or the COVID pandemic slump of 2020. And any global inflationary spike affects the Hungarian economy more than most, as it did in the post-pandemic inflation spike – and will also from the Iran conflict.
And it’s the main reason that Hungary lags towards the bottom of the East European “convergence” club, if still higher than Bulgaria and Slovakia.
Wages are low, on average just half that of the EU average, worse than Slovakia and only slightly better than Bulgaria and Greece.
Pay for key sectors like education and health is among the lowest in the EU and life expectancy is poor compared to other EU countries. On most measures of social deprivation, Hungary performs badly compared to other Visegrad countries (Czech, Poland and Slovakia). And its gini ratio for inequality of incomes is higher.
Would an election victory by Magyar make any difference to Hungary’s weak economy? Probably not. Despite more than two years of campaigning and a 240-page election manifesto, the details of what exactly Magyar will do if he gains power remain vague. He concentrates on removing ‘corruption’ and undemocratic parts of Hungary’s institutions. Above all, he wants closer relations with the EU. He would end the veto Hungary has been applying on EU funds for Ukraine.
Ending that would release E20bn in frozen EU support funds for Hungary (that’s about 10% of the country’s GDP). Hungary had been allocated a total of €10.4 billion under the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), consisting of €6.5 billion in grants and €3.9 billion in loans. However, almost all of these funds have remained frozen or not yet fully accessible due to disputes over rule-of-law, corruption, and judicial independence issues.
But in many areas, Magyar would change little. He wants a harder line on immigration than Orban by scrapping the country’s ‘guest worker’ scheme. And while he would end ‘dependence’ on Russian energy imports, he wants to preserve ‘pragmatic’ relations with Russia. Orban is relying for support on the government’s generous handouts to pensioners and low-paid. So Magyar, in a ‘New Deal’, is promising a $1.5bn boost for health, railways and energy. But at the same time, he aims to cut the government budget deficit to under 3% of GDP to speed up euro entry by 2030. And he also wants to cut taxes for most Hungarians. So there are a few contradictions there. Above all, the structure of the Hungarian economy as a foreign investor vassal will not be touched by either party – indeed more incentives for the multi-nationals will flow.
The 2022 election saw a turnout of just under 70%, where it has been for several elections. The turnout could be higher in this crucial election. But even if Magyar wins, ending corruption and autocracy won’t be easy. His government is very unlikely to have enough seats in the new parliament for the two-thirds majority necessary to reverse the many measures that Orban incorporated into the constitution over the decades. And if changes are not made to comply with EU rules by end-August, Hungary will lose all this EU funding. But at least the EU leaders will get a more cooperative Hungarian government after 16 years.
I have considerable respect for John Mearsheimer. I believe he is a genuine character, though he does not place his considerable skills at the service of the working class by any means. I’m halfway through this but Mearsheimer is laying down the law. He must be despised by both the left and right of the US body politic and the US ruling class in general. He’s just reminded us that if there was a present day Nuremberg like in 1945 after the genocide that took place against the Jews at that time, “Biden and his lieutenants and Trump and his lieutenants would be hanged.”
Mearsheimer is a bourgeois strategist and since co-authoring a book about the Israeli Lobby or AIPAC in 2007, his views on the Middle East and the Israel/US relationship have been borne out to a great degree.
I do not agree though with his affirmation that Israel calls the shots saying that while countries have national interests and sometimes the national interests of countries can converge, when the US and Israel have opposing interests, the US acts in the interests of the latter against its own; this is due to the power of AIPAC is his argument. Some would call it the Jewish Lobby.
I believe the US has very important interests in the region being oil of course, as well as the Suez Canal and the general need for a global hegemon to maintain important footholds in other parts of the world and especially so as the US now has a peer competitor globally in the form of China.
US imperialism is losing its influence in this region and a significant defeat for Israel, its settler colony would be a humiliating defeat for US imperialism globally. It will hang on to Israel as it is the only reliable ally of the US in this part of the world. So it sees defending its proxy as in the interests if the United States.
Mearsheimer talks of the Israeli strategy to build a greater Israel and the need to ethnically cleanse the region, that is what it is doing in Lebanon, ethnically cleansing the southern part of the country below the Litani river and it has even greater ambitions for Syria, and beyond. I see this as driven by US imperialism’s interests. Israel could not have done what it has in Gaza or what it is doing in Lebanon and Iran now without US money and weapons and points out that Israel’s strategy is to weaken Iran and have a regime there compliant to the US, so does Washington. Washington is facing increasing pressure domestically given the cost to the US population of this venture not to mention the horrors that cannot be hidden given the role of social media.
To not see it that way and accept that AIPAC is the driving force to get the US ruling class to act against its own interests, what is it about AIPAC, a group representing a small country, and more importantly, a small population, specifically Jews both inside Israel and out, that makes it so powerful?
I know what some would say and I certainly don’t think Mearsheimer is proposing it although the Zionists have accused him of that.
But what do I know? Mearsheimer has a Phd. I have a GED
The only reason why I still have a Twitter account is that that's where you find the real tea
As you all know, Melania Trump held a press conference yesterday to tell the country she has nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody asked her to. Her husband says he didn't know she was gonna do it. Her own staff didn't know the topic until she started talking. The Epstein story had basically died down, 'cause everyone's been focused on Iran. And she just walked out there and revived it.
So why now? Her adviser said "enough is enough" and "the lies must stop."
Sure. But she did something weird.
She acknowledged the 2002 email she sent Ghislaine Maxwell, the one where she complimented a New York magazine profile of Epstein and signed off "Love, Melania." She called it a reply. Twice. Except the subject line was "HI!" and there's no prior email from Maxwell in the files. It wasn't a reply. She reached out. Maxwell wrote back and called her "sweet pea."
And then Melania pivoted to calling on Congress to hold public hearings for Epstein's victims - under oath. Her husband's administration has been doing everything possible to make this go away. Pam Bondi just refused a subpoena the day before to testify. The whole White House message has been "time to move on." And the First Lady is out here asking for sworn testimony. most of the reporting says that everyone in the White House was "stunned."
None of this makes sense - until you know who Amanda Ungaro is.
Ungaro is a Brazilian former model. She came to the US in 2002 at 17, on Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express. She's on the flight logs. Her agent was Jean-Luc Brunel, one of Epstein's procurers, who was found hanged in a Paris prison cell in 2022 while awaiting trial for raping minors and trafficking girls.
Ungaro told a Brazilian newspaper she saw about 30 girls on that flight, most of them between 14 and 16. She watched some of them disappear to the back of the plane with Epstein and Maxwell and never saw them again. Brunel tried to get her to carry a suspicious package. She refused.
After she landed in New York, she ended up at Paolo Zampolli's modeling agency. And this is where it all connects.
Zampolli is the guy who brought Melania to America from Slovenia in 1996. Got her the visa. Introduced her to Trump at a party in 1998. Trump has confirmed this himself. Zampolli is in the Epstein files dozens of times. He and Epstein tried to buy Elite Model Management together in 2004. Epstein visited his agency.
In one email from the files, Epstein warned a businessman that "Zampoli is trouble." Zampolli currently works in the Trump administration as special envoy for global partnerships and sits on the Kennedy Center board.
Ungaro and Zampolli were together for almost 20 years. They have a teenage son. They sat at Melania's table at the first inauguration dinner. Ungaro even held a UN ambassadorship to Grenada through Zampolli's connections. They split around 2018 and Zampolli later claimed they were never actually married, which was news to basically everyone.
Then last June, Ungaro got arrested in Miami on fraud charges at a medical spa. Her new husband made bail. She didn't. 'Cause according to the New York Times, Zampolli called a senior ICE official named David Venturella, told him Ungaro was on an expired visa, and asked about getting her transferred to federal custody. Venturella called the Miami field office. He mentioned the case was important to someone close to the White House.
Zampolli says he just asked what was going on. DHS says it wasn't political. But Ungaro got picked up by ICE before she could post bail and was deported to Brazil. She eventually agreed to leave because she thought staying in detention would cost her custody of her kid. Her son went to Brazil with her, then went back to Zampolli.
The man who introduced the President to the First Lady got the mother of his child deported. And this woman knew the Trumps for 20 years. She was at their events. She was close to Melania's parents. She rode on Epstein's plane as a teenager.
Now she's in Brazil posting on X, tagging Melania directly. Saying she'll expose everything she knows. Threatening legal action. Saying she has nothing left to lose.
But wait! There's more!
The Epstein files from January include a redacted FBI proffer from 2019, three days after Epstein's arrest. An immunity witness told federal agents that Epstein introduced Melania to Donald Trump. Not Zampolli. Epstein. Lying under a proffer agreement is a federal crime. The White House says the files may contain unverified claims. Melania has been threatening to sue anyone who repeats it. Wolff. Hunter Biden. The Daily Beast already caved and retracted. Hunter's response was "F**k that. That's not gonna happen." He refused to retract and basically dared them to depose both Trumps. Wolff sued her back.
And then Zampolli popped up after Melania's speech to tell the Daily Mail he's ready to testify under oath that he made the introduction. Melania just asked Congress to set up hearings.
So - to sum up - a woman who was on Epstein's plane, who spent 20 years in the Trump inner circle, gets deported by the man who introduced Donald and Melania. She starts threatening to talk. The Epstein files contain sworn testimony that contradicts the official story of how the Trumps met. And then Melania holds a surprise press conference to deny everything, while her key witness volunteers to back her up and her husband pretends he didn't know it was happening.
Melania doesn't do press conferences. She doesn't blindside the West Wing. She doesn't voluntarily bring up the one scandal her husband's team has been trying to bury. Whatever Amanda Ungaro knows, it was enough to make all of that happen on a Thursday afternoon. And good lawd - now everyone is talking about the Epstein Files again.
Ungaro was 17 on that plane. Her lawyers say Zampolli started pursuing her at 15, though some accounts say 17. Either way, he was 32. She spent two decades inside Trump world. And when she became a problem, they shipped her out of the country.
So - now we wait, I guess. To see if she follows through on her threats - or if this is all just another nothingburger.
I was talking with a Lebanese man I met recently who painted a similar picture that the author describes here with regard to Hezbollah and the Shia population in Lebanon. He was from that community. The Israeli regime fears nothing more than the unity of the various religious groupings in Lebanon, Shia, Sunni, Christian, Druze, and Hezbollah fears the same. I think I am correct in believing that the name Hezbollah, means “Party of God” which is enough to warn us of its reactionary character. Religious sectarianism here is the scourge of the working classes just as it has been throughout the world from Northern Ireland to India. Like racism and tribalism, this divide and rule tactic was central to British colonialism’s global power and is an important weapon in US imperialism’s interests in the region.
Sirantos Fotopoulos seems to me to have painted a realistic picture here but I am no expert on the events in this part of the world. and share the commentary for readers' interest. I am generally committed though to the view that it is only the working class of the region and indeed the world, that can resolve what are global capitalist crises and it is the weakness or absence of the working class and our organisations that creates the space for religious sectarianism and other divisive elements. So I would be interested in finding out more about the working classes of the region and their organizations which I accept have been weakened, if not destroyed in some cases due to religious extremism and interference in the form of US imperialism. RM FFWP Admin
Yesterday morning, the ink on the fragile ceasefire had barely dried when Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the largest single-day bombardment of Beirut in the current war. The operation was named, with an almost confessional candor, "Operation Eternal Darkness." More than 100 targets across five civilian neighbourhoods were struck within the space of ten minutes. At least 254 people were killed, among them mourners at a funeral in the Bekaa Valley, three girls in the coastal town of Adloun, and civilians whose charred bodies AP journalists photographed on one of Beirut's busiest intersections at rush hour. The American University of Beirut Medical Center urgently appealed for all blood types. Lebanon's health minister called it catastrophic. Lebanon's president called it a massacre.
The ceasefire in question had been brokered by Pakistan and explicitly stated, in the words of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, that it applied to fighting "everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere, effective immediately." France's Emmanuel Macron said Lebanon was fully included. Iran's foreign minister also said Lebanon was fully included. A Hezbollah official said the group had halted attacks and was waiting for mediators. Netanyahu's office, releasing its statement only in English and not in Hebrew, said the ceasefire "does not include Lebanon." Trump, characteristically, said Lebanon was "a separate skirmish" and that it would "get taken care of too," as if a sovereign country of six million people were a minor errand on a to-do list. The legal and diplomatic ambiguity was, to put it generously, manufactured. To put it accurately, it was a lie.
This raises a question that polite diplomatic commentary persistently refuses to answer with the directness it deserves: is Benjamin Netanyahu constitutionally, psychologically, and politically incapable of making peace? The evidence is no longer merely circumstantial. His own opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said this week that there has never been "such a diplomatic disaster in all of our history," that Netanyahu "failed politically, failed strategically, and didn't meet a single one of the goals that he himself set." The left-wing Democrat leader Yair Golan was blunter still: "Netanyahu lied. He promised a historic victory and security for generations. The nuclear program was not destroyed; the ballistic threat remains; the regime is in place and is even stronger coming out of this war."
Netanyahu's governing coalition includes Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister who lives in an illegally built home in an illegal settlement and whose Religious Zionist Party's founding documents derive their territorial claims directly from the Torah. When asked why Jewish people have an exclusive right to all parts of what he calls the Land of Israel, Smotrich does not reach for international law or demographic argument: he reaches for the Bible. His party's coalition agreement with Netanyahu states explicitly that "Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel," which includes everything between the Nile and the Euphrates, and since taking office he has announced 22 new settlements in the West Bank, calling it a "historic decision." Then there is Itamar Ben-Gvir, a Kahanist whose political background, in the assessment of multiple analysts, is rooted in a violently racist movement calling for the expulsion of Palestinians. Kahanism is a far-right, religious Zionist ideology based on the views of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, which advocates for Jewish supremacy, the establishment of a Halakhic (theocratic) state, and the expulsion of non-Jews who do not accept subordination. Ben-Gvir has been sanctioned by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, the Netherlands, and Spain for inciting settler violence. He was previously barred from military service due to his own extremist views. These are the men without whom Netanyahu has no current government coalition otherwise.
A significant current within Israeli religious nationalism holds that the territorial boundaries of biblical Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates in some formulations, represent not a political preference but a divine mandate. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the ideological father of the settler movement taught that Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel was a sacred commandment that preceded and superseded any state, treaty, or human law. This is the concept known as Greater Israel, and it functions not as a negotiating position but as an eschatological inevitability, a matter not of policy but of prophecy. From this vantage point, a ceasefire is not a strategic pause but a theological betrayal. Settlements are not provocations but sacraments. And perpetual war, conducted preferably by the American military, is not a tragedy to be averted but a necessary station on the road to messianic redemption.
What Netanyahu's government wants is not Israeli military victory in any classically defined sense. They have no interest in the kind of regional settlement that ends wars, normalises borders, and creates stable security arrangements. What they want is for the United States military to do the heavy work of destroying Iran's capacity while Israeli settlement expansion proceeds unimpeded and permanently, until the demographic and territorial facts on the ground make a two-state solution not merely difficult but impossible. They want an American war, American casualties, American financing, and American diplomatic cover, after which they will pocket the territorial gains and return, in their own time, to the systematic displacement of the Palestinian people and the annexation of whatever remains. Netanyahu's current performance, striking Beirut hours after a ceasefire to ensure he cannot be blamed for stopping the war prematurely, is a willful strategic attempt to sabotage the ceasefire.
There is, however, a second axis of cynicism in this catastrophe. The Iranian theocracy, whose proxies Israel claims to be fighting in Lebanon, has spent decades using Hezbollah not as a shield for the Lebanese people but as a weapon against them. Hezbollah emerged not from Lebanese resistance but from the Iranian Revolution, its founding slogans calling for an Islamic Republic from East Beirut to West Beirut. It has, since 1992, built a comprehensive state-within-a-state, with its own military, healthcare, education, and financial infrastructure operating entirely outside the control of any Lebanese government, and it has used that parallel state to hold Lebanon hostage to Tehran's regional agenda. When Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into war against Israel last month in support of Iran, the Lebanese government declared those attacks unlawful. The Lebanese president called for Hezbollah's disarmament and expelled Iran's ambassador-designate. Lebanon's foreign minister told Iran to respect sovereignty. None of this moved Hezbollah because Hezbollah answers not to Lebanon but to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Lebanese Shia community that Hezbollah claims to represent has paid an extraordinary price for this arrangement. More than one million people have been displaced within days. Displaced families packing their tents on Beirut's waterfront yesterday, believing the ceasefire meant they could return home, were caught between Netanyahu's airstrikes and Hezbollah's refusal to honor the truce. The Lebanese economy has been in freefall since 2019, its currency depreciated by more than ninety percent; hospitals overwhelmed; public institutions decimated. A member of the Beirut municipality, surveying the wreckage of yesterday's strikes, said with a terrible simplicity: "This is a residential area. There is nothing military here." That statement applies with equal force to forty years of Iranian foreign policy in Lebanon. Iran has conducted a de facto colonial settler project in Lebanese territory, exploiting sectarian grievances to build an armed proxy that serves theocratic strategic interests and has been credibly implicated in the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. This is occupation by another name.
If the ceasefire holds, the Islamic Republic of Iran will have survived a war that killed its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, saw its missile production capabilities severely degraded, and reduced its nuclear enrichment program to rubble. Its new supreme leader, Khamenei's own son Mojtaba, is reportedly close to the Revolutionary Guard and considered more hostile to the West than his father. The political class devoted to the theocracy remains intact. Pro-government demonstrators in Tehran burned American and Israeli flags yesterday on news of the ceasefire announcement and chanted death to compromisers. Mass protests that erupted before the war have been crushed. Within weeks or months, when the noise of international diplomacy has faded and reconstruction aid begins to flow from the tolling of the Hormuz, that government will turn its instruments of repression inward once again. The women of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, who braved death to assert the most basic claims of human dignity, will face renewed state violence from a regime that has used the war as a pretext to silence them. A ceasefire that saves the Iranian theocracy is not, in any morally coherent sense, a victory for the Iranian people in their desire for liberation.
We are therefore confronted with the following tableau: a region in which two deeply reactionary forces, one theological-nationalist and one theological-revolutionary, have constructed a durable symbiosis around the perpetuation of violence, each requiring the other's menace in order to justify its own excesses at home. Netanyahu needs the Iranian threat to hold his coalition together and keep the Israeli courts from prosecuting him for corruption. The Iranian theocracy needs the Israeli threat to suppress its own population and justify its military apparatus. The Lebanese people need neither, and have said so, loudly and at mortal cost. The Palestinian people need neither, and have paid with generations of dispossession. The Syrian people, the Iraqi people, the women and dissidents of Iran, the Lebanese Christians and Druze and Shia who want a functioning state and not a permanent battlefield, need neither. What they need is what both Netanyahu and the Ayatollahs are constitutionally allergic to: a political settlement premised on the dignity and self-determination of human beings who are not on anyone's geopolitical chessboard.
There is a name for what Netanyahu did yesterday, hours after a ceasefire. It is sabotage. The Arab League called it that. Egypt called it premeditated intent to undermine de-scalation. Spain's prime minister said Netanyahu's contempt for life and international law was intolerable. France called the strikes unacceptable. These are not the words of enemies. They are the words of exhausted allies who have finally noticed that the man at the center of this catastrophe has a structural interest not in winning the war but in never ending it. History will record that Operation Eternal Darkness was not named after the darkness it intended to impose on Beirut. It was named, with all the inadvertent accuracy of authoritarian self-revelation, after what its architects have in mind for the future.
Israel’s targeting of over a hundred Beirut sites in under a minute today suggests their attack on Lebanon has now reached genocidal proportions. Given their new name for the assault, Operation Eternal Darkness, and their continual threats to turn Lebanon into Gaza, their genocidal intent should now be clear. Any time a group is committing genocide in one place, we should expect the violence they are carrying out elsewhere to turn genocidal if given time, for genocide is never so much an intention as it is an impulse—and Israel’s genocidal impulses should now be blindingly obvious.
In this way, Iran’s threat to withdraw from the recent ceasefire agreement if Israel continues with its assault on Lebanon might be said to constitute a humanitarian intervention. And while humanitarian interventions are so rare that many political analysts would argue they virtually never occur, this is at least the second on the part of Iran. The first happened in the early nineties in Bosnia, where they joined with H•zb•llah in breaking an arms embargo, which had been imposed by the West, to stop what would later be labelled a genocide, ironically… by the West.
But if we take western states at their word, and we treat Hez•ollah and the Ho•this as mere proxies of Iran, then we would have to label their intervention in Lebanon as Iran’s third humanitarian intervention, following their efforts to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Both groups sough to raise the financial and political costs to Israel of sustaining the genocide by, in the case of the Ho•this, closing off the Red Sea to shipping, and in the case of H•zb•llah, forcing Israel to divert a substantial portion of its forces to the north.
So, what we are seeing is a historical rarity.
The willingness of Iranian leaders to continue fighting is all the more extraordinary in that their lives are arguably more at risk than perhaps any other leadership in the modern history of war. There has certainly never been a case in modern interstate warfare where the leader of a country, the head of their judiciary, and the head of their legislature, along with a number of cabinet level officials, were all killed in so short a period—and the high level assassinations have been going on for years now, including two secretaries of defense. So, we cannot say that the Iranian leadership is simply risking the lives of their citizens while they punch buttons from afar.
Political pundits would not hesitate to call it a humanitarian intervention if carried out by western democracies, but we are so indoctrinated that even the most radical western news sites would not think of it in the case of Iran.
Still, it is not lost on the average citizen. A tremendous portion of the American electorate has sided with Iran, and so has most of the world, by the looks of most comment sections of major news sites. Genocide is the ultimate evil, and groups that carry it out tend to be despised, insofar as their crimes come to light. So, the targeting of Israel and American sites in the Middle East, along with the United Arab Emirates, which has been sustaining the genocide in Sudan, seems to have provided much of the world with a sense of relief—in spite of the substantial risks to the global economy and the possibility of nuclear armageddon.
And it seems to have provided many with the only real sense of justice they have experienced in global affairs in years.
These are simply the facts, framed so as to highlight what remains invisible to most people due to the spell of propaganda in which we are all immersed. It is not to endorse Iran’s government or H•zb•llah, which would be illegal in many countries in the West, in any case. Whatever might be said about Iran’s human rights abuses at home, and there is a lot to criticize; and however much the country’s experiment in theocratic democracy is in need of dramatic reform; they are stopping what a substantial portion of the planet has come to see as the greatest threat to humanity.
And at great risk to everything they hold dear, not least their own lives, Iran’s leaders have refused to let Lebanon go the way of G•za, at least for the moment—and that is more than can be said of any other state. And this raises a simple question: why has every single western democracy allowed itself to be shown up by a country whose military most of them have labeled terrorists? And why have so many of us, who have criticized the country’s failure to live up to our own highest standards of human rights at home, failed to sacrifice even a small portion of what their leadership is willing to risk in order to stop what many would now agree is the greatest threat to humanity?
Of course, my readership comes from all over the world, and many have put their lives at risk to stop Israel’s crimes against humanity; and many have done the same to bring greater freedom to Iran. We should honor them all, but we should not lose site of the complexity of international affairs. The villains of yesteryear are often driven to take heroic stands today; the heroes of today are often the villains of tomorrow. And a good cause under one set of circumstances can quickly sour as the ground moves beneath our feet and everything on the geopolitical chessboard changes places.
Hence, we should honor what is right and good when it is taking place, knowing every value system and ideology is prone to corruption, and everyone is capable of heroic stands—as anyone who has watched a few films can imagine.
It is even possible to work to stop a genocide while simultaneously supporting the extermination of a people. Iran might be said to have done this in fighting Isis in northern Iraq while supporting Assad’s extraordinary crimes against humanity in Syria; the Biden administration did this for a time in stopping arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which was starving Yemen, while sustaining the genocide in G•za—though they would eventually come to support the starvation of Yemen in solidarity with Israel, along with the genocide in Sudan, by upgrading America’s defense partnership with the United Arab Emirates, also for Israel.
We need not support a party to recognize its extraordinary stands for justice. But when the people we are accustomed to criticizing risk more than ourselves for our own causes, as so many of us have recently seen with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, we should take this as an impetus to work harder. The fight for G•za is not over. Israel can be stopped. And it is quite possible it will go the way of the greater majority of states that define themselves around committing genocide—which is to say in the dustbin of history, unwept, unsung, and detested for the grotesque monstrosity it came to be.
Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny: The Crisis Before the Fascist Inferno
The title is not with the original article. FFWP Admin
This is a good article from Middle East Eye but I have consistently rejected the idea that the tail wags the dog in this Israel/US relationship as the author suggests. And it is not based on the manipulative powers of Netanyahu either.
Trump is a narcissist and a con man, possessing many other offensive habits, sexually assaulting and ra*ing women, or portraying the Obama’s as apes among them. So yes, he can easily be manipulated if the bait is right. According to witnesses that were present during previous negotiations with Iran, Trump was described as being dragged in to a war he was trying to get out of by his two main negotiators, the ardent Zionists, and real estate pimps Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.
Trump is not a smart man, he’s a con man and the idea that you have to be smart to get rich is a fabrication; let’s remind ourselves of one of Marx’s most important statements that the class that controls the manufacturing of goods in society also control the means of the manufacture of ideas; the dominant ideology in any society is that of the class that governs and the idea that being rich equals being smart originates there. It wasn’t the European peasant that promoted the idea that the King was King by Divine Right.
It is also true, as the article points out, that most Americans oppose the Iran war, over 60%, and most want Trump gone (only one in four registered voters voted for him) which is one reason for the massive turnout for the No Kings protests. However, the organizers that founded Indivisible, one of the main organizations behind the protests are former Democratic interns or Congressional staffers and their goal is to Vote Blue (Democratic) in the primaries and return the Democrats to power; a return to the status quo. But the status quo has been a disaster for millions of Americans as living standards and public services have been savaged over the past period. So the 8 million is not an homogenous bloc by any means and regardless of what happens, the war on US workers from both parties will continue. A defeat for US imperialism abroad, is a victory for the US working class at home.
I could go on and on but despite these findings, nothing changes. Wait, I stand corrected, conditions continue to deteriorate and that is one of the reasons Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults currently agree with the statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do “such a poor job” of representing the American people that “a third major party is needed.” Gallup
Millions of Americans have opted out of the electoral process altogether completely disgusted with the political system and the entire US body politic. They have drawn the incorrect conclusion that the US Congress is utterly corrupt and this is at the root of the problem; it is a flaw of personality, people are just greedy. This argument is backed up by religious authority rather than explaining that the root cause of the problem is that the two parties of capital do not represent the interests of the working and middle classes. The capitalist system is in crisis and it is their role to bail it out and that means making workers pay. There is no guns and butter in this scenario. The politicians are backed in this endeavour by the bureaucracy atop organized labor who are committed to capitalism and that the market has the answer to all things.
The reality is, as I have always argued, is that the US settler colony is the only reliable ally US imperialism has in this important region of the world. The Arab regimes, as unstable as they are, and we witnessed how rapidly these despotic regimes, all backed by the US, could fall in the Arab Spring of 2011, cannot be relied upon to defend US interests there. The potential power of the Arab working class is too great for these regimes to be trusted. Settler colonies, and in the case of Israel, a European settler state amid a sea of Arabism as one official once put it, has filled that role.
There is no doubt that the activities of the crazed Zionist Apartheid regime-----its genocide, torture and mass mu*der of children----- beyond fueling anti-semitism throughout the Middle East and the world, has weakened the US/Israel link and undermined support for the Zionists and Zionism in the US, particularly among young Jews.
But there has always been and is still support still in the US Congress. There are Christian Zionists, sections of the energy and tech bourgeois for example who are troubled by Israel’s behaviour but are not breaking ranks by any means. The likely leader in the race for the White House among Democrats is California governor Gavin Newsom who recently stated that he, “reveres Israel” and refused to call it an Apartheid state.
As I write and in the wake of a ceasefire agreed to between Iran and the US that included Lebanon where the Israeli’s are carrying out a Gaza style bombing of civilian infrastructure is weakening the US/Israel alliance. Despite Lebanon being included in the ceasefire, Netanyahu has said there will be no halting of the destruction the Zionist regime is waging in Lebanon. Netanyahu has admitted they are doing a “Ga*a style action in Lebanon. This is a humiliation for the US for sure. Iran has stated, according to Iran New 24 @IRanMediaco, that if Israel violates the ceasefire by bombing Lebanon, Iran will bomb Tel Aviv.
So there is no doubt that the tail of the dog is out of control and that is putting some pressure on the tail’s owner, but that is different than the implication that Israel is in charge here in my mind. How this will develop and to what degree the relationship between the US and its proxy will decline is hard to say. The Iranian resolve in the face of US aggression has changed the Middle East for good. And with the collapse of the US, and likely Trumps misnamed Board of Peace, we are in a new historical era and the multi-polar world that both Russia and China talk of.
I know that, as the author of the ME article says, South African Apartheid wasn’t allowed to exist. Na*i Germany wasn’t allowed to exists and Israel as it is should not be allowed to exist. Jews, along with Christian have lived in Palestine for millennia and when Palestinian’s have talked of Israel having no right to exist they refer to the colonial expansionist state. Jews have always been there and they have a right to be there. Zionism and settler colonialism is different.
