Did Iran Create or Cooperate with Regional Resistance? Much is made of the US military base-encirclement of Iran and the threat it poses but considerably less attention is paid to Iran’s Ring of Fire that threatens to engulf Washington and Tel Aviv. Resistance to the Imperialist project in the West Asia (Middle East) region has […]
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This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
The recent confrontation between Iran and Israel marked a decisive shift in regional power equations, particularly in the Persian Gulf. Iran’s direct and calibrated military response – executed through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – exposed the strategic vulnerabilities of Tel Aviv and forced Gulf capitals, chiefly Riyadh, to reassess long-standing assumptions about regional security.
The Saudi-led recalibration did not emerge in isolation. Years of cumulative political, military, and diplomatic failures under the umbrella of US-Israeli tutelage have pushed Persian Gulf states to seek more viable, non-confrontational security arrangements.
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This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Janine Jackson interviewed Citations Needed‘s Adam Johnson about media in war mode for the June 27, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
AP (via PBS, 6/26/25)
Janine Jackson: We are recording June 26 in medias res, but AP’s latest gives us enough to start:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine doubled down Thursday on how destructive the US attacks had been on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and described in detail the study and planning behind the bombing mission, but they stopped short of detailing how much the attack set back the nation’s nuclear program.
We hear also Trump saying, “I’m not happy with Israel because they have broken the ceasefire” that he, we hear, created, adding that Iran and Israel have been fighting “so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” I can’t say that word on the radio, says the FCC, but Trump can say it because—well, you and I don’t know.
The US went to war with Iran last week without congressional, much less public, approval. But most of us only know what we know through corporate news media, and that’s a problem.
Joining us now is Adam Johnson, media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. He’s coauthor, with In These Times contributing editor Sarah Lazare, of a couple of recent relevant pieces in In These Times. And he joins us now by phone from Illinois. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Adam Johnson.
Adam Johnson: Thank you for having me.
JJ: So we don’t know what’s going to happen with Iran. Maybe we’re not at war, that would be great, but sadly, we do know what corporate news media will do, because they’ll do what they do. We saw them pull out the playbook, scratch out Iraq, Afghanistan, Eastasia, and write in Iran; or maybe scratch down deeper to get to Iran 1953, and here we go again. It’s many things, but one thing for sure that it is is predictable.
Column (6/22/25)
AJ: So the primary thing that the news media keep doing, pundits and reporters alike, specifically Jake Tapper at CNN, which we wrote about, is they keep saying “nuclear weapons program.” And the goal, generally, is just to put the words “Iran” and “nuclear” in the same sentence, over and over and over again.
The public will largely fill in the blanks, and the media make no effort to even really point out that they, in fact, don’t have a nuclear weapon, or a nuclear weapons program, which is a really important piece of context to know, but it’s almost never mentioned. And this is according to the US intelligence’s own assessment, DNI, CIA, 19 other different intelligence agencies, all came to the same conclusion, and have since 2007.
However, pundits repeatedly say “nuclear weapons program,” but it’s not a nuclear weapons program. And there’s several instances, like I said, of Jake Tapper saying it, several people in Congress have said it. You could say maybe it’s a slip of the tongue by accident, but when basically no one else on CNN but Jake Tapper does it, it doesn’t really seem like an accident; it seems like he’s very clearly making an assertion. Now, if Jake Tapper has access to secret, proprietary intelligence that the CIA doesn’t have, maybe he should tell them?
And what we saw in the buildup to Trump’s bombing of Iran, which we now know was largely theatrical, thank God, was that the sort of ticking time bomb scenario, that he and JD Vance and others were going to the media with, was obviously, by their own admission, and by the New York Times’ own reporting, not based on any new intelligence. It was “a reassessment of old intelligence,” I believe is how the New York Times put it. There’s another name for that: It’s called ideologically motivated bullshit.
But repeatedly, the CIA, which weirdly was pushing back on this, I guess to their credit, in the Wall Street Journal and CNN, was saying, No, no, no, no. Iran’s increased enriched uranium, but it’s just a bargaining chip. It’s a way of getting the US to come to the table so they can relieve these sanctions which have crippled their economy, the only mechanism they plausibly have to do that. But they made no decision. And even if they did make a decision to build a bomb, it would take upwards of three years.
So this is the context that is completely missing or overshadowed, and there’s going to be a poll coming out. I asked one of these progressive polling groups to add it, and I don’t know when it’s going to come out, but what I’d be curious to know is, what percentage of the American public thinks that Iran currently has a nuclear weapon? I suspect it’s probably 70-some odd, 80%.
Because, again, if you say the word “nuclear” and “Iran” over and over again, people are going to have that impression. They don’t believe—why would they have a civilian program? Even though, of course, over 30 countries have a civilian nuclear program but don’t have nuclear weapons; it’s pretty common. And that is just not part of how the public interprets it.
So the public is widely misled on this issue, which, again, gives the impression of some radical cartoon “terrorist” who’s going to blow up Tel Aviv or Manhattan.
New York Times (6/28/25)
Second to that, you have a lot of the New York Times opinion section, for example, rushing to delegitimize the government, citing a very dubious poll saying 80% of Iranians want regime change, when all other polls show the number is probably closer to 40 or 50.
And, of course, how that regime change happens is very contestable; a lot of people hate Trump, but they don’t want China to come bomb us. That’s a totally different claim, right?
You had laundering of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is a pro-Israel think tank, you had laundering of their claims that Iran is now housing the head of Al Qaeda. This is all a rehash, word for word, of Iraq War stuff.
So the New York Times was doing its part, as were some other outlets. But for the most part, the White House seems to have wanted a “cool bombing” PR thing. And then what some suspect, and I don’t know, this is just idle speculation, is that Israel was suffering more damage than people knew. And unlike bombing South Lebanon or Gaza, Iran can actually fight back, and Israel couldn’t sustain or couldn’t maintain its defense posture.
And so they basically used this as a way of getting a ceasefire that they needed anyway. But not by lack of trying on the part of the Washington Post, which actually called for Trump to keep bombing Iran in their editorial board.
FAIR.org (6/23/25)
JJ: There are so many questions that are under the table in this conversation, which is what makes me so upset with media. Media pretend they’re posing questions, and so we’re supposed to imagine that they’ve considered them deeply, but to just draw us back to basics: If the question is, “Should the US bomb Iran?” well, the answer is no, because that’s an overt violation of domestic and international law. The Constitution forbids it, the War Powers Resolution forbids it. But for corporate media, it’s like Bryce Greene just wrote for FAIR.org, the New York Times editorial board says, “America Must Not Rush Into a War Against Iran.” Of course we can do it, but let’s keep it cute, right? These are illegal actions.
AJ: They did the exact same thing in Iraq on March 2003. They published “No War With Iraq,” But if you read it, it says no war until you let the weapons inspectors do their job.
And then in the month prior, they published an editorial in February 2003, saying if Saddam Hussein doesn’t hand over his biological and chemical weapons, that the US has to use military force. Now that’s an argument for war, because of course Saddam Hussein didn’t have biological and chemical weapons.
JJ: So he can’t show them.
New York Times (6/12/25)
AJ: So, yeah, this is the scope of debate. The scope of debate is not, “Is it justified or moral? Why is Israel not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty? Why do they not have IAEA inspectors?” There’s this kind of faux-liberal world order narrative.
And that’s why the IAEA report was so powerful. It was a 19 to 16 vote, it was almost along party lines, kind of pro-US/Israel, pro-Russia/pro-China.
And then, quickly, the head of the IAEA says, “Oh, no, no, don’t interpret this as us saying that in any way Iran has made a decision or is somehow accelerating an actual nuclear program.” But that’s not how it was interpreted. Like the New York Times, which had it as a head story the day Israel started bombing Iran, to give it this veneer of liberal rules enforcement, which is obviously absurd, because Israel is not subject to any of these rules. It has an estimated 100 to 300 nukes.
So the scope of debate in these editorials and these opinion sections is not “Do we have any legitimacy to be bombing Iran?” but, “Is bombing Iran the best way to stop them from enriching uranium?” which, again, is entirely within their rights under international law. They have a right to a civilian nuclear program, like any other country does.
JJ: And this is the implicit undergirding of corporate media’s debate, that some countries are “good,” and they can have world-destroying weapons—declared, undeclared, whatever. And some countries are, as Van Jones put it on CNN, “not normal.” Because, if we are looking for “normal,” we got Donald Trump! We got masked agents abducting people off the street…
Adam Johnson: “The scope of debate…is not ‘Do we have any legitimacy to be bombing Iran?’ but ‘Is bombing Iran the best way to stop them from enriching uranium?’”
AJ: And we have the US and Israel openly operating a mass starvation campaign through human genocide, not even euphemism. So I guess this is what normal countries do. They have a daily ritual killing of scores, sometimes hundreds of Palestinians that are desperately lining up for grains of rice and wheat. That’s what normal countries do.
And, again, it’s very weird. There’s this zombie liberal “rules-based order” framing that is still going on, despite the fact that there’s an unfolding genocide that’s lost all pretense of international law. And so there’s this “Oh, the US has to be a policeman and police the world” faux-liberal framework that Trump doesn’t take seriously, Netanyahu doesn’t take seriously, but the media, especially the kind of prestige editorial pages and opinion pages, the New York Times and Washington Post, have to maintain that this is still a thing.
And, of course, people like Van Jones and Jake Tapper at CNN, this idea that there’s normal countries, there’s the goodies and then there’s the baddies. And so even though the goody countries are carrying out this almost cartoon evil, completely removing a people in whole or in part from Earth, and an actual explicit starvation campaign, not even hiding it—that’s what they’re calling it; it’s very weird.
In 2003, when they did this, there was a little more kind of post–Cold War credibility, and now there’s zero. And it’s very strange to watch the vestiges of that framework still go on, regardless of the new facts, and the fact that the majority of Americans think that there’s a genocide going on. No one outside of the Washington Post editorial board and the New York Times editorial board buys any of this shit.
JJ: Exactly. And just, finally, when you try to intervene, you find yourself making arguments at a level that you don’t accept. Like, “Well, they shouldn’t attack Iran’s nuclear capacities, nuclear facilities.” They said “nuclear weapons,” but then they can suck weapons out of it, and they know that it’s still going to be read the same way.
AJ: Yeah, it’s implied.
JJ: And then you also want to say, “Well wait, there’s no evidence of Iran having weaponry.” And then you want to say, “Well, Iran’s allowed to have nuclear weaponry.” And then you have to say, “If we acknowledged Israel’s nuclear weaponry, we wouldn’t legally be allowed to arm them.” So there’s all of these unspoken things, and yet, to silence them is the price of admission to get into “serious people conversation.” And that’s obviously why a lot of people clock out of elite media, because the price of admission is too high.
AJ: It is just not credible, to sit there and talk about international law; you have to have some kind of ostensibly high-minded liberal reason why you’re bombing a country. It’s just not credible, with what we’ve seen over the last two years. It’s very strange. And there’s a kind of think tank/media nexus that has to maintain this fiction, and watching them talk about Iran in such a way that was, again, every kind of terrorist cartoon, every “war on terror” framing, ticking time bomb…. Again, it doesn’t have to make any sense. It’s supposed to just be vaguely racist and vaguely feels true.
But the question in a lot of these panels was like, “What’s the best way to overthrow the regime?” You’d have a liberal on being like, “Well, we need to do the kind of meddling NED stuff and promote groups and this and that, and maybe even arm some ethnic minority groups, and maybe some Kurdish rebels.” And they’re openly just discussing how you overthrow a government.
It’s like, well, OK, so you see them as being illegitimate, can you just provide a list of the legitimate and illegitimate governments for us, and then we can figure out how the US is supposed to take out all the illegitimate ones? The whole thing is so casually chauvinist and casually imperial, they don’t even think about what they’re doing.
JJ: Exactly. Well, where do you see hope, as you are still contributing to media? You believe in journalism; where do you see daylight?
AJ: You know, I don’t. I think social media helps in some ways. Obviously I think it democratized how people receive news coming out of Gaza, but even that’s been manipulated. They see social media CEOs get dragged in front of Congress, and they get disciplined under the auspices of fighting polarization or hate speech or fake news, but it’s all to prevent media that doesn’t fall within that national security directive, quite explicitly.
So I don’t know. I think those algorithms are easily manipulated. I think that the ways in which, even though very few people actually read the New York Times editorial board or watch the Sunday shows, but the ways in which those ideological, agenda-setting institutions still manage to trickle down, and promote seriousness and the concept of seriousness and what is serious and what isn’t, is still very effective. And I don’t really see that changing anytime soon.
JJ: Corporate news media are so many steps removed from human understanding, but they convey so powerfully the air that this is how smart people think. And you can think differently, but that will make you marginal. And even critics are stuck at, like, “don’t drop bombs.” And it becomes this very stale, rehearsed conversation, and we already know where it leads.
And what corporate media won’t do is show the vigor and the work and the intelligence of diplomacy. Media could make peacemaking a heroic effort. Kristi Noem could cosplay as a negotiator. They could sell a different story if they wanted to, is my feeling. So I don’t feel like journalism per se is broken. I feel like it’s being mal-used.
Joy Reid (with Jamie Metzl) on CNN (6/25/25)
AJ: Yeah, I think to the extent to which they have done that, there’s been people saying, “Oh, the Obama deal was working.” And that’s true to an extent, but the Obama deal was still predicated on a totally arbitrary and unfair sanctions regime that is not applied to other countries. But it is correct that it was working, I mean, if one assumes that “working” is Iran not having enriched uranium. So there were some people saying that.
And Joy-Ann Reid I would like to highlight as someone who did a good job pushing back on a lot of the stuff on CNN. She was fired because of her reporting on Gaza at MSNBC. But she’s reappeared as a pundit on CNN to, I guess, play devil’s advocate, as it were. And she’s done a tremendous job, actually, going on CNN and punching down these idiots. That was kind of nice to see. It’s very rare, though. Who knows if they’ll ask her back after that.
But the debate is like, “how much should we sanction Iran?” on the far left end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is “should we go for regime change and kill hundreds of thousands of people?” Instead of saying, well, OK, if we do believe in these high-minded liberal concepts of an international rules-based order, then why don’t we go back to the drawing table and come up with rules, and actually apply them equally? Come up with a system where the US allies and US client states and to a great extent the US—which of course doesn’t sign a bunch of different treaties, cluster munitions, the ICC, the International Criminal Court—why don’t we come up with an actual rules-based order, instead of just whatever the US State Department and its buddies in Tel Aviv and Riyadh think?
That would be something that would maybe be worth pursuing, but it’s not. It’s this kind of weird, zombie, fake-consistent order, where if you’re deemed as being hostile to US and Israeli and Saudi security architecture in the Middle East, you are seen as per se ontologically evil, and in urgent need of disciplining, and in urgent need of either regime change or bombing or crippling sanctions that ruin your economy.
And that’s just taken for granted. And this is not particularly liberal or very thoughtful or very worldly. It’s knee jerk. It’s chauvinist. It’s obviously oftentimes racist, and that’s what narrows the debate. There’s no sense that we should apply any of these standards to any other country.
JJ: All right then. Well, we’ll end there for now. We’ve been speaking with media analyst Adam Johnson. He’s co-host, with Nima Shirazi, of the podcast Citations Needed. His substack is called the Column, and his work on Iran and other issues, co-authored with Sarah Lazare, can be found at InTheseTimes.com. Thank you so much, Adam Johnson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AJ: Thank you.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Asia Pacific Report
A prominent academic has criticised the New Zealand coalition government for compromising the country’s traditional commitment to upholding an international rules-based order due to a “desire not to offend” the Trump administration.
Professor Robert Patman, an inaugural sesquicentennial distinguished chair and a specialist in international relations at the University of Otago, has argued in a contributed article to The Spinoff that while distant in geographic terms, “brutal violence in Gaza, the West Bank and Iran marks the latest stage in the unravelling of an international rules-based order on which New Zealand depends for its prosperity and security”.
Dr Patman wrote that New Zealand’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, emphasised partnership and cooperation at home, and, after 1945, helped inspire a New Zealand worldview enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and norms such as multilateralism.
“In the wake of Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, the National-led coalition government has in principle emphasised its support for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza and the need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank,” he wrote.
However, Dr Patman said, in practice this New Zealand stance had not translated into firm diplomatic opposition to the Netanyahu government’s quest to control Gaza and annex the West Bank.
“Nor has it been a condemnation of the Trump administration for prioritising its support for Israel’s security goals over international law,” he said.
Foreign minister Winston Peters had described the situation in Gaza as “simply intolerable” but the National-led coalition had little specific to say as the Netanyahu government “resumed its cruel blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza in March and restarted military operations there”.
Silence on Trump’s ‘Gaza ownership’
“Even more striking was the government’s silence on President Trump’s proposal to own Gaza with a view to evicting two million Palestinian residents from the territory and the US-Israeli venture to start the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in late May in a move which sidelined the UN in aid distribution and has led to the killing of more than 600 Palestinians while seeking food aid,” Dr Patman said.
While New Zealand, along with the UK, Australia, Canada and Norway, had imposed sanctions on two far-right Israeli government ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar ben Gvir, in June for “inciting extremist violence” against Palestinians — a move that was criticised by the Trump administration — it was arguably a case of very little very late.
“The Hamas terror attacks on October 7 killed around 1200 Israelis, but the Netanyahu government’s retaliation by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) against Hamas has resulted in the deaths of more than 56,000 Palestinians — nearly 70 percent of whom were women or children — in Gaza.
Over the same period, more than 1000 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank as Israel accelerated its programme of illegal settlements there.
‘Strangely ambivalent’
In addition, the responses of the New Zealand government to “pre-emptive attacks” by Israel (13-25 June) and Trump’s United States (June 22) against Iran to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities were strangely ambivalent.
Despite indications from US intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran had not produced nuclear weapons, Foreign Minister Peters had said New Zealand was not prepared to take a position on that issue.
Confronted with Trump’s “might is right” approach, the National-led coalition faced stark choices, Dr Patman said.
The New Zealand government could continue to fudge fundamental moral and legal issues in the Middle East and risk complicity in the further weakening of an international rules-based order it purportedly supports, “or it can get off the fence, stand up for the country’s values, and insist that respect for international law must be observed in the region and elsewhere without exception”.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Fame is fleeting. We may be a Facebook celebrity today with ‘likes’ in the six digits, only to find as time goes by that the balance is shifting daily as we fade into the oblivion from which we emerged. Pretty much the same phenomenon is discernible in regard to the attention paid historical events. Images blur, and then most slip out of consciousness. It seems especially pronounced these days. Forgetfulness, whether due to a studied attempt to suppress the past or the kicking-in of self-defense instincts on a mass scale, reminds us of George Orwell’s “memory hole’ in 1984. As Orwell understood when he created the “memory hole” concept, the erasure or sublimation of memory makes it easier to shape the present by controlling or editing history. Doing so also serves to preserve a mythic version of a country’s identity. Most broadly, a memory hole is any psychological mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing past events. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth made sure that its manipulations were complete and irreversible. What we experience today is something less draconian and directed. Memories do survive, but they usually are vague and distorted. They are prone to be blended into benign fable.
These thoughts about the transitory nature of things arose while perusing a collection of old clippings. Let’s consider some of them.
Image: ASCF News
Quemoy & Matsu yesterday; the Spratleys today.
In 1958, the PRC was an enemy. Nowadays, it is a competitor – at worst. However, too many in Washington’s corridors of power ‘need’ an enemy – for strategic, material or emotional reasons. Russia and/or Iran do not suffice. For China’s uniqueness lies in its potential – based on its very success – to challenge Americans’ atavistic article of faith that the United States is destined to serve as the world’s paramount power and leading light. America must beat the Chinese in order to confirm that foundational truth.
2. Crucial breakthroughs in anti-submarine technology – by the Soviets. As the “balance-of-terror” became institutionalized with the appurtenances of MAD, mental space opened for a fresh source of worry. Since the Pentagon & friends cannot tolerate a threat vacuum, anonymous reports started to appear which noted with alarm that the critical pillar of the deterrent triad composed of nuclear submarines carrying MIRVED missiles was in danger of being menaced by the Russkis’ development of diabolically capable attack submarines. The Cassandras claimed that their deployments gave Moscow an incentive to launch a first strike at a time of crisis.
Outcome? Nothing consequential. Sober analysis showed that the risk was inflated, our 20,000+ warhead arsenal was kept intact, and then the USSR disappeared from the strategic map. Now, of course, Putin is taken to be the avatar of Khrushchev, Russia’s hypersonic missiles are reason/excuse to accelerate our own $1 trillion upgrade, and nobody talks about submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) – much less their fanciful vulnerability. Yet, they are the ultimate factor ensuring the credibility of Mutual Assured Destruction.
There is no such thing as “nuclear superiority” between the great powers. The present ‘race’ to develop more refined missile delivery systems (which the Russian are ‘winning’) will not change that basic truth. For 75 years, military planners and analysts have bandied about a variety of ideas for ‘operationalizing’ nuclear weapons.
Fortunately, they never have been activated (TNWs a partial exception). No leader of a nuclear state has placed a hovering finger over the ‘button.’ Sanity ruled their thinking/emotions. That may now have changed given that sanity is no longer a requisite for being commander-in-chief of a nuclear power.
The one state that conceivably could use a nuclear explosive as a weapon of war is rabidly, fanatical Israel.
3. Fulda Gap. For decades, anyone with the slightest claim to expertise about national security and NATO was on intimate terms with the ‘Fulda gap.’ It refers to that portion of the North German plain that represented the shortest route for the Red Army to take on its way to the Channel. The term can have a strategic as well as a territorial definition. For the ‘gap’ also was the dividing line between the bulk of the American forces in Germany who were deployed south of it and the allied forces deployed mainly to the north of it. Hence, double vulnerability. Nightmare visions of 40 Soviet armored divisions pouring through the Fulda gap spawned several innovative ‘solutions.’ They included the deployment of thousands of tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) in Western European available to staunch an otherwise irresistible Soviet advance overwhelming outnumbered, conventionally armed NATO troops. That was a Kennedy/McNamara initiative. The TNWs were deployed; some are still in place. Fortunately, the notion that this first-use resort to n-weapons could be operationalized without setting off massive strategic exchanges was never tested. Of course, we now know that the Kremlin never contemplated such a suicidal assault – as did a few sane heads back then.Little has been learned, though. These days, the Pentagon and NATO routinely sound the alarm that Putin’s truncated Russia poses a similar threat – despite the loss of all its Warsaw Pact allies and its Eastern European bases, despite NATO’s advance deployments to the Russian borders with Poland, the Baltics, and Finland — despite the inconvenient geographical fact that Russia’s army is 1,000 kilometers farther away from the Fulda gap. That army took three years to gain a decisive advantage over NATO’s Ukrainian auxiliaries. Moreover, there is no conceivable motive for such a crackpot move. For Russians to reach the Fulda Gap these days, they depend on tour coaches. Nobody uses the term ‘Fulda Gap’ in Washington. It’s too awkward for our war planners, but the mentality survives and thrives. History can repeat itself: first as drama, then as farce.
4. Fantasy Provocations. In 1846, many American eyed enviously the Mexican territories North and West of the Rio Grande and Baja. Texans, who were still digesting the large morsel of real estate they had torn from Santa Ana, where among them – out of pure greed, and to gain ‘strategic depth’ I suppose. President James Polk, egged on by other hawkish empire-builders among the country’s political elite, was gung-ho for conquest. He was just looking for an excuse. There being none: he fabricated one. After Texas’ accession to the Union, a crisis was created by the Texans’ demand that the border be moved south from the Nueces River to the Rio Grande (lebensraum). When Mexican President Herrera balked, Polk ordered General (later President) Zachary Taylor to invade the disputed zone. Months later, the Mexicans dared to defend their territory. Polk raged that Mexico had “invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil” – and sent to Congress an already drafted declaration of war.
Public opinion was divided (among the vocal opponents was Congressman Abraham Lincoln), but the motto Manifest Destiny and the willful Washington government triumphed. We invaded Mexico, defeated them, occupied Mexico City and forced them to hand over the vast territory that ran to the Pacific. Probably the biggest land grab in history. Hence, Hollywood, Santa Fe, and Los Vegas.
Greenland’s Destiny is now Manifest — in the eyes of the American Presidency. So, too, Canada.
In 1898, a vigorous America feeling its oats began flexing its muscles – in Central America, in the Caribbean, in the Pacific Basin. McKinley was President. Expansionists fixed a covetous eye on the residual Spanish possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico and – farther afield – the Philippine Islands. Spain was a decaying state whose tattered bits of empire scattered around the globe it could not defend. All that the United States needed to take them over was an excuse. As in 1848, they manufactured one. Many of us still “remember the Maine” – the U.S. flagged ship that blew up in Havana Harbor. The U.S. accused the colonial authorities there of deliberately destroying the ship. There was no plausible reason for them to do so – but it wasn’t reason that prevailed. Historians have established beyond a doubt that the Maine was sunk by an explosion that was caused by a spontaneous combustion of grain stored in its hull. No more than there was reason to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 or the aluminum tubes were the crucial ingredients of his non-existence nuclear weapons program. The outcome of the Spanish-American War: we got the dubious places we prized. We suppressed a 6-year Philippino resistance to our occupation that left about 400,000 ‘natives’ dead and devastated the country, and 40 years later, we were gone. Teddy Roosevelt rode his fame as leader of the ‘Rough Riders’ into the White House.In Panama, too, they speak Spanish.
In 1958, we embarked on an uncannily similar performance in Indochina. That gruesome story has many chapters, punctuated in the end by humiliation and failure. The most notable repeat element was the artful fabrication of an incident that was exploited as an excuse for war: the infamous Tonkin Gulf encounter. The short version is simple. Senior Washington officials, led by Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, were pressing very hard for a massive escalation of the American military intervention. JFK resisted the pressure and documentary evidence now suggests that he indeed reached the tentative conclusion to begin a withdrawal after the 1964 election. LBJ was also hesitant, but more ambivalent and in a weaker political position. McNamara and Bundy in fact sent Johnson a written ultimatum: either take the measures we are advocating, or we will denounce you as a weakling on national security during the upcoming campaign. It was a proposal that he could not refuse. So, the hunt for an excuse that would sway public opinion and justify a major war in Asia was on. It was found in a naval incident off the coast of North Vietnam. The official story was that an American vessel had been fired on by a Vietnamese gunboat. That was beefed-up as the casus belli for the disproportionate American retaliation which produced millions of casualties (mostly civilian) in all of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and among American forces (58,000 killed). The rest is a matter of record.
So, keep a gimlet eye on the Persian Gulf. Then again, recent events tell us that these days we don’t need a contrived excuse to attack a sovereign country on the other side of the world that poses no threat to the United States.
6. 50 METRICS
In November-December 2009, President Obama found himself in a dilemma. It was the failure of the American project to foster a friendly, democratic Afghanistan. The enormous investment of military forces, cash and political advice had not paid the expected dividends. The Kabul government was incompetent, corrupt and riddled by warlord rivalry. The Taliban insurgency, spurred back to life by the ham-handed occupation, was thriving. The counter-insurgency was stymied in a stalemate. Obama’s instincts pointed him towards a lowering of the United States’ profile in acceptance that our goals were unreachable. However, no one in the administration’s national security team shared this sentiment – except for Vice-President Biden.
Under the guidance of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the resisters formed a cabal to prevent Obama from acting on his instincts. It included Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullin, CIA Director David Petraeus, our newly appointed commander in Afghanistan Stanley McCrystal and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She was selected to act as the ‘frontman’ for political reasons that included her personal standing with the President. They pressed hard for a different strategy that entailed an expansion of the residual reduced force in country by some 35,000 and a doubling down on our commitment to pre-existing objectives. Obama set aside his misgivings and yielded to the pressure. To cover himself, he took three exceptional steps. One, he lowered the size of the escalation. Two, he composed an elaborate, quasi-legal document that spelled out the terms and conditions of the strategy. It stipulated the sequence of actions and set deadlines. All of the main protagonists were obliged to sign what was a strange sort of pre-nuptial contract. Finally, Obama included 50 metrics by which to measure progress/success in the strategy’s implementation. That was done in order to avoid the fudging of future assessments and serve as benchmarks for later decisions. The punditry and the media made much of the 50 metrics which were broadly viewed as a sign of the President’s diligence and rigorous, lawyerly mind. That lasted for about 10 days. The metrics never again were to be mentioned in any public setting – or, as far as we know – in any private setting either.
11 years and 3 administrations later, the war went on. Trump talked about a withdrawal – sort of. We didn’t leave. Desultory ‘peace’ talks between the Taliban and the debile Kabul government (complicated by the intrusion of ISIS fighters) meandered. So, were back to Richard Holbrooke’s definition of success: “We’ll know it when we see it.” For the Pentagon, ‘success’ was primarily a matter of ensuring that history doesn’t place an ‘L’ in the U.S. military’s record book. In the last weeks of his first administration, Trump conceded defeat. The chaotic withdrawal, totally mismanaged by the Pentagon, took pace under Biden. He was blamed.
Digits and statistics and equations and algorithms are the last (or first) refuge of somebody either trying to pull the wool over your eyes – or really not knowing the subject he is talking about.
The ignominious flight from the 19-year Afghan debacle put paid to the COIN/Nation Building/Democracy Promotion phase of the post-Cold War strategy for maximizing American global influence. It had been a three-pronged project now reduced to what always had been the two main elements: coercive force, and covert operations. The ‘best-of-intentions’ cover that the former provided continued to serve as propaganda tool for cudgeling hostile states on human rights grounds. However, the ranks of the true believers were reduced to a few naïve idealists.
Outright coercion has been employed with growing audacity: Syria, Libya, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon (where it succeeded) as well as Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen (where it failed). Covert operations are employed with the same audacity spanning the globe – producing similar mixed results: Ukraine, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Pakistan (successful); Venezuela, Georgia, Belarus, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Mali (where it failed). This propensity for trying to dictate the political leadership of other countries now has reached its logical extremity in the outright voiding of election results that displease Washington: Romania being the outstanding example. This last is not as incongruent as it might seem; after all, this is what 50% of Americans, a majority of the ruling party, and a slice of the federal judiciary approve of/countenance when it comes to the violent insurrection of January 6.
7. The JCPOA Deal With Iran. Within hours of signing the historic, laboriously constructed agreement, President Obama said:
With respect to Iran, it is a great civilization, but it also has an authoritarian theocracy in charge that is anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, sponsors terrorism, and there are a whole host of real profound differences that we [have with them].
Later:
Questions have been raised about whether we have sufficient options for dealing with Iranian violations of the deal. In fact, we have a wide range of unilateral and multilateral responses that we can employ should Iran fail to meet its commitments. First and foremost, as you are aware, the snap back provision we secured in the UN Security Council is unprecedented. If at any time the United States believes Iran has failed to meet its commitments, no other state can block our ability to snap back those multilateral sanctions. Second, we and our European partners can snap our own sanctions back into place at any time should Iran fail to meet its commitments. This gives us, as well as our European partners, enormous leverage in holding Iran to its commitments under the JCPOA. Third, we also enjoy a range of other, more incremental options. These include re-imposing certain US. sanctions, and working with our European partners to do the same, as we have done in the past. Fourth, we can employ our leverage in the mechanisms agreed to with our negotiating partners, such as through the Joint Commission’s role in the procurement channel established in the JCPOA this is a mechanism Iran must use under the deal for the procurement of any materials designed for a peaceful nuclear program and in which we have the ability to block approval. Ultimately, it is essential that we retain the flexibility to decide what responsive measures we and our allies deem appropriate for any non-compliance. Telegraphing in advance to Iran the expected any potential infractions would be counterproductive, potentially lessening the deterrent effect.
— Letter to Representative Nadler
Obama was echoed by Secretary of State John Kerry:
Through these steps and others, we will maintain international pressure on Iran. United States sanctions imposed because of Tehran’s support for terrorism and its human rights record – those will remain in place, as will our sanctions aimed at preventing the proliferation of ballistic missiles and transfer of conventional arms. The UN Security Council prohibitions on shipping weapons to Hizballah, the Shiite militias in Iraq, the Houthi rebels in Yemen – all of those will remain as well….
Have no doubt. The United States will oppose Iran’s destabilizing policies with every national security tool available. And disregard the myth. The Iran agreement is based on proof, not trust. And in a letter that I am sending to all the members of Congress today, I make clear the Administration’s willingness to work with them on legislation to address shared concerns about regional security consistent with the agreement that we have worked out with our international partners.
Reply: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, [said] Washington sought Iran’s “surrender”. “The [arrogant] Americans say they stopped Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” Khamenei said. “They know it’s not true. We had a fatwa (religious ruling), declaring nuclear weapons to be religiously forbidden under Islamic law. It had nothing to do with the nuclear talks.”
Neither Obama nor Trump complied with the JCPOA’s provisions calling for the lifting of economic sanctions including release of Iranian financial assets frozen in American banks. Iran did comply with its treaty commitments vis the IAEA (which predictably passed on the information to American Intelligence and military planners — a practice that continued to last week). This pattern is reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s reneging on the deal with North Korea in the 1990s.
This depiction of Iran has had two profound effects. First, it closed off the possibility of pursuing a wider détente with Iran that could permit diplomatic resolution of outstanding regional conflicts. Second, this characterization was grist for the mill for all those opposed to any normalization of relations between Washington and Tehran. Thereby, it created political circumstances that encouraged Trump’s withdrawal from the treaty and then led President Biden to take a hardline approach to a restoration of our participation. By insisting on the same, unacceptable preconditions that his predecessor demanded, Biden in effect followed the course laid down by Trump – as enabled by Obama.
Now we suffer the inevitable denouement.
Why Memory?
Each of these episodes in collective forgetfulness has its singular features, as do the lessons to be drawn from them. If we were to indulge ourselves in generalization, they could be summarized this way:
1. The erasure or blurring of past events is common and easily accomplished.
2. Doing so often is a matter of political convenience.
3. The lessons we draw from them are normally self-serving, selective and partial.
4. Retrieving with accuracy memories of those past events is technically quite simple; psychologically, it takes great willpower
The failure of collective memory can exact a very heavy penalty.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Rather than condemning this blatant violation of international law, US corporate media commentators gushed over what the Boston Globe (6/24/25) called a “brilliant military operation.” The Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) gave President Donald Trump “credit…for meeting the moment.”
To the New York Times’ Bret Stephens (6/22/25), Trump made “a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect.” “The president acted before it was too late,” he wrote. “It is the essence of statesmanship.”
For the Washington Post’s Max Boot (6/25/25), it’s “good news…that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”
The post Media Celebrate International Aggression Against Iran appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
A notorious British MI6 agent infiltrated the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on London’s behalf, according to leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone. The agent, Nicholas Langman, is a veteran intelligence operative who claims credit for helping engineer the West’s economic war on Iran.
Langman’s identity first surfaced in journalistic accounts of his role in deflecting accusations that British intelligence played a role in the death of Princess Diana. He was later accused by Greek authorities of overseeing the abduction and torture of Pakistani migrants in Athens.
In both cases, UK authorities issued censorship orders forbidding the press from publishing his name. But Greek media, which was under no such obligation, confirmed that Langman was one of the MI6 assets withdrawn from Britain’s embassy in Athens.
The post Spying On Iran: How MI6 Infiltrated The IAEA appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
By actively partnering with the U.S. government to smuggle communications hardware into Iran, Elon Musk is once again aiding Washington’s attempts at regime change. This fits into a long pattern of both American efforts to dislodge the government in Tehran and Musk’s close collaboration with the U.S. national security state, helping it to achieve its objectives around the world.
For decades, Washington has sought to overthrow the government in Tehran. Today, its most important ally in that effort may not be in the CIA or Pentagon, but in Silicon Valley.
Elon Musk, through his Starlink satellite system, is now helping to smuggle thousands of communication terminals into Iran, enabling opposition networks to evade government restrictions and coordinate in secret.
The post How Elon Musk Is Powering A Covert Campaign Against Iran appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Aggression is widely understood as the most serious form of the illegal use of force under international law. At the post–World War II Nuremberg Trials, British Judge Norman Birkett said:
To initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 lists seven acts that constitute aggression, including:
In a clear instance of such aggression, 125 US military aircraft (along with a submarine) unleashed 75 weapons against Iran on June 21, including 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs), each of which weighs 30,000 pounds (BBC, 6/23/25). The MOPs are the most powerful non-nuclear weapons in the US arsenal (Democracy Now!, 6/23/25).
The New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (6/22/25) acknowledged that US intelligence maintained that “Iran’s leaders had not yet decided to build a bomb”—but he argued that to act “amid uncertainty…is the essence of statesmanship.”
Rather than condemning this blatant violation of international law, US corporate media commentators gushed over what the Boston Globe (6/24/25) called a “brilliant military operation.” The Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) gave President Donald Trump “credit…for meeting the moment.”
To the New York Times’ Bret Stephens (6/22/25), Trump made “a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect.” “The president acted before it was too late,” he wrote. “It is the essence of statesmanship.”
For the Washington Post’s Max Boot (6/25/25), it’s “good news…that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”
Rather than toasting aggression, these observers could have used their platforms to try to help foster a political climate that prioritizes peace and the international legal principles that could help create a less violent world.
Meanwhile, some opinion mongers thought the US was at risk of insufficiently violating international law. The Post’s editorial board (6/22/25) said Trump
should ensure that Iran’s nuclear program is demolished, as he appeared to claim it was on Saturday. This would mean the destruction of the targeted sites plus any residual weapons-building capacity.
In other words, the authors are glad that the US bombed Iran in violation of international law, and think it might be best to do more of the same.
A Journal editorial (6/23/25) put forth a similar view, warning that Trump will “squander” any “gains” that the US and Israel may have made against Iran if he “lets Iran take a breather, retain any enriched uranium it has secretly stored, and then rearm. But the last fortnight creates a rare opportunity for a more peaceful Middle East.” I’m not a big Orwell fan, but there’s something to his vision of the propaganda slogan “war is peace.”
Iran “now knows Mr. Trump isn’t bluffing,” the Wall Street Journal (6/22/25) wrote. Does the paper imagine that Iran thought Trump was “bluffing” when he assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the nation’s top military leader, in 2020?
These celebrations of bomb-dropping occur in an upside-down world, where Iran is an aggressor against the United States. One form of this lie is accusing Iran of wantonly killing Americans or seeking to do so. The Journal (6/22/25) cited “1,000 Americans killed by Iran-supplied roadside bombs and other means”—referring to the dubious claim that Iran is responsible for US soldiers killed during the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (Progressive, 1/7/20). Thus, to the editors, “Mr. Trump had to act to stop the threat in front of him to protect America.”
For Boot (6/22/25), Iran is a “predator” that the United States and Israel “will still have to deal with…for years to come.”
It would be nice to be able to assess the evidence for these allegations, but the authors don’t so much as hint at any. What is well documented, though, is that the US has been the aggressor in its longrunning war with Iran.
The US ruling class initiated the conflict by overthrowing Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 (NPR, 2/7/19), propping up the Shah’s torture regime for 26 years (BBC, 6/3/16; AP, 2/6/19), sponsoring the Iraqi invasion of Iran and helping Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran (Foreign Policy, 8/26/13), supporting Israel’s years-long campaign of murdering Iranian scientists (Responsible Statecraft, 12/21/20), and asphyxiating Iran’s civilian population through economic sanctions (Human Rights Watch, 10/29/19).
In other words, the US has been prosecuting a war against the Iranian people for more than 70 years, and Iran hasn’t done anything remotely comparable to the US, but the corporate media pretends that the inverse is true.
The consent manufacturers went even further, characterizing Iran as a threat to the world more generally. The Journal (6/22/25) said “Iran has been waging regional and terrorist war for decades,” and that “the world is safer” because the US bombed the country. Stephens proclaimed the Iranian government “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” a claim Boot (6/25/25) echoed, writing that the nation has a “decades-long track record as the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism.” Sickeningly, Antony Blinken (New York Times, 6/24/25), a leading architect of the genocide of Gaza’s civilian population, called Iran “a leading state sponsor of terrorism; a destructive and destabilizing force via its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq.”
As usual, none of these writers bothered to say which acts of “terrorism” Iran has backed, never mind provide proof. Of course, if one wanted to make a serious argument that Iran has won the planet’s “state sponsor of terrorism” gold medal, then it would be necessary to show how they trumped, say, US support for Al Qaeda in Syria. For such a case to be convincing, it would furthermore be necessary to assess where bankrolling a genocide ranks in the terror-sponsoring Olympics.
Max Boot (Washington Post, 6/25/25): “The good news is that both Israel and the United States showed they can bombard Iranian nuclear facilities and other targets at will.”
In the fantasy world where Iran is a grave danger to the US and indeed the world, then wrongly implying that it has or is about to have nuclear weapons packs a heavier punch. The Journal (6/22/25) said, “President Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s three most significant nuclear sites on Saturday helped rid the world of a grave nuclear threat.” The editorial would later add, “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted a bomb more than peace.”
Boot (6/25/25) wrote that “preliminary Israeli intelligence assessments [of the US bombing of Iran] conclude that the damage to the Iranian nuclear weapons program was more extensive—enough to set back the program by several years.” Stephens began his piece:
For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.
As FAIR contributor Bryce Greene (6/23/25) recently demonstrated, there is no proof that Iran has nuclear weapons or is close to having any. Yet the op-ed pages are peppered with insinuations that Iran’s imaginary nukes legitimize the US’s aggression against the country.
A Boston Globe editorial (6/24/25) read:
After years of insisting it would not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, Israel followed through by launching a wide-ranging attack earlier this month, assassinating nuclear scientists and military leaders and destroying many sites associated with Iran’s decades-long nuclear program. Trump initially stayed on the sidelines, until Saturday when US bombers delivered the coup de grâce, destroying—or at least heavily damaging—a key underground site that only American bunker-buster bombs could reach….
Stopping Iran, whose unofficial national motto is “Death to America,’’ from gaining a nuclear weapon has rightly been a US priority for decades.
Iran’s nuclear program is now damaged but not destroyed.
What’s missing from this chatter is that, even if we lived in an alternate reality where Iran had nuclear weapons or was hours away from having them, attacking them on these grounds would not be legitimate. After all, international law does not grant states a right to attack each other on a preventive (Conversation, 6/18/25) or pre-emptive basis (Conversation, 6/23/25). This crucial point was entirely absent in the coverage I’ve discussed.
Also overlooked are the 90 nuclear warheads that Israel is believed to have, as well as the more than 5,200 that the US reportedly possesses, none of which apparently constitute “a grave nuclear threat,” even as it’s not Iran but the US and Israel that routinely carry out full-scale invasions and occupations of nations in West Asia.
Whether it’s Iran’s supposed support for terrorism or Iran’s nonexistent and non-imminent nuclear weapons, the propaganda follows the same formula: make an unsubstantiated claim about Iranian malfeasance, and use that as a premise on which to defend Washington openly carrying out acts of aggression, perhaps the gravest violation of international law.
If you want the US and Israel to stop killing and immiserating people in Iran, remember this pattern and get used to debunking it. Because, last week’s ceasefire notwithstanding, the US/Israeli war on Iran isn’t over.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
In this wide-ranging episode, we explore the United States’ surprise bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites, the ceasefire that followed, and the way Australia’s 24-hour silence morphed into a reflex endorsement of Washington’s strike.
Our analysis looks at how Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong framed the raid under the tired mantra of “alliance obligations”, even as experts warned the gamble could ignite a region-wide war which has been designed to prop up Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and the military-industrial complex. We track the media narrative that magnifies “Iranian aggression”, while treating Israel’s right to self-defence as gospel, highlighting the ABC’s decision to give Scott Morrison – now on the board of a major arms contractor – and disgraced bureaucrat Mike Pezzullo prime airtime without disclosing their conflicts of interest.
We test Australia’s claim to a “rules-based international order”, which essentially is rubber-stamp diplomacy that refuses even to name breaches by the United States or Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We ask whether Penny Wong has abandoned the national interest, comparing her record to past foreign-policy low-lights by Alexander Downer and Gareth Evans, and explore Ed Husic’s call for genuine balance as a rare sign of Labor spine. The Coalition’s Andrew Hastie demands transparency on Pine Gap and AUKUS – even though his own party stitched up the $380 billion submarine deal in total secrecy –revealing the bipartisan habit of saying one thing in opposition and another in power.
Will complacency threaten Labor’s huge post-2025 majority now that the “we don’t comment on national security matters” has returned as part of the political lexicon? And will failing to manage foreign-policy crises risk the same slow credibility bleed that started with the Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023. It didn’t cost Labor at the last election, but could it have an effect at the next one? Finally, we also look the Federal Court win for journalist Antoinette Lattouf – sacked by the ABC after reposting a Human Rights Watch report on Israel’s starvation tactics – showing how the Israel lobby still warps Australia’s public broadcasters.
#auspol
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The post The End Of The Rules Based International Order appeared first on New Politics.
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Officials in Kiev are seeking clarification on a US decision to halt a delivery of air defense munitions to Ukraine, which a White House spokesperson said was taken to “put America’s interests first.”
“We’re now checking with the Americans what’s really happening,” an anonymous Ukrainian official was cited as saying by the Washington Post on 2 July.
Other Ukrainian officials were “silent or declined to answer, and seem to have been caught by surprise by the news,” the report added.
The US Department of Defense announced halting shipments of air defense missiles and other precision munitions over concerns that stockpiles were running low.
The post Ukraine Demands Answers After US Halts Missile Shipments appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Iranians are waking up from what feels like a nightmare. For 12 days, Israel bombarded their country with missiles, air strikes, and drone attacks. It hit homes, hospitals, and offices, killing around 1,000 people. Thousands more were injured, and tens of thousands lost their homes. Parents have been left without children, and children without parents. One family lost 12 members in an…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On Friday, June 13, after Israeli airstrikes struck Iran, Iran launched a retaliatory barrage of missiles at Israel, hitting targets in Tel Aviv. Palestinians watched Iran’s bombs fall on Israel from across the militarized border separating the Gaza Strip from Israel. The Real News Network spoke with Palestinians on the ground in Gaza, who continue to endure genocidal violence and forced starvation at the hands of Israel, about their reactions to Iran’s airstrikes.
Credits:
Producers: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographers: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt
TEXT SLIDE:
On Friday, June 13, after Israeli airstrikes struck Iran, Iran launched a retaliatory barrage of missiles at Israel, hitting targets in Tel Aviv.
Palestinians watched Iran’s bombs fall on Israel from across the militarized border separating the Gaza Strip from Israel. The Real News spoke with Gazans, who continue to endure genocidal violence and forced starvation at the hands of Israel, about their reactions to Iran’s airstrikes.
RADIO REPORT:
It has been en route for one hour and will land in a few moments, and emotions are high, not just in support but because of Israel’s actions.
RAJA NADA ABU HAJAR:
May God bless them. First and foremost. Iran. Because they have stood with the Palestinians. May God stand with all of us and end the war on us both. I saw them. What did you see? I saw the missiles going across, here. What did you feel? I saw them! What did you feel? We felt joy! May God give them victory over all who fight them! Everyone felt happy. People were shouting with joy, that someone is defending Palestine. That there’s someone who stands with us.
IMAD HARB DAWAS:
The war between Israel and Iran is a private war between Israel and Iran. Nuclear reactors, uranium enrichment… Whoever thinks that Iran is going to war for the people of Palestine is confused. This war has other military dimensions, a war between Israel and Iran. Of course, we saw the missiles, and we and all the people were hopeful, that the military pressure— of course, our poor people are confused, they hope for an end to the war. The missiles represented hope: that maybe the war on Gaza might finally end.
JALIL MUSTAFA REZG FIRDAWS:
Honestly I felt, please God, just push Israel back a bit. That they might leave us alone, a little. My one and only hope is to go and sit on top of the ruins of my house, nothing more. I want nothing. Just to sit on the ruins of my house. That’s it. Killing, death, hunger and displacement. Evacuated from here to there. They’ve gone to war with Iran and forgotten about us. We don’t know our fate, what’s going to happen to us?
RAJA NADA ABU HAJAR:
You leave your home not knowing if you will find the rest of your family alive or dead. You leave thinking maybe there will be a strike on the street and you’ll die. This war is not normal: It’s total destruction, not war. War is not like this. We experienced many wars, but we never saw anything like this.
IMAD HARB DAWAS:
The Israelis are deliberately starving us. They cut off the internet, so we couldn’t communicate to the rest of the world about the starvation, it’s a war on journalists and on journalism everywhere. Air traffic over Iran and Israel in the wake of escalation is now almost non-existent.
JALIL MUSTAFA REZG FIRDAWS:
Honestly the lack of internet has had a big impact on us. We want the world to hear our voices, to see us. We want the world to see us in reality, not just on the news. No: We want
those outside to see how we’re living. We don’t want them to see fabricated news reports. We need the internet to also hear the news from outside. Just like the world should hear us, we want to hear what’s happening in the world: Who is standing with us, who isn’t? Who’s defending us, who isn’t? Where is the Arab world?
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
In March, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, began receiving top secret messages from national security officials in the Trump administration after he’d been inadvertently added to an internal Signal chat. Many of those same officials oversaw recent military strikes against Iran. On this week’s More To The Story, host Al Letson sits down with Goldberg to discuss what “Signalgate” taught him about the Trump White House and his concerns for the future of American democracy.
Producer: Josh Sanburn, with help from Steven Rascón, Artis Curiskis, and Julia Haney | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Listen: In Fallujah, We Destroyed Parts of Ourselves (Reveal)
Read: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans (The Atlantic)
Read: All the Ways Trump Officials Are Downplaying the “War Plans” Group Chat (Mother Jones)
Read: New Report: Trump Administration Just Got Hit With Another Signal Chat Scandal (Mother Jones)
This post was originally published on Reveal.
Although there is a temporary “ceasefire” in the U.S./Israeli effort to destroy Iran, many groups internationally are determined to stay mobilized. The horrific genocide in Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank, continues, as do plots against Iran.
There were more than 65 actions around the world listed on the website of the United National Antiwar Coalition, based on a call from Global Resistance for a week of actions June 21 to 28. Internationally actions were held in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Germany, India, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Sweden. Across Canada there were multiple actions, from Vancouver to Hamilton, Ontario.
In the U.S. the week of actions stretched coast to coast.
The post Actions In 70 US Cities: ‘Hands Off Iran And West Asia! Free Palestine!’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Asia Pacific Report
In the new weekly political podcast, The Bradbury Group, last night presenter Martyn Bradbury talked with visiting Palestinian journalist Dr Yousef Aljamal.
They assess the current situation in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and what New Zealand should be doing.
As Bradbury, publisher of The Daily Blog, notes, “Fourth Estate public broadcasting is dying — The Bradbury Group will fight back.”
Gaza crisis and Iran tensions. Video: The Bradbury Group/Radio Waatea
Also in last night’s programme was featured a View From A Far Podcast Special Middle East Report with former intelligence analyst Dr Paul Buchanan and international affairs commentator Selwyn Manning on what will happen next in Iran.
Political Panel:
Māori Party president John Tamihere,
NZ Herald columnist Simon Wilson
NZCTU economist Craig Renney
Topics:
– The Legacy of Tarsh Kemp
– New coward punch and first responder assault laws — virtue signalling or meaningful policy?
– Cost of living crisis and the failing economy
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting the United States next week to meet with President Donald Trump and other top officials in the U.S. administration, supposedly to “capitalize on the success” of the 12-day war against Iran. This comes after nearly 21 months of Israel’s war on Gaza that has killed at least 56,000 Palestinians, with daily violence only increasing.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges
Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end.
I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde.
Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933.
It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in the Second World War. German soldiers used food, as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps.
“There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.
This tactic is as old as warfare itself.
Ordered to shoot
The report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Israeli soldiers are ordered to shoot into crowds of Palestinians at aid hubs, with 580 killed and 4,216 wounded, is not a surprise. It is the predictable denouement of the genocide, the inevitable conclusion to a campaign of mass extermination.
Israel, with its targeted assassinations of at least 1400 health care workers, hundreds of United Nations (UN) workers, journalists, police and even poets and academics, its obliteration of multi-story apartment blocks wiping out dozens of families, its shelling of designated “humanitarian zones” where Palestinians huddle under tents, tarps or in the open air, its systematic targeting of UN food distribution centers, bakeries and aid convoys or its sadistic sniper fire that guns down children, long ago illustrated that Palestinians are regarded as vermin worthy only of annihilation.
The blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, is reducing Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they must crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they are stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This is by intent.
Yousef al-Ajouri, 40, explained to Middle East Eye his nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The hubs are not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south.
Israel, which on Sunday again ordered Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, is steadily expanding its annexation of the coastal strip. Palestinians are corralled like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points which are overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They receive, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food.
Al-Ajouri, who before the genocide was a taxi driver, lives with his wife, seven children and his mother and father in a tent in al-Saraya, near the middle of Gaza City. He set out to an aid hub at Salah al-Din Road near the Netzarim corridor, to find some food for his children, who he said cry constantly “because of how hungry they are.”
On the advice of his neighbour in the tent next to him, he dressed in loose clothing “so that I could run and be agile.” He carried a bag for canned and packaged goods because the crush of the crowds meant “no one was able to carry the boxes the aid came in.”
Massive crowds
He left at about 9 pm with five other men “including an engineer and a teacher,” and “children aged 10 and 12.” They did not take the official route designated by the Israeli army. The massive crowds converging on the aid point along the official route ensure that most never get close enough to receive food.
Instead, they walked in the darkness in areas exposed to Israeli gunfire, often having to crawl to avoid being seen.
“As I crawled, I looked over, and to my surprise, saw several women and elderly people taking the same treacherous route as us,” he explained. “At one point, there was a barrage of live gunfire all around me. We hid behind a destroyed building. Anyone who moved or made a noticeable motion was immediately shot by snipers.
“Next to me was a tall, light-haired young man using the flashlight on his phone to guide him. The others yelled at him to turn it off. Seconds later, he was shot. He collapsed to the ground and lay there bleeding, but no one could help or move him. He died within minutes.”
He passed six bodies along the route who had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.
Al-Ajouri reached the hub at 2 am, the designated time for aid distribution. He saw a green light turned on ahead of him which signaled that aid was about to be distributed. Thousands began to run towards the light, pushing, shoving and trampling each other. He fought his way through the crowd until he reached the aid.
“I started feeling around for the aid boxes and grabbed a bag that felt like rice,” he said. “But just as I did, someone else snatched it from my hands. I tried to hold on, but he threatened to stab me with his knife. Most people there were carrying knives, either to defend themselves or to steal from others.
Boxes were emptied
“Eventually, I managed to grab four cans of beans, a kilogram of bulgur, and half a kilogram of pasta. Within moments, the boxes were empty. Most of the people there, including women, children and the elderly, got nothing. Some begged others to share. But no one could afford to give up what they managed to get.”
The US contractors and Israeli soldiers overseeing the mayhem laughed and pointed their weapons at the crowd. Some filmed with their phones.
“Minutes later, red smoke grenades were thrown into the air,” he remembered. “Someone told me that it was the signal to evacuate the area. After that, heavy gunfire began. Me, Khalil and a few others headed to al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat because our friend Wael had injured his hand during the journey.
“I was shocked by what I saw at the hospital. There were at least 35 martyrs lying dead on the ground in one of the rooms. A doctor told me they had all been brought in that same day. They were each shot in the head or chest while queuing near the aid center. Their families were waiting for them to come home with food and ingredients. Now, they were corpses.”
GHF is a Mossad-funded creation of Israel’s Defense Ministry that contracts with UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, run by former members of the CIA and US Special Forces. GHF is headed by Reverend Johnnie Moore, a far-right Christian Zionist with close ties to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
The organisation has also contracted anti-Hamas drug-smuggling gangs to provide security at aid sites.
As Chris Gunness, a former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) told Al Jazeera, GHF is “aid washing,” a way to mask the reality that “people are being starved into submission.”
Disregarded ICC ruling
Israel, along with the US and European countries that provide weapons to sustain the genocide, have chosen to disregard the January 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which demanded immediate protection for civilians in Gaza and widespread provision of humanitarian assistance.
Ha’aretz, in its article headlined “‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid” reported that Israeli commanders order soldiers to open fire on crowds to keep them away from aid sites or disperse them.
“The distribution centers typically open for just one hour each morning,” Haaretz writes. “According to officers and soldiers who served in their areas, the IDF fires at people who arrive before opening hours to prevent them from approaching, or again after the centers close, to disperse them. Since some of the shooting incidents occurred at night — ahead of the opening — it’s possible that some civilians couldn’t see the boundaries of the designated area.”
“It’s a killing field,” one soldier told Ha’aretz. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”
“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces,” the soldier explained, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”
He said the deployment at the aid sites is known as “Operation Salted Fish,” a reference to the Israeli name for the children’s game “Red light, green light.” The game was featured in the first episode of the South Korean dystopian thriller Squid Game, in which financially desperate people are killed as they battle each other for money.
Civilian infrastructure obliterated
Israel has obliterated the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza. It has reduced Palestinians, half a million of whom face starvation, into desperate herds. The goal is to break Palestinians, to make them malleable and entice them to leave Gaza, never to return.
There is talk from the Trump White House about a ceasefire. But don’t be fooled. Israel has nothing left to destroy. Its saturation bombing over 20 months has reduced Gaza to a moonscape. Gaza is uninhabitable, a toxic wilderness where Palestinians, living amid broken slabs of concrete and pools of raw sewage, lack food and clean water, fuel, shelter, electricity, medicine and an infrastructure to survive.
The final impediment to the annexation of Gaza are the Palestinians themselves. They are the primary target. Starvation is the weapon of choice.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, a strike by the US Air Force on three nuclear facilities in Iran authorized by President Donald Trump on June 22, was raucous and triumphant. But that depended on what company you were keeping. The mission involved the bombing of the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, and the uranium-conversion facility in Isfahan. The Israeli Air Force had already attacked the last two facilities, sparing Fordow for the singular weaponry available for the USAF.
The Fordow site was of particular interest, located some eighty to a hundred metres underground and cocooned by protective concrete. For its purported destruction, B-2 Spirit stealth bombers were used to drop GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator “bunker buster” bombs. All in all, approximately 75 precision-guided weapons were used in the operation, along with 125 aircraft and a guided missile submarine.
Trump was never going to be anything other than optimistic about the result. “Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images,” he blustered. “Obliteration is an accurate term!”
At the Pentagon press conference following the attack, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bubbled with enthusiasm. “The order we received from our commander in chief was focused, it was powerful, and it was clear. We devastated the Iranian nuclear program.” The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, was confident that the facilities had been subjected to severe punishment. “Initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction.” Adding to Caine’s remarks, Hegseth stated that, “The battle damage assessment is ongoing, but our initial assessment, as the Chairman said, is that all of our precision munitions struck where we wanted them to strike and had the desired effect.”
Resort to satellite imagery was always going to take place, and Maxar Technologies willingly supplied the material. “A layer of grey-blue ash caused by the airstrikes [on Fordow] is seen across a large swathe of the area,” the company noted in a statement. “Additionally, several of the tunnel entrances that lead into the underground facility are blocked with dirt following the airstrikes.”
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, also added his voice to the merry chorus that the damage had been significant. “CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted airstrikes.” The assessment included “new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”
Israeli sources were also quick to stroke Trump’s already outsized ego. The Israel Atomic Energy Commission opined that the strikes, combined with Israel’s own efforts, had “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir’s view was that the damage to the nuclear program was sufficient to have “set it back by years, I repeat, years.”
The chief of the increasingly discredited International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, flirted with some initial speculation, but was mindful of necessary caveats. In a statement to an emergency meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors, he warned that, “At this time, no one, including the IAEA, is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage at Fordow.” Cue the speculation: “Given the explosive payload utilised and extreme(ly) vibration-sensitive nature of centrifuges, very significant damage is expected to have occurred.”
This was a parade begging to be rained on. CNN and The New York Times supplied it. Referring to preliminary classified findings in a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment running for five pages, the paper reported that the bombing of the three sites had “set back the country’s nuclear program by only a few months”. The strikes had sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities, but they were not successful in precipitating a collapse of the underground buildings. Sceptical expertise murmured through the report: to destroy the facility at Fordow would require “waves of airstrikes, with days or even weeks of pounding the same spots.”
Then came the issue of the nuclear material in question, which Iran still retained control over. The fate of over 400 kg of uranium, which had been enriched to 60% purity, is unclear, as is the number of surviving or hidden centrifuges. Iran had already informed the IAEA on June 13 that “special measures” would be taken to protect nuclear materials and equipment under IAEA safeguards, a feature provided under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Any transfer of nuclear material from a safeguarded facility to another location, however, would have to be declared to the agency, something bound to be increasingly unlikely given the proposed suspension of cooperation with the IAEA by Iran’s parliament.
After mulling over the attacks for a week, Grossi revisited the matter. The attacks on the facilities had caused severe, though “not total” damage. “Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there.” Tehran could, “in a matter of months,” have “a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium.” Iran still had the “industrial and technological” means to recommence the process.
Efforts to question the thoroughness of Operation Midnight Hammer did not sit well with the Trump administration. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt worked herself into a state on any cautionary reporting, treating it as a libellous blemish. “The leaking of this alleged report is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” she fumed in a statement. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets.”
Hegseth similarly raged against the importance placed on the DIA report. In a press conference on June 26, he bemoaned the tendency of the press corps to “cheer against Trump so hard, it’s like in your DNA and in your blood”. The scribblers had to “cheer against the efficacy of these strikes” with “half-truths, spun information, leaked information”. Trump, for his part, returned to familiar ground, attacking any questioning narrative as “Fake News”. CNN, he seethed, had some of the dumbest anchors in the business. With malicious glee, he claimed knowledge of rumours that reporters from both CNN and The New York Times were going to be sacked for making up those “FAKE stories on the Iran Nuclear sites because they got it so wrong.”
A postmodern nonsense has descended on the damage assessments regarding Iran’s nuclear program, leaving the way clear for overremunerated soothsayers. But there was nothing postmodern in the incalculable damage done to the law of nations, a body of acknowledged rules rendered brittle and breakable before the rapacious legislators of the jungle.
The post Operation Midnight Hammer: Were Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Damaged? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The sudden claim of Iran being very close to a bomb (that seemingly jumped out of ‘nowhere’ to leave Americans puzzling how could it happen that – in the blink of eye, we are going to war – was subsequently refuted by IAEA Chief Grossi to CNN on 17 June (but only after the abrupt attack on Iran already had taken place):
“We did not have any evidence of a systematic effort [by Iran] to move to a nuclear weapon”, Grossi confirmed on CNN.
This statement drew the following riposte from Iran by its Foreign Ministry Spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei on 19 June:
“This is too late, Mr. Grossi – you obscured this truth in your absolutely biased report that was instrumentalized by E3/U.S. to craft a resolution with baseless allegation of [Iranian] ‘non-compliance’; the same resolution was then utilized, as a final pretext, by a genocidal warmongering regime to wage a war of aggression on Iran and to launch an unlawful attack on our peaceful nuclear facilities.
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The fighting between Israel and Iran, sparked by an illegal and entirely unprovoked attack by Israel, has abated for the moment. After the United States did what Israeli Prime Minister hoped it would do and bombed Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, including the one at Fordow with bunker buster weapons, U.S. President Donald Trump told Israel to stop its attacks and reinforced that order when Israel sent dozens of bombers toward Iran shortly after the ceasefire was enacted, claiming a response to two Iranian missiles.
The entire battle, fought on the basis of a fictional threat of Iran being close to acquiring a nuclear weapon, demonstrated how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can manipulate intelligence, politics, and ignorance in the U.S. to provoke American action.
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The Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi, expressed on 29 June his “doubt” that Israel will adhere to the ceasefire with Iran, indicating Tehran’s preparedness to respond to any violation.
The comments came during a phone call with Saudi Arabia’s Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman.
“We have serious doubts about the continuation of the ceasefire and are prepared to respond to any aggression,” Mousavi was quoted as telling the Saudi war chief.
“Israel and the United States have proven their lack of commitment to any international rules and norms,” he went on to say. “We did not initiate the war, but we responded to the aggressor with all our might and are prepared to deliver a decisive response in the event of repeated attacks.”
The post Iran’s Army Chief Expresses ‘Serious Doubts’ Israel Will Adhere To Ceasefire appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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Asia Pacific Report
Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark has warned the country needs to maintain its nuclear-free policy as a “fundamental tenet” of its independent foreign policy in the face of gathering global storm clouds.
Writing in a new book being published next week, she says “nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present.
“The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now sits at 89 seconds to midnight,” she says in the prologue to journalist and media academic David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior.
Writing before the US surprise attack with B-2 stealth bombers and “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, Clark says “the Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons”.
The Doomsday Clock references the Ukraine war theatre where “use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia”.
Also, the arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals, she says.
“North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity.”
‘Serious ramifications’
Clark, who was also United Nations Development Programme administrator from 2009 to 2017, a member of The Elders group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, and is an advocate for multilateralism and nuclear disarmament, says an outright military conflict between China and the United States “would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.”
She advises New Zealand to be wary of Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States.
“There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry,” Clark says.
“This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.
“Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development
of more lethal weaponry.”
In the face of the “current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.
Clark says that the years 1985 – the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 — and 1986 were critical years in the lead up to New Zealand’s nuclear-free legislation in 1987.
“New Zealanders were clear – we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”
Chronicles humanitarian voyage
The book Eyes of Fire chronicles the humanitarian voyage by the Greenpeace flagship to the Marshall Islands to relocate 320 Rongelap Islanders who were suffering serious community health consequences from the US nuclear tests in the 1950s.
The author, Dr David Robie, founder of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, was the only journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior in the weeks leading up to the bombing.
His book recounts the voyage and nuclear colonialism, and the transition to climate justice as the major challenge facing the Pacific, although the “Indo-Pacific” rivalries between the US, France and China mean that geopolitical tensions are recalling the Cold War era in the Pacific.
Dr Robie is also critical of Indonesian colonialism in the Melanesian region of the Pacific, arguing that a just-outcome for Jakarta-ruled West Papua and also the French territories of Kanaky New Caledonia and “French” Polynesia are vital for peace and stability in the region.
Eyes of Fire is being published by Little Island Press, which also produced one of his earlier books, Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific.
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This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
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By Bryan Manabat in Saipan
Advocacy groups in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) disrupted the US Department of Defense’s public meeting this week, which tackled proposed military training plans on Tinian, voicing strong opposition to further militarisation in the Marianas.
Members of the Marianas for Palestine, Prutehi Guahan and Commonwealth670 burst into the public hearing at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Garapan, chanting, “No build-up! No war!” and “Free, free, Palestine!”
As the chanting echoed throughout the venue on Wednesday, the DOD continued the proceedings to gather public input on its CNMI Joint Military Training proposal.
The US plan includes live-fire ranges, a base camp, communications infrastructure, and a biosecurity facility. Officials said feedback from Tinian, Saipan and Rota communities would help shape the final environmental impact statement.
Salam Castro Younis, of Chamorro-Palestinian descent, linked the military expansion to global conflicts in Gaza and Iran.
“More militarisation isn’t the answer,” Younis said. “We don’t need to lose more land. Diplomacy and peace are the way forward – not more bombs.”
Saipan-born Chamorro activist Anufat Pangelinan echoed Younis’s sentiment, citing research connecting climate change and environmental degradation to global militarisation.
‘No part of a war’
“We don’t want to be part of a war we don’t support,” he said. “The Marianas shouldn’t be a tip of the spear – we should be a bridge for peace.”
The groups argue that CJMT could make Tinian a target, increasing regional hostility.
“We want to sustain ourselves without the looming threat of war,” Pangelinan added.
In response to public concerns from the 2015 draft EIS, the DOD scaled back its plans, reducing live-fire ranges from 14 to 2 and eliminating artillery, rocket and mortar exercises.
Mark Hashimoto, executive director of the US Marine Corps Forces Pacific, emphasised the importance of community input.
“The proposal includes live-fire ranges, a base camp, communications infrastructure and a biosecurity facility,” he said.
Hashimoto noted that military lease lands on Tinian could support quarterly exercises involving up to 1000 personnel.
Economic impact concerns
Tinian residents expressed concerns about economic impacts, job opportunities, noise, environmental effects and further strain on local infrastructure.
The DOD is expected to issue a Record of Decision by spring 2026, balancing public feedback with national security and environmental considerations.
In a joint statement earlier this week, the activist groups said the people of Guam and the CNMI were “burdened by processes not meant to serve their home’s interests”.
The groups were referring to public input requirements for military plans involving the use of Guam and CNMI lands and waters for war training and testing.
“As colonies of the United States, the Mariana Islands continue to be forced into conflicts not of our people’s making,” the statement read.
“ After decades of displacement and political disenfranchisement, our communities are now in subservient positions that force an obligation to extend our lands, airspace, and waters for use in America’s never-ending cycle of war.”
They also lamented the “intense environmental degradation” and “growing housing and food insecurity” resulting from military expansion.
“Like other Pacific Islanders, we are also overrepresented disproportionately in the military and in combat,” they said.
“Meanwhile, prices on imported food, fuel, and essential goods will continue to rise with inflation and war.”
Republished from Pacific Island Times.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a truce between Israel and Iran following nearly two weeks of open warfare.
Israel began the war, launching a surprise offensive on June 13, with airstrikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, missile installations, and senior military and scientific personnel, in addition to numerous civilian targets.
In response, Iran launched a wave of ballistic missiles and drones deep into Israeli territory, triggering air raid sirens across Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba and numerous other locations, causing unprecedented destruction in the country.
What began as a bilateral escalation quickly spiraled into something far more consequential: a direct confrontation between the United States and Iran.
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