Category Archives: Iran

Iran, Israel, Nuclear, US Congress

Five Dollar Bill: Forget Canadian Spock, USA to Replace Abe with Bibi…….

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

“Since Friday, the world has been grieving the passing of Leonard Nimoy, with many touching tributes to the man best known for his role as Spock on “Star Trek” hitting the Internet over the weekend. Perhaps one of our favorites so far is happening in Canada, where Trekkies are “Spocking Fives” by putting images of Nimoy on the country’s $5 bill…………

SpockCanada
New Canadian

AbeLincoln –> NetanyahuLooney3                                                                                                      Proposed US change
NetanyahuLooney2
New face of GOP

My very own special incredible Congressional source is reporting that this Canadian move has inspired the U.S. Congress. If the Canucks can honor Mr. Spock (Nimoy) on the $5 bill, why not the US? So, she reports that a bi-partisan group of representatives and senators are getting ready to propose a similar U.S. move.  No, it has nothing to do with Spock.

Fresh from their verbal oral interaction with Benyamin Netanyahu last week, still in the grips of the afterglow, the law-makers will propose that the USA replace Abe Lincoln with Benyamin Netanyahu on the $5 bill. With the cost of living and ‘entertainment’ now so high in Washington, they claim, Abe Lincoln can’t buy you as much as he used to.

Americans will have the joy of carrying Bibi in their wallets, and even giving him back to the tune of $5-6 billion every year. Besides, it is a New Republican Party now, it needs a new symbolic and final break with its distant shameful and inconvenient past……….
Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
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Bullshit, Iran, Israel, Mossad, U.S. Congress

Meir Dagan of Mossad: ‘Chickenshit Spewed Bullshit at U.S. Congress’…….

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

“Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan lambasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a Channel 2 interview previewed Thursday, calling his speech before Congress “bullshit,” and charging that his policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians endangered the Zionist dream……… In a snippet from Dagan’s reaction to Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress on Tuesday — which he watched alongside a Channel 2 reporter — Dagan can be seen muttering at the screen “bullshit” after Netanyahu makes a point on Iran’s progress in its nuclear program………..”

So this former chief of the Mossad, like other top Israeli commanders, don’t think much of Benyamin Netanyahu. They call Chickenshit’s speech Bullshit. They would know: have been close enough to him to know, and maybe familiarity does breed contempt in this case.
As for members of the U.S. Congress (both houses): how can they tell? They have been acclamatised or desensitized to bullshit, they produce so much of it themselves………

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
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Iran, Israel, nuclear Iran, U.S. Foreign Policy, United Nations International Organizations

A Fatwa on the Nuclear Deal: What If……..

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

From the Netanyahu speech and the orgasmic reaction of the members of the U.S Congress, we have learned that it all has little to do with the nuclear issue as far as Israel and its Washington lobby are concerned. It is more about forcing a certain foreign policy path on the Obama administration so that it would try to force certain regional policies on Iran. Which means it is aimed at certain failure and increasing tensions in the Middle East, possibly leading to another war against yet another Muslim country. But Netanyahu has no intention of waging a futile war alone: he wants to drag the United States into it. Which might mean creating and inviting Shi’a extremists to open a second front against the West. Great, so much for the ‘war on terror’. 

What about the rest of the world? The Germans, Russians, French, Chinese, British, and billions of others who are not Netanyahu cheerleaders? The rest of the world that is not necessarily captive to moneyed American or Israeli lobbyists, powerful special interests, Rapture-obsessed evangelical Christian Zionists, and bigoted Las Vegas tycoons? Those who are truly concerned about the nuclear issue and have no other ‘foreign’ agenda imposed on them?
If they like ‘the deal’ but Washington is too afraid to accept it? They are likely to reject American dictates, which in that case would be Israeli dictates. The sanctions will get much weaker, since they will become even more unilaterally American. Can the extreme right wing in America, the half of the government that is a proxy for the extreme Israeli right wing, force its agenda and the Iran blockade on the rest of the industrial world? On the rest of the world? Highly unlikely………..

So my fatwa is that failure of the talks will very likely also weaken the Western blockade as well. So shall it be written, so shall it be done. Probably……

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
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Al-Qaeda, Arab Revolutions, Caliphate, Iran, Iraq, Syria, U.S. Foreign Policy

Fighters of ISIS: Soldiers, Wahhabis, Mullahs, and Crusaders………

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

“He’s best known for bankrolling Republicans Rick Santorum and Scott Walker afloat, but Foster Friess has a new cause a long way from D.C. Republican megadonor Foster Friess is shifting his sights from political campaigns to a military campaign: to fight ISIS and save Kurdish lives. Behind the scenes, the conservative Christian has been traveling to the Middle East to support the vulnerable Kurdish minority in Iraq, and then coming back to the U.S. to lobby for arming and training their militias, known as the Peshmerga. These forces are on the front lines of the war with ISIS……………”

Media and many politicians here (in the USA) have barely lost the afterglow of their Washington orgy with Benyamin Netanyahu. Now it is back to business: now they profess to be terribly worried about Iraq again. No, not worried about ISIS controlling so much territory. Not about the continued terrorist suicide bombings against civilians that kill and maim every day. They are not worried about ‘the war’ itself or about the people of Iraq (or Syria).

They are worried about the reported Iranian help to Iraqis against ISIS, specifically around Tikrit. Even as Western boots are on the ground, many more of them than we know. Even as Arab Wahhabi air forces fly over Iraq and Syria, bombing ISIS. Even as Wahhabi Arabs start hosting training facilities for more Wahhabi rebels in Syria. Even as jingoists like John McCain and other Likudniks in Washington call for even more robust American intervention, like an effective invasion of Syria.

And where do they get their ideas that the ‘region is seething’ at Iranian ‘intervention’ in Iraq? Not from the real masses of Arabs that stretch all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. No, from the very same Wahhabi Arab potentates who created Al-Qaeda and ISIS and from where Arab money and volunteers still flow through Turkey, and from the former Baathists in Iraq. They get them from princes and potentates of what Field Marshal Generalissimo Al Sisi, their own creation, called ‘half-states’.

The terrorists of ISIS and others have always claimed that Western intervention is a continuation of the Crusades. That is not true, not completely, not on the policy-making level. Now they can point out to this rich Christian-Salafi man and possibly others as proof that the West has no respect for Muslims even as it claims to free them from Jihadist terror. People like him should stay away, they only serve the propaganda of the Caliphate. The politicians that he owns should also stay away: they don’t know Middle East issues from the proverbial hole in the ground.

What next? Owner of the Republican Party Sheldon Adelson will start his own militia to liberate Arabs and Muslims? He can start on the West Bank………….

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
[email protected]

Iran, Mossad, Mujahideen Khalq, US Foreign Policy

Nuclear Mujahideen Khalq: Bequeathed by Saddam to the Mossad?……..

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

“On Tuesday, Feb. 24, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political front for the “cult-like dissident group” known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), revealed the location of what they claimed was an underground centrifuge facility in the suburbs of Tehran. The announcement was, evidently, intended to derail ongoing negotiations toward a diplomatic settlement over Tehran’s nuclear programs. The State Department spokesperson stated, “Well, we don’t have any information at this time to support the conclusion of the report.”………….”

It is like a secretive cult or sect that has its own Supreme Leaders, the Rajavi couple. The leadership of the movement moved to Paris in the early 1980s after the mullahs tightened their grip on power in Iran and started cracking down on their revolutionary partners. But the rank and file were soon gathered in camps in Iraq. They served Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War and Desert Storm and afterwards. 

After Saddam’s defeat they were apparently inherited by the Israeli Mossad, who probably recommended them to other friends. I suspect they are helpful when Iranian handprints are needed to implicate the mullahs overseas, usually when things are slow and the headlines are dormant (in Asia and other places). They are widely and credibly believed to have helped murder Iranian scientists and academics in Tehran (that would be called terrorism if the killings were in the West). They also help create fake nuclear ‘facts’ when needed, with maps and other tools.

Often they serve by creating false headlines by making false claims about the Iranian nuclear program, like secret sites. Networks like Fox and a couple of Arab (Saudi) outlets usually spread them. By the time it is realized that the claims were meaningless or unsubstantiated, it is too late and the headlines have traveled all around the world. Cute tactic but every little bit helps, no?

No wonder the Mossad leadership (even the IDF) often refute Netanyahu’s nuclear claims. Possibly they know quite well where some of the “proofs” of these claims came from and why.

The group have also learned what fuels the politics here. They pay huge sums of money for prominent American politicians, current and former pols and of both parties, to make meaningless speeches at their gatherings in Europe, usually Paris. Probably not bribes, not technically, but maybe tips. How else did they gather so much support to get lifted off the ‘terrorist group’ list?
Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
[email protected]

Iran, Israel, Nuclear, U.S. Congress

The Bibi Political Circus Hits Washington: Netanyahu’s Nuclear Looney Tunes………..

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

A polarizing figure, a celebrity, and a supremely opportunistic politician. Now he brings his circus into enemy territory: Washington DC. It has been a circus,a diplomatic and political and media circus these past few weeks. Of the kind that only a celebrity (in America) like Netanyahu could deliberately provoke and organize. Besides Israeli politics he also seeks to deliberately embarrass and disrespect the black man he probably detests the most: Barack Obama. He would never do that to a white president. He also knows the nuclear negotiations have their own logic, be they successful or not.

Folks at the White House consider him a ‘chickenshit’.

Many Democrats, be they Jewish or gentile, see him as either a chickenshit or just a political hustler following his only path to keeping his job. Most of them would not dare say so publicly. Some of them have already decided to throw Obama under the bus and attend the Netanyahu political rally.

Most Republicans see him as the man who will lead the Jewish people to a belated conversion to the old Jewish sect of Jesus Christ. At the time of the Rapture.

A couple of star-struck extreme American neoconservative groupies even have a form of man-crush on him. They have taken to comparing him to Churchill, evoking Munich and the Holocaust and all that.

Will he use his staple of Looney Tunes Road Runner WileCoyote cartoons again to illustrate the nuclear issue? It should be interesting when the the bull is spread and let us see how much of it sticks to the ceiling of the Capitol.

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
[email protected]

Iran, Israel, nuclear Iran, U.S. Congress, U.S. Foreign Policy

Netanyahu’s Good Arab Proverb: the Dogs Bark but Will the Caravan Move On?……..

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

“The Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Moves On: الكلاب تنبح والقافلة تسير” A very good Arab proverb.

“It is said that Israelis’ favorite philosopher is Spinoza. I approve. Iranian intellectuals are less able to speak their minds in Iran’s unfree media than their Israeli counterparts (though there is a price to too much frankness in Israel, as well), but one on one they are also level-headed and clear-eyed. I suspect Iranians’ favorite philosopher is Rumi. If so, again, I approve. In fact, I think Rumi and Spinoza would have gotten along famously. Unfortunately contemporary Iran and contemporary Israel don’t get along at all politically, which sets the stage for the Washington melodrama planned for March 3, when Israel’s belligerent prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, will address Congress in a bid to undermine President Obama’s diplomacy with Iran on their civilian nuclear enrichment program…………”

“The coming weeks will put the relationship between their countries, which otherwise remain stalwart allies, to one of its toughest tests. Netanyahu is bound for Washington for an address to Congress on Tuesday aimed squarely at derailing Obama’s cherished bid for a diplomatic deal with Tehran. At the same time, Secretary of State John Kerry and other international negotiators will be in Switzerland for talks with the Iranians, trying for a framework agreement before a late March deadline………….”

There is an excellent Arab saying or proverb: “The Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Moves On= الكلاب تنبح والقافلة تسير“.
It seems that the caravan of the Iranian and P5+1 negotiations is moving on, even as Mr. Netanyahu and his American groupies become more shrill. Even as they intensify the campaign against a deal aimed at avoiding yet another Western war against a Muslim country. Throwing all kinds of distortions at the media here, while inserting himself and his reelection campaign into a tense American political situation. Something no foreign leader has ever done, not with the connivance of a major American political party. Not in this century.

So, the dogs bark and will continue to do so, but will the caravan of peaceful negotiations keep moving on?

Here is what I wrote on this many long months ago:
“He has been warning them for more than twenty years now that the Iranians are only six months away from a nuclear bomb. From way back in the 1990s, when he was fear-mongering to win his first election, he claimed that the mullahs were about to go ‘nuclear’. I am surprised Europeans still listen to him (American politicians are different, they have their own ‘compelling’ excuses for listening to him). Over two decades, Mr. Netanyahu and his ministers have promised the world a lot of unrealized nuclear slam dunks about Iran………..”

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
[email protected]

Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, US Foreign Policy, War on Iran

Israeli-Saudi Military Alliance? Semites and Anti-Semites Going All the Way……..

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

“The Iranian nuclear program has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel closer, according to a report in Israeli media. Saudi Arabia has now offered to let Israeli fighter jets use its airspace to attack Iran when necessary, in exchange for Israel making progress in the peace talks with Palestinians, a senior European source told Israeli Channel 2. “The Saudi authorities are completely coordinated with Israel on all matters related to Iran,” the European official in Brussels said. Using Saudi airspace means that Israeli Forces could strike Tehran at a shorter distance, without having to fly around the Persian Gulf…………….”

This from the official Iranian Al-Alam network, but it has been covered by other media as well. There is nothing really new here. Speculation about this has been ongoing since before the Wikileaks disclosures exposed the true ‘head of the snake‘. That was when they urged the Bush administration to wage a war of choice against another Muslim country. The Saudis have already prepared their people, the Wahhabi majority of them, for it. 

Their well-financed political propaganda has portrayed the Iranian ruling mullahs as Zoroastrian Sassanids bent on rebuilding the old Persian Empire. Their equally vast sectarian propaganda has succeeded in dividing Muslims and shifting the Arab uprisings of 2011 into futile sectarian conflicts, from Syria to Bahrain, with some poisonous influences in Egypt and Libya and Yemen as well. They have prepared their people well for it, as well as others on the Persian Gulf. The Iranians may also have helped push this narrative along through their intervention in the Syrian war and possibly in Yemen.

So, yes, it is possible and maybe even likely these days. There is always the prospect of implausible denial, and not for the first time. Yet they must also worry that the supremely self-absorbed Israelis will leave them ‘holding the bag’. They have seen the Iran-Iraq war, how it lasted eight years (The Economist initially stupidly predicted it would last only weeks). How it eventually led to what Americans call the First Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. They must have, since they also colluded in that long war through  money, weapons, diplomacy, and oil policy. They could have lost their kingdom and the two Holy Shrines, but for timely American intervention.

They have been flirting with the Israelis for many years now, these doctrinally anti-Semitic princes and their palace clerics. But they have never dared ‘going all the way‘, something we used to obsess with as young students. Now they may feel that they are ready to close the deal and ‘go all the way’.

(FYI: the Israelis will never dare wage that kind of foolish war without forcing some American participation. Even the spineless U.S. Congress would be upset, if only about the bill for the war).

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
[email protected]

Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, History, Iran, Yemen

Quagmire: Will Saudis Invite Egyptians into Yemen? Will Iranians get Bogged Down?…….

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

Yemen 1962: some military officers staged a coup d’etat against the royal family, the Imamate of Hameediddeen. The new Imam Badr sought refuge in Saudi Arabia. A civil war ensued in Yemen, with some Saudi-supported tribes rising against the new regime, and leftist Egypt under Nasser siding with the officers. Saudis and Jordanians supported the tribes. Egypt sent thousands of troops to Yemen to help the Republican regime. It was a quagmire for the Egyptians, a quagmire the Saudis made sure would make Nasser suffer. Nobody really won that long civil war, and in the end they reached a compromise. The Egyptians left Yemen, but they faced a more difficult and tougher enemy in June 1967.

Yemen 2009: The Saudis briefly forgot their own lesson from the 1960s. They intervened in North Yemen against the Houthis. The best Western weapons that money could buy were essentially defeated by lightly-armed Houthis.

Yemen 2015: during 2014 the Houthis swarmed from their northern stronghold and easily defeated the corrupt Yemeni establishment that was set up and supported by the Gulf GCC, with UN blessing. More recently they have sidelined the president Hadi Al Zombie and the parliament and established new institutions. Now the Gulf GCC are making some political noises. There have even been hints at intervention by GCC. That would be interesting: would they send their imported foreign mercenaries into Yemen? How big a defeat would the Houthis inflict on them? Would the Gulf potentates align with the secessionists (former Marxists) in South Yemen? Would they kiss and make up with their AQAP (Al Qaeda) kin against a common enemy?

Recently, Egyptian media and some Egyptian officials have also been making warning noises about Yemen, in conjunction with GCC complaints about the Houthis. Their worry about possible Iranian inroads is understandable. It is unlikely that the Egyptians are thinking of re-entering Yemen. If they do, it is unlikely that the results would be better than in the 1960s. The Iranians themselves would be making Egyptian-like mistakes if they actually get deeper into Yemen. It would be the first Iranian intervention in Yemen in fifteen centuries, and it would be a big mistake. Yemen has always made a nice quagmire for foreigners.

Regardless of media fear-mongering, nobody is going to close the Bab El-Mandab Strait of the Red Sea, anymore than anybody will close the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. So just leave Yemen for the Yemenis to fight over: it is much safer and cheaper that way. Everybody else, from Iranians to Saudis to Qataris to Egyptians, stay out.
Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

Iran, Israel, Khamenei, Nuclear, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Politics

Iran Nuclear Talks: Netanyahu May Win Again…….

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

KuwaitCox2

2012: “Following his speech to the United Nations General Assembly this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Friday that he is “pretty satisfied” with his trip to the U.S. to instigate World War III. “All in all, I think I accomplished my goal of pushing humanity toward the brink of complete and utter annihilation,” said Netanyahu, adding that his implicit calls for international military action against Iran, which would ultimately escalate the conflict to an Armageddon-level of death and destruction…………” 

2014: “Asserting the Middle Eastern nation’s right to a safe, peaceful energy program, members of the Iranian diplomatic team attempted to seek more favorable terms of a deal with the P5+1 global powers while openly assembling a nuclear weapon in the negotiating room, sources confirmed Monday. “Iran will not agree to any international accord without a total and immediate lifting of Western sanctions,” said Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to representatives from China, Russia, and the United States while inserting a U-238 tamper sphere into a thermonuclear weapon on the floor of Coburg Palace………….”

Benyamin Netanyahu is determined to come to Washington soon, an unwelcome guest at the White House. In the past Netanyahu had relished every occasion to kick Obama in the shin (someone else’s term). Now he has become more ambitious, he has been emboldened by the U.S. Congress and other Likudnik Americans to aim higher, literally and figuratively. He is seeking to inflict more pain on the president in his own capital. Congress is helping Netanyahu kick Mr. Obama (still President Obama) again, straight in the testicles. If you grew up playing soccer, you know that no kick is more painful than that.
The powerful war party in Washington may win its battle and the nuclear talks may end without “success”, unless Obama stands firm. Already the Iranian supreme leader Khamenei seems to expect this victory for the Israeli right-wing (and left-wing actually). He has talked almost in sync with some Americans: Khamenei said this week that it makes no sense to extend the nuclear talks beyond the current deadline.
Back to the beginning. Some Iranians, and most Arabs especially outside the Persian Gulf region, have always suspected that the harsh unilateral Western blockade pushed by the Israeli lobby and voted dutifully by a pliant Congress was about more than the nuclear program. That there was a broader and more ambitious Israeli and other regional agenda behind it. The way some hawkish campaign-fund-hungry senators of both parties speak almost openly about it, those Iranians are probably right. It has evolved into something more broad that is hard to dismantle, with a full bureaucracy in Washington that naturally seeks to survive.

So what next? The blockade has failed to bring the Iranians to heel. It has brought them to the table, but without the white flag of surrender. Like all economic blockades it has inflicted a lot of pain on the people and not the regime, but they seem resilient and have become experts at evading some of its consequences. Are ‘all option on the table’ as the conventional press-conference bullshit says? That depends on how far the U.S. Congress is willing to push the White House, which depends on how much pressure the Israeli lobby will apply to the Congress as the U.S. heads toward the crucial but very expensive 2016 general elections. Mucho dinero needed these days for a campaign, almost any campaign.

Good news is that Barack Obama has no more political ambitions. For the first time since 2007 he does not need to pander to anyone anymore. That is when some recent U.S. presidents have become truly presidential. We may hear from Mr. Obama on all these issues after 2016, after the fog of campaign needs is lifted.
Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter