Trickery, Humiliation, Death – and the Timeless Hunger for ‘Honour and Glory’

Alastair Crooke

 

One major theme of Homer’s Iliad – which somehow seems as fresh and as vivid today as when first written – is its description of how even the greatest of states in Western civilization fail to reclaim what they lose. “Attempts to repair one loss lead only to more losses”, Emily Wilson writes in her introduction to the Iliad (2023). “Loss can never be recouped.”

As Wilson sets out her story, one cannot escape the analogy to today – to a Biden seeking to recoup the American ‘reputation’ (Kleos in Greek). In the case of leaders of the ancient world too, the goal of achieving undying kleos runs through the poem.

Today, we might refer to it as one’s ‘legacy’. In the Iliad it is definitional and gives mortal leaders the chance to live on after death with honour and glory. For Team Biden, Ukraine was supposed to be their Troy. Russia, like Hector, was tricked into a fight and (and as Team Biden had hoped) is killed under Troy’s walls.

But in today’s world, it didn’t work out that way. And now the U.S. faces the humiliation of a clear Russian victory in Ukraine, and a collective Russian leadership that says it intends to retrieve all lands and cities that were culturally Russian. Western Ukraine, they say, can go ‘wherever it likes’.

The military facts on the ground are relentless and cannot be undone. But the White House hopes to keep a morsel of kleos by simply having Ukrainian forces ceasing to fight, falling back onto defensive lines – yet never saying ‘defeat’. The kinetic component to the conflict barely would ‘tick over’ at low revs. And, as Gideon Rachman has written in the Financial Times, to “flip the narrative to one of [repeatedly insisting] that Putin has failed”. The aim being that Washington quietly can ‘steal away’.

Well, there are two big problems: First, Russia doesn’t agree; it doesn’t agree at all. And secondly, Zelensky and his associates were grievously tricked. Not in this case, by the goddess Athena, but by the mortal Messrs Johnson and Blinken.

In March 2022 in Istanbul, Zelensky and his negotiators had reached an accord with Russia. But that agreement ‘was killed’ by Boris Johnson urging Zelensky to fight on, and to gain his portion of the ‘honour and glory’ by participating in the slaying of the Russian aggressor.

“As long as it takes – and whatever it takes” was the solemn ‘oath’. That is, so to speak, Zelensky was promised an open cheque and whatever weaponry would be needed …

So, what happened to that which is now gone?

If this were the Iliad, the storyline would at least, in part, focus on Zelensky’s disappointment at his tiny ‘portion of life’. Wilson writes:

“Many of the words in the Iliad are often translated as fortune or fate – literally, these suggest we get a portion or share … It’s as if there is a whole side of beef that is a quantity of human life and each of us gets a particular portion of it, both how long we get to be alive and also our portion of honor and glory”.

Zelensky will have wanted a portion of honour to compensate him for fate having dealt-out his present portion of life in an unfair way (i.e. by having been tricked by British and U.S. assurances).

The public humiliation Zelensky now suffers will no longer be balanced by a large share of glory gained through a vanquished Moscow. In the Homeric vein, this lays the ground for an act of revenge on Biden – publication of the ‘deal’.

When these details emerge – as surely they will (echoing perhaps, the mysterious and reputationally explosive war-time Churchill letters hinting to Mussolini at some ultimate kleos-esque outcome) – then the ‘victory narrative’ may become soured by the insistent question: Tens of thousands of Ukrainian young men had to die between March and now – for what?

The other theme in the Iliad is that of the prized facility of mêtis. It could be thought to be the ‘wiliness’ (or long-experienced cleverness) on which Biden is known to so pride himself: Should something unexpected happen and you react (subconsciously) just right in the moment, then by displaying mêtis, you receive a special kind of glory, as compared to that gained from the trudge of geo-political campaigning.

On 7 October, Hamas exploded out from its’ Gaza enclosure.

Biden reportedly regards himself as having ‘the smarts’ over Netanyahu. He knows Netanyahu thinks to manipulate Biden, but the latter believes he both is containing Netanyahu and pre-empting his plans by keeping them under close U.S. surveillance.

But a ‘green light’ is a green light.

And in essence the Biden embrace ends by giving the Israeli Cabinet a conditional ‘green-light’ for almost all its projects, bar the Settler arsonists in the West Bank.

Israel’s Gaza military operation is visibly failing, though the aerial bombardment is set to continue through the coming weeks. It never had a military logic, and this is becoming evident to many Israelis. Gaza is already a monument to callous inhumanity and suffering. It will get worse – yet the Gazans will endure and remain defiant.

And the Israeli military operation against Hizbullah also stands ‘green-lighted’, albeit only when Hochstein’s diplomatic effort to push a disarmed Hizbullah back behind the Litani River (predictably) fails. What is the White House thinking? Do they recall the 2006 war? Do they understand how formidable an adversary Hizbullah has become? Do they not see how Israel is provoking Hizbullah and Iran?

Can Biden recoup America’s standing in this way – with the ‘cleansing’ in Gaza; eruptions in the West Bank; and war brewing with Hizbullah? Biden clearly wants some portion of honour to accrue to him that compensates for the humiliation he suffers from Netanyahu. So he has to keep going.

Emily Wilson reminds us: “Attempts to repair one loss (such as Ukraine), historically lead to more losses: Loss can never fully be recouped”.

U.S. policy of ‘embrace and question’ nonetheless is driving Israel towards a binary choice: three internal military wars in which Israel risks humiliation, or a resort to population displacement (the Naqba option – one favoured by increasing numbers of Israelis). The two-state ‘solution’ is not an option for the present (or ever).

As for the Naqba option, the moral enormity of such a policy would require the Jewish nation to be absolutely sure of its ground. Is it? In spite of raised levels of anger, works such as The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, Emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, must at least raise a current of unease and debate.

The situation however is not one of ratiocination, but of all-consuming irrationality

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/12/30/trickery-humiliation-death-and-the-timeless-hunger-for-honour-and-glory/

 

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SEE ALSO: https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/12/29/us-allies-get-cold-feet-on-red-sea-armada-and-who-could-blame-them/

U.S. Allies Get Cold Feet on Red Sea Armada and Who Could Blame Them?

 

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US Silent as Yemeni Missile SUNK a US Destroyer in Red Sea (unconfirmed)

 

The Houthis (Ansar Allah) announced late on January 24 that they damaged a United States warship and forced two American commercial vessels to retreat after a two-hour missile engagement in the Gulf of Aden and Bab al-Mandab Strait.

“In solidarity with the Palestinian people and in response to the American-British aggression on our country, clashes occurred with a number of American destroyers and warships in the Gulf of Aden and the Bab al-Mandab Strait,” Houthi military spokesman Brigade General Yahya Saree said in a video statement.

The spokesman said that the engagement occurred while the ships were providing protection for two American commercial vessels and lasted for more than two hours.

Brig. Gen. Saree confirmed that Houthi missiles scored a direct hit on an American warship, forcing the two commercial vessels to “retreat from entering the Red Sea.”

He said that “a number of ballistic missiles of the group reached their targets, despite attempts to intercept them by warships, and the armed forces used several ballistic missiles in the engagement.”

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2024/01/25/us-silent-as-yemeni-missile-sunk-a-us-destroyer-in-red-sea-unconfirmed/

 

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Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, senior political officer and spokesman for Yemen’s Ansarallah movement, explains the objectives behind his movement’s naval blockade of the Red Sea in this interview with The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal. Al-Bukhaiti also responds to military threats from the Biden administration and allegations that Ansarallah is controlled by Iran’s IRGC.

Translation by Hekmat Aboukhater

 

https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/25/interview-houthi-spokesman/

 

 

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During the last two months or so, the media have been deluged with fury over the Houthi—de facto rulers of Yemen—either capturing or bombing ships outside Yemeni coasts headed toward Israel.

The Houthis’ actions were provoked by Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the Israeli occupation of the southern coastal parts of Yemen, and has now culminated in an illegal attack against Yemen by the U.S. and UK.

The reason Yemen (the poorest nation in the region due to continuous Western-Arab aggression), unlike other Arab nations loyal to Washington and Brussels, would want to show its solidarity with Gaza would be easy to figure out, had there actually been an interest to do so in the first place. It, like Gaza, has been subjected to violent Western-Israeli terrorism by a coalition of Western and Arab states since 2015, continuing to the present.

The U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen was launched in order to “police” the independent nationalists in the country, thus “protecting” Western “energy and security interests in the region,” as internal U.S. State Department documents put it, also killing between half to one-and-a-half million Yemenis, if anybody happened to care.1

It is quite revealing that the West, for years and increasingly so lately, has been illegally attacking and confiscating Yemeni ships carrying Yemeni oil and other resources, worth tens of billions of dollars, from this impoverished and almost universally starving population.

Western military forces at the same time openly steal incalculable amounts of liquefied natural gas, shipped off Yemeni coasts with American, European, Emirati and Korean commercial ships under the protection of Western war-fighting vessels stationed in Yemeni waters.

All of this has been documented to an unusually extensive degree, though naturally nothing reaches the “free press.” That may shock heavily indoctrinated Westerners, carefully insulated from the facts and raising not a single eyebrow as we deplore the occupied Yemeni people for “piracy.”2

What that reveals is that precisely every reaction in the West to Houthi “attacks” on ships is a total fraud, pure hypocrisy, on a par with Belarusian or Russian leaders condemning Western and Israeli aggression as they continue their attacks on Ukraine.

The carefully orchestrated hysteria over the Houthi has indeed reached a fever pitch, on the tacit assumption that the West must be free to attack anybody it feels like with total impunity.

Nothing causes as much fury as any indication that the victim (be it Palestine, Yemen or any other official enemy) may respond in kind, in self-defense, which amounts to an unspeakable crime, in fact even aggression toward the West. There is, to be sure, not a single trace in the media of voices calling for Western capitals to sanction themselves, to send billions of dollars worth of arms, giving Yemen and Palestine the full right to murder collectively—adjusted to the population number of Gaza and Yemen and the amount slaughtered—over a hundred million Americans, Europeans and Israelis, while Hamas and Houthi ships and aircraft impose full-spectrum blockades against Western civilian populations, effectively starving them to death.

Whatever one may think, this proposal has just as much merit as the right to murder unanimously granted to Israel by the Western media. In fact, it has even more merit: Israel and the occupying Western coalition in Yemen are, after all, the illegal occupiers and aggressors, while Palestine and Yemen are the occupied and attacked.

However, this banal and elementary truism is so exotic, so remote from being even psychologically computable, that it cannot go from the ear into the mind, our having been so effectively brainwashed.

In short, the media system has fulfilled its role.

Furthermore, a carefully orchestrated frenzy was launched to portray Iran as launching a war against us through its “Houthi proxies”—known and conceded by the State Department, Western military intelligence, and technical scholarly investigations into Houthi’s ties to Iran to be a mere fabrication, as they are “a self-sufficient” entity.

They do not need Iranians to be “on call” and “are fairly autonomous in their decision-making.”3 However, those yet to have fallen prey to the powerful Western indoctrination system are still vainly looking for an explanation anywhere in the liberal press as to why Iran sending arms to an occupied nation defending itself from a gang of depraved superpowers would be wrong, and indeed amount to aggression toward us—unlike our $100+ billion in arms sent to Ukraine, of course.

The New York Times decried the “hostility toward the United States and Israel” shown by Houthi (never asking why), while claiming that “the White House has shown no appetite for responding militarily to the Houthis,” namely by attacking the country, occupying it, stealing its resources and running constant military raids in Yemeni territorial waters.

Furthermore, the Times explained, the Saudis and Americans have desperately been trying to end their occupation (a word the Times never uses), but mysteriously cannot do for some reason. This is overwhelmingly due to the “important arm of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’” being “ideally positioned to escalate regional conflict.” That portrays the occupied as the aggressor, and the illegal occupants as the peacemaking diplomats—an impressive but also common achievement of “free press” agitprop.

Incidentally, that same article was titled: “Houthis step up raids, defying U.S. task force,” not asking what right American, French, British and other warships have surrounding the country they attack—namely none. You will notice that this was printed as “news.”4

When you “defy” the Mafioso, the goons must be sent in to smash your legs to convey the appropriate message.

U.S. Navy destroyers managed to shoot down cut-rate Houthi drones—such as the USS , the crew of which was visited by CENTCOM commander Michael E. Kurilla, who awarded the crew with “over 1,000 pounds of barbecue” for their heroic courageousness.5

Meanwhile, 18+ million Yemenis are starving, suffering from the illegal American-Saudi blockade in explicit violation of UN Security Council resolutions.6 The story is similar in Gaza under Israeli terrorist siege and attack, where 40% are suffering from “catastrophic starvation,” as the UN recently put it.7

We find an extraordinarily illuminating self-image of a lawless terrorist state exposing itself in mainstream journals, which are happily and openly promoting aggression against Arab states, Iran in particular, in a fashion surely not very different from the discussions held in the Nazi General Staff as they planned their “self-defense” against the Balkans and the Low Countries.

The Wall Street Journal demanded “Biden do his duty as Commander in Chief” and smash “the Iranian proxies,” explaining without irony that “American forces” desperately try defending themselves against “lethal target practice against U.S. bases in the Middle East.”8

We may imagine how we would have reacted if Iraq, Yemen or Iran established illegal military bases in Washington, conducting regular illegal bombings and assassination campaigns against congressional and Pentagon members, and the U.S. attempted to defend itself from these, whereby the Mullahs decried “lethal target practice against Arab bases in America.”

But this too lies far beyond discussion, and with our bullying mannerisms it is taken for granted that the Arabs must tolerate the imperial antics that are a Western specialty.

Yorktown Institute President Seth Cropsey warned of an Iranian “campaign against Israel and America,” projecting power just as “Napoleonic France or the Soviet Union,” “raising the potential of encirclement” of Israel—the country in the region that is constantly invading and attacking others, that is. Luckily, on the other hand, Israel and the U.S. can “conduct a lightning strike…employing an air-power-heavy campaign and ground war to achieve a swift victory,” including attacking Lebanon, Syria—as the two regularly do, he forgot to mention. Therefore, the U.S. “should publicly accept the need for the military action in Syria and Lebanon the next year,” thus ensuring “a peaceful Mideast.” In other words, War is Peace.9

Recall the uncontroversial facts: It is the U.S. and Israel which carry out constant aggression against Iran, including assassinating Iran’s top political and military staff, missile strikes on Iranian targets, enormous sabotage against critical infrastructure inside Iran, illegally capturing Iranian oil ships and illegally stealing Iranian monetary assets, carrying out multiple large-scale offensive joint military exercises on Iran’s borders explicitly aimed to prepare an attack on it, and so on.

Once again, not the other way around. The effects of these facts on Western propaganda are precisely null, as expected. We turn to a microscopic selection of these aggressive acts, focusing only on the ones committed in 2023, and only on Iran and excluding the too-many-to-count illegal attacks and aggressive acts toward Syria and Palestine.

To kick January off, then-defense minister and now war-cabinet minister Benny Gantz explained to the Israeli Air Force that they might be bombing Iran in “two or three years,” following endless “attack simulations” against Iran conducted along with Washington.

“Israel has significantly increased its preparedness in recent years and is preparing for the possibility of an attack on Iran,” Gantz explained.10

Toward the end of the month, Israel and the U.S. conducted Juniper Oak 23.2, “the largest American-Israeli military exercise ever,” including “electronic attack, attack against enemy air defenses, [and] attack-coordination” to prepare a “successful attack against” Iran with hundreds of military jets, warships and almost 10,000 soldiers. Again, multiple similar “attack simulations” were undertaken the year prior—of course, I am talking about U.S.-Israeli ones directed at the “heart of Iran,” not Iranian-Yemeni ones off the coast of Miami.11

Juniper Oak 23.2 went basically unnoticed in the major media, as they were too busy lambasting the leaders of Tehran, “prime offenders that have sought to bully their way to greater power and influence through the brutalization of their neighbors.”12

Astonishingly, on March 29th, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley declared that the Iranian army “is what we need to be targeting, and targeting them very harshly over time, and that’s exactly what we plan on doing.”13

 

On the very next day, the UN International Court of Justice (the highest judicial organ on Earth) ruled that the U.S. violated international law by freezing assets owned by Iranian companies, ordering Washington to pay compensation to Tehran. That was dismissed without comment, once again revealing the attitude toward international law in a terrorist superpower.14

We may ask how many references to this fact there are in the current jingoist blast of the Houthi interrupting international “trade and finance.” The disgrace of the “free press” could not be more staggering.

IDF Chief Herzi Halevi said a week after Milley: “We are ready to act against Iran. The Israeli army has the ability to strike both in distant countries and near home.”15

In the summer, Israel and the U.S. radically increased war readiness. The Jerusalem Post noted that—aside from Israel being “behind hundreds of airstrikes and other operations against the Iranian nuclear program” including “assassinations of senior Iranian scientists and cyberattacks against nuclear facilities”—“Israel’s current military exercise is meant to prepare the country for a prolonged multifront war, the scenario Israel expects should it strike Iran.”16

Shortly thereafter, Israeli Intelligence Services noted they had created a special intelligence unit to “prepare for a potential Israel-Iran war,” with an Israeli Lieutenant Colonel explaining: “Every day we gather more targets and objectives at a satisfying pace and learn how to strike them effectively. We have already doubled the target bank in Iran, regardless of nuclear facilities.” Again, notice we are not talking about Iranian plans, bragged about openly for the world to hear and see, without anybody raising an eyebrow.17

In the following months, the U.S. and Israel conducted “simulations” for “a potential joint Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities,” so as to “prepare Israel for a potential multi-front missile attack,” as The Times of Israel noted. To review these would not amount to much more than to kick at an open door.18

There has been a major campaign to concoct an Iranian “nuclear threat,” which the U.S. helplessly is seeking to avoid. Forget, however, that Washington withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear deal and refused to re-enter with a pleading Iran during the Vienna talks which aimed to restrict Iran’s nuclear program.

Of course, as is perfectly well understood by the CIA and Israeli Mossad, “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device,” to quote the U.S. Director of National Intelligence report, the top intelligence report produced for the White House.19

Or the Pentagon’s assessment, noting that “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.” Or CIA Director William Burns’s assessment in February: “To the best of our knowledge, we don’t believe that the Supreme Leader in Iran has yet made a decision to resume the weaponization program that we judge that they suspended or stopped at the end of 2003.”20

Had Iran intended to get any nuclear weapons, they would be purely defensive, as the country is constantly being attacked and openly threatened with invasion by the World’s two leading rogue states. Now, one should not pretend as if there is no “nuclear threat.” There are.

Namely, the current aggressor in Tel Aviv, Benjamin Netanyahu, who on September 22, 2023, declared in front of the UN General Assembly: “Above all—above all—Iran must face a credible nuclear threat.”21

It has to be stressed, again, that none of these facts has even a slight impact on the current war-propaganda served day in and day out by a unison media and political apparatus, declaring that “We’re fighting the Houthis. We beat the Germans and the Japanese. We should be able to beat the Houthis…I have been saying for six months now hit Iran. They have oil fields out in the open, they have the Revolutionary Guard headquarters you can see from space. Blow it off the map,” quoting Senator Lindsey Graham.22

What we are witnessing is a truly fanatical level of indoctrination, going far beyond anything that Orwell could possibly have imagined. Maybe a unique level of brainwashing in history, comparable only to extreme dogmatic sects, and making the Russians’ propaganda system seem rational in comparison.

“The West may now have no option but to attack Iran,” explained war criminal and media darling John Bolton, for its “recent acts of aggression” toward us, citing the Houthi missile strikes with precisely zero evidence ever generated to prove Iran was even involved, not to speak of responsible. “The critical truth [sic] here is that Iran has directly committed an act of war against what it believed was an Israeli target,” blaming a spineless White House for “not establishing conditions for deterrence, thereby potentially cooling the conflict down”—a grave threat, to be sure. He finished off by openly calling for “overthrowing” Iran’s leaders in government, “replacing them with some other form of government.”23

Let us, apart from everything said being a precise inversion of fact, follow the logic of Bolton. Iran is being constantly attacked, openly threatened with invasion and nuclear evaporation, and therefore, according to Bolton, they “may now have no option but to attack” hostile elements threatening it, including virtually all of Western liberal press, Washington and Tel Aviv. Then, Iran will invade them, destroy their governments, “replacing them with some other form of government.”

However, the fanatical reader of the entire media may be rewarded with fragmentary nuggets of honesty. Thus, CIA Iran specialist Douglas London commented on U.S.-Israeli aggression (which he enthusiastically applauds) in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, titled without a trace of irony “Iran Is Pushing Biden Around.”

U.S. aggression “was aptly illustrated after the U.S. killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020. The U.S. demonstrated its willingness to commit an open act of war against a leader roughly equivalent to the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs, national security adviser and director of national intelligence.

At the time, the U.S. had also significantly bolstered its military presence in the region with additional ships, aircraft and Marines. Iran fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. bases across Iraq—missing each time, probably on purpose. The Iranian military pulled its punches rather than risk inviting a massive American military response.”

“Now,” he continued, “might be the time for the U.S. to consider visible but deniable cyberattacks that temporarily take out Iran’s power grid, banking, oil or port infrastructure. Cyber operations can similarly target Iran’s television and radio stations, using them to expose regime corruption … Washington should make clear its willingness to pursue more kinetic targets.”24 Just days ago (December 25th), Israel assassinated yet another Iranian head of military with an air strike, Seyed Razi Mousavi, Iran’s top commander in Syria.25

These are all some of the major successes of the propaganda system, which will soon lead us all into yet another war. It will then rightly be regarded as a “media war,” too.

US-UK bombing of Yemen in mid-January

In mid-January the United States and the United Kingdom bombed Yemen, in what Rishi Sunak called “self-defense,” inducing a religious awe of praise among the entire media for this moral heroism, very much like Russian media hails Russian “defensive” missiles against Kyiv in its “self-defense” against Ukrainian terrorist attacks.

“The actions, carried out to maintain a key channel of commerce, are a good reminder of the global public good the U.S. Navy provides,” as illustrated by the blockade of Yemen and its assisted one of Gaza and elsewhere, “and why we need a strong one”—a “more lethal one would be even better,” noted The Washington Post.26

The Wall Street Journal was particularly agitated, though, as Biden’s “message to Iran to stop aiding the Houthi attacks” were “lost in translation” as they “keep firing missiles.”

You will notice that “Biden’s message,” which says Iran is in fact aiding the Houthi, is a doctrinal order by the Leader, and as such cannot be questioned.

Navy SEALs tried docking a Yemeni ship “with suspected weapons” which we have no right to touch, just as Russian Spetsnaz have no right to dock Polish, Baltic, American or British vehicles shipping arms to Ukraine—though two soldiers fell in the sea, and “may be dead – two more American casualties of Iran’s hostility to U.S. interests.”

“Iran and the Houthis are putting American lives a risk”, said the Journal. Not conversely, like the minimum 500 000 Yemenis murdered by the US war of aggression.27

Goebbels’ heirs in Western press were indeed not all as enthusiastic, complaining that “softie” Biden had not hit Yemen, “lavishly financed by the mullahs of Tehran,” hard enough and thus enabling a “global Islamist army waging a war on the Jewish state and the West” (Mark Almond, director of the Crisis Research Institute at Oxford).28 Daily Mail explained, unironically, that “Freedom of navigation, then, is in Britain’s DNA,” “warmly” congratulating Sunak för “launching air strikes,” as “The only way to deal with rogue states is to show strength. Any sniff of weakness is ruthlessly exploited.”29

Andrew Neil was infuriated that Biden was not “showing an iron fist” and “was more inclined to put a friendly arm around the regime in Iran”, presenting zero evidence for the charge, of course.

He warned that “Western inaction”—meaning constant occupation, attack, starvation warfare and so on—has “emboldened the Houthis”, continuing: “everywhere there is trouble in the Middle East … these days you can be pretty sure Iran is a pivotal player in encouraging violence, instability and unrest either doing so directly or through its many nasty regional proxies”, Houthi being not one, in fact. Neil forgot to mention that Iran is taking merely a defensive role against the four overwhelming instigators of violence and attack in the region: the US, UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia—nobody else comes even close to coming close.

Since not even Neil can conjure up multiple invasions against Arab countries, collectively killing millions of Iraqis, Yemenis, Afghans, Palestinians, Syrians (proxy-war since 2012) and so on, and enormous illegal sanctions programs designed to starve civilians, multiple large-scale attack-simulations openly directed towards countries that defy orders—since Neil and his colleagues in the propaganda system cannot conjure that up about “Iran’s appetite for mayhem” being “insatiable”, they have to do the best they can, thus faking stories about Iran “bankrolling” Yemeni peasants with “£79 a month to join the Houthi militia.” He concluded by recommending the West to carry out “Cyber attacks on Iranian infrastructure” and conducting “anti-regime” operations to topple the government in Iran.30

We may be pretty sure that there will be precisely zero calls anywhere in Western press during our lifetime for Houthi, Iran and plenty of others subjugated to Western aggression to let off bombs in Washington, London, Brussels, Tel Aviv and so on, and that is not because that suggestion has less merit than what we are currently doing to Yemen and Iran to the enthusiastic applause of the entire media.

Indeed, as is usually the case concerning Western aggression, both the hawks and doves were principally indistinguishable in their reactions to the bombings of Yemen.

Thus, Charles Moore of The Daily Telegraph noted that “Striking the Houthis was Britain’s only option”—not stopping its illegal aggression towards Yemen, to be sure—and “As a maritime nation, Britain must punish piracy,” as it and its allies regularly do by illegally stealing billions of dollars’ worth of Yemeni oil by sea, or fully funding Israel as it steals Gaza’s coastal resources, and therefore “Parliamentary [tactical] scruples are also misplaced.”31 

The critics at the outermost dissident end, say The Independent, lauded “the US and Britain” and their stooges for doing what is “necessary to interrupt the Houthi’s piracy and terrorism”, and “were operation under the principle of self-defense”, and “So Mr. Sunak is correct” fundamentally, except on tactical details, perhaps.32

In short, noted The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, we thankfully bombed the disobedient Houthi in this “bizarre little war off the coast of Yemen”, who defied “The grandees of the world economy” at “Davos”.33

That is in fact a very correct and apt comment. When the brutalized and dominated people of this world dare defend themselves from the whims of “The grandees of the world economy”, they must be crushed, and the intellectual classes, ever serving their “grandees”, will ensure no questions arise.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/01/30/u-s-israeli-aggression-yemen-and-the-coming-war-with-iran-the-fantastic-achievements-of-propaganda/

 

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The German frigate Hessen, which was deployed to the Red Sea as part of an EU mission, mistakenly fired on an American drone earlier this week, the German Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.

Berlin had previously disclosed the Hessen’s first successful engagement, in which the vessel shot down two Houthi drones within 15 minutes of one another on Tuesday. 

On Monday evening, however, the frigate used two SM-2 missiles to target an unidentified drone, but both failed to hit the target, according to German Defense Ministry spokesman Michael Stempfle.

“The case was resolved in the sense that it was not a hostile drone, which only became clear afterwards,”Stempfle said.

Defense Minister Boris Pistorius confirmed Stempfle’s statement while visiting a military base in Bavaria on Wednesday evening, telling reporters that there had been an incident “in which shots were fired, but no one was hit.” 

According to the German military blog Augen geradeaus, the US-made missiles failed for “technical reasons,” which prompted the Hessen to use its 76mm main gun to engage the Houthi drones on Tuesday. The German warship then used short-range RAM missiles to shoot down another Houthi drone on Wednesday morning.

The Hessen had tried to identify the drone by reaching out to other friendly ships in the Red Sea, but no country claimed the UAV. It later turned out to be an “unreported”American MQ-9 Reaper, flying with its transponder turned off. Washington had not notified the allied warships of its mission.

The US and several of its allies have sent ships to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in an effort to stop the Houthis – the most powerful faction in Yemen – from attackin Israeli-linked shipping along the major global trade route. Houthi attacks on merchant vessels began in late October and the group said they would continue so long as Israel continued attacking the Palestinians in Gaza.

The Hessen is part of the EU’s mission in the Red Sea called “Aspides” (Greek for “shield”), which is intended to involve at least four frigates. It is separate from the US-led “Operation Prosperity Guardian,”also intended to protect merchant ships. 

The Houthis initially targeted only “Israeli-linked” vessels, but expanded their interdiction to cargo ships linked to the US and the UK, after ships and planes of the two countries began bombing Yemen in January. Most major global shippers have re-routed their vessels around Africa, as insurance premiums soared due to the increased risk.

https://www.rt.com/news/593334-german-ship-american-drone/

 

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US CENTCOM chief arrives in 'Israel' amid fears of Iranian response
By
Al Mayadeen

 

Gen. Michael E. Kurilla has landed in "Israel" for consultations on the Iranian response to the deliberate attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria.

 

Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, the head of the US Central Command, has landed in "Israel" for talks with Israeli officials, including Yoav Gallant, regarding the anticipated Iranian response to the deliberate targeting of Iran's consulate in Syria. 

 

Iranian officials have openly voiced intentions to retaliate against "Israel" following the Damascus attack, which caused the martyrdom of seven IRGC advisors.

Iranian leader Sayyed Khamenei affirmed that "Israel" made a grave mistake by targeting the Iranian consulate in Damascus, highlighting that the attack is tantamount to an attack on Iranian soil. He threatened the "wicked entity", saying that "it must and will be punished."

American and Israeli officials have been engaging in dialogue across various governmental levels to anticipate the Iranian retaliation.

Reportedly, it has been circulated that it is not a matter of "if" Iran would respond, but rather when. 

https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/us-centcom-chief-arrives-in--israel--amid-fears-of-iranian-r

 

 

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