“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities”… Voltaire
Some might say the dust has settled from the Warsaw and Munich conferences, while others would say that Netanyahu and Pence dropped the political equivalent of a tactical nuclear preemptive strike with its telltale mushroom cloud that will be with us for a long time.
The overall news coverage rates the Warsaw conference as a flop, starting with its rigged agenda of being a hate fest for Iran, which triggered threats of very low attendance. The US State Department quickly revised the focus away from Iran into a nebulous peace and security in the Mideast theme. No one was fooled.
When Bibi Netanyahu showed up, taking time out from his busy election campaigning with Israeli prosecutors circling him like vultures, he made short work of Cinderella-story peace claims. He wanted to play Mr. Tough Guy for the voters back home, so he immediately grabbed the first day headlines with his tweet that the leading Arab countries were sitting down with him “to advance the common interest of war with Iran.”
The US State Department must have been livid about Bibi’s grandstanding and raised holy hell for him to take the tweet down, which he did, but not after leaving it up long enough to make sure that all Israeli voters heard of it. A story was put out to the press that there had been a translation mistake. But Haaretz got hold of the video and confirm that the Hebrew word Bibi used was the one for war.
Vice President Mike Pence, the Christian Zionist, later took his turn at being the shock jock of the day by demanding that the EU members of the JCPOA show solidarity with Mr. Trump by withdrawing from the agreement themselves. This went over like a lead balloon, with nearly everyone shocked that such a condescending request had been made to them, like a school master berating unruly students.
But Pence was not finished with them yet. He next charged the EU with being a disloyal ally by trying to undermine the US sanctions on Iran, a country which by the way had recently endured a horrible suicide terror attack on a Republic Guard convoy in Iran with terrible loss of life.
Attendees said they could sense the entire room gasp at the audacity of the disloyalty remark, when it was really the US that had been disloyal to the EU by reneging on a complex negotiation that had taken four years to achieve, and where the IAEA had confirmed that Iran had always been in compliance. It was the classic case of the American adage of “the pot calling the kettle black”.
Vice President Pence seemed to have thought this was going to be his day in the sun, playing the enforcer for the unipolar power in Washington by coming out to the European colonies to tell them to shape up or ship out.
Warsaw was a conference with no ending statement, with the unipolar hot air balloon just hissing away as it ran out of gas. But Pence was not finished. He might have had poor attendance in Warsaw, but the Munich Conference was next, and all the major powers would be there to watch him shine, with 30 heads of state and 90 ministers.
The Europeans were seething after their Warsaw treatment by Mr. Trump’s overseer coming out to the fields to chastise the serfs that they need to get with the program. They were loaded with double-barrel diplomatic buckshot.
The Munich Conference
Angel Merkel spoke before Pence at Munich, and she gave no quarter, focusing in on Trump’s car tariffs which are based on the assertion that German cars represent a national security threat to the US, notwithstanding that the cars are actually made in South Carolina, and some of those cars are even exported to China. Merkel got a standing ovation when she was done, with Ivanka Trump remaining seated, knowing the cameras would be on her.
When Pence’s turn came to speak, he began by saying he brought greetings from the 45th President of the United States and paused for the expected polite applause, but the audience was silent. And when he finished his talk, he got the silent treatment once again.
This public rebuke seems to set a new nadir in so-called American leadership in the world, which is really America imposing its will, not the people doing it, but the current group of gangsters in charge. Merkel even made a comment after the meeting alluding that Europe would suffer through Trump until he was gone, which might be sooner than Trump thinks.
His campaign advisor, Paul Manafort had his plea negotiation thrown out for continuing to lie to federal prosecutors. He is looking at 16 to 25 years now at his sentencing this Spring, a virtual death sentence, and one that might entice him to tell more about what he knows. Some see the Mueller investigation’s main focus might be obstruction of justice charges on Trump.
The new scandal brewing is how Trump is pushing US nuclear technology out to the Saudis, something that has been in the works for a while, as the White House worker bees have already lined up a consortium of contractors to begin building the nuclear facilities, which will brew up another big battle in Congress, where some feel that increasing Saudi Arabia’s nuclear capability is insane.
While Iran may have highly accurate medium range missile with conventional war heads, if the Saudis have a steady supply of weapons grade material, then they are just one step away from having a large inventory of tactical nuclear armed missiles to threaten Iran with, turning the Persian Gulf and its oil exports into a ticking time bomb.
Gordon Duff of Veterans Today has already spilled the beans on the Saudis already having nuclear weapons for some time, buying its centrifuges from Germany and its ballistic missiles from China. And the Saudis are not the only ones with undeclared nukes. The world public has been subjected to a double standard on nuclear proliferation policy, as proliferation has not been viewed as a bad thing when the countries are US allies. Even Canada has a few.
All this focus on Iran as an offensive threat is despite the fact that the Mideast is bursting at the seams with US and NATO modern weapons, purchased by countries that had pressing domestic needs that went unfulfilled. The US continues to put the squeeze on countries not to buy Russian weapons, even if their technical analysts say they are a better deal.
We see Chaos Theory, which the Israelis claim they invented, wherever we look, with a US showdown in progress with Venezuela, and the recent major terror attack on Indian troops in Kashmir, with Pakistan threatening retaliation.
In Israel we have ex-Defense Minister Lieberman saying last week that the next Gaza War will be the last one. Why would he say that when he is out of office now? Is the next attack already planned for after the elections in April?
This continuing use of proxy terrorism and endless military threats does not bode well for the future. The world economy is a house of cards, where one big shock can bring it all tumbling down to where we look back on these current trade disputes as the good old days.
Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
