Egged on by warmonger and National Security advisor John Bolton, the American military are rattling sabers all over the planet. The main attractions right now are Venezuela and Iran but we can also look to North Korea, Ukraine, Yemen and various African nations with fragile governments. This is nothing new. The history of U.S. baiting other countries into war goes all the way back to the emergence of our military strength and it hasn’t wavered one iota over the decades.
It all started back in 1846 when James Polk got the Mexican-American war going by claiming that Mexico had invaded U.S. territory. It was a pretty spurious claim since it depended on an unsettled decision as to whether the border was actually the Mexican claimed Nueces River or the U.S. claimed Rio Grande. We won the war so it became the Rio Grande but about 1500 American kids died of battle injuries and about 10,000 more from illness.
We added to the bullshit in 1898 when an explosion on the U.S.S. Maine was our excuse to start the Spanish-American War. It was supposed to have been a Spanish torpedo but 60 years later Admiral Hyman Rickover concluded it was actually spontaneous combustion in a bunker next to ammunition locker.
During the ‘60s and ‘70s we turned starting wars into an art form by promoting the phony excuse of fighting communism in Central and South America. This led us into backing one would be dictator after another in battles with, more often than not, legitimate presidents simply because they had been elected by a left leaning cit,izenry.
In 1986 the Reagan Administration, the same patriots who gave us Iran/Contra, nudged and poked Libya until they fired six missals at U.S. planes. We responded by sinking a Libyan patrol boat with all hands on board and then went on to sink two other Libyan ships and destroy a missal site near Sirte.
There have been others but perhaps the most egregious was the excuse for our getting into the Vietnam War. Two phony incidents with our warships in the gulf of Tonkin that enabled us to enter a French bred war in which we lost over 57 thousand American kids and killed over a million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.
But more likely it was the flat out lies by Bolton, Don Rumsfeld and their scabrous mates, toadying for Dick Cheney about non-existent WMDs which led us into Iraq that will always take the prize for the most egregious of all war-starting lies. They led us into a war that murdered thousands of American kids and millions of foreign civilians and completely decimated that unfortunate country,
So with a full, rich history of tactical lies and the baiting of other countries into situations that give us an excuse to attack, we are now confronting Iran, a country with whom we had a secure treaty that guaranteed, under inspection, the stoppage of their nuclear program for at least 15 years. That was before Trump entered the White House.
Trump isn’t intelligent enough to understand the benefits of such a treaty so he pulled it and ever since, he has been busy poking Iran with a sharp stick made of sanctions and other provocations.
We all understand that the Iranians aren’t good guys. Most of the countries we provoked into war weren’t either, but that alone is no reason to kill American kids or to deplete the resources of our country by engaging in wars that can show no gain nor any plan for success.
Twelve days after Trump took office he had Michael Flynn declare that as of that day we were putting Iran on notice. On May 5thJohn Bolton announced that a battleship taskforce and a bomber group were being deployed to Iran’s coast because the Iranians had committed all kinds of troubling and terrorist acts. He never got specific, so both the Iranians and ourselves were left to wonder what they had done. Of course this was not new behavior for Bolton who had advocated bombing Iran long before Trump picked him off the garbage heap and installed him in our government. Five days later Trump sent the U.S.S. Arlington and a battery of missal systems to join the earlier group.
The Trump administration claims it’s worried that Iran will attack some of our forces in the Middle East. Yeah! Well, if we weren’t so busy shoving these attack vehicles down Iran’s throat maybe they wouldn’t be in a position to shoot back.
Iran hasn’t done anything to us to provoke our military incursion into their territory. If they sent ships over here to the Gulf of Mexico, we’d have already blown them out of the water. By doing the same thing to them we are begging for them to attack us just so we can do what we have done all through history whenever we get a bunch of warmongers with the President’s ear.
It must be understood that Iran has made some aggressive moves but not directly against us. They recently threatened to close the Straight of Hormuz and then they announced that they would no longer comply with a couple of parts of the 2015 Nuclear Deal. That’s the one the idiot Trump had already pulled out of, leaving England, France, Germany, China and Russia holding the bag.
Yes, we’re doing it again, the same thing that we have done over and over for the last couple of hundred years, provoking another nation into a fight and doing it in the exact bullying manner that suits all Trump’s moves. But why are we doing it now, and why to Iran when Russia and North Korea have both displayed more aggressive behavior in just the past six months?
Well, maybe it’s because Iran doesn’t have any nuclear weapons and the coward Trump feels safer trying to push them around. Maybe it’s because Bolton is feeling his oats and has decided that his warmongering may just work at this particular moment because it will help Trump distract from all the stupid moves he is pulling on the domestic front.
Healthcare, the environment, tariffs, wages, the southern border and now abortion are all areas that Trump has moved in lately and all have been disastrous. Almost as bad is his attempt to lie his way out of the Mueller report and his stonewalling of every attempt by the House to run effective inquiries into his associations with the Russians during the 2016 elections. Maybe a nasty war is just what Trump needs to take our minds off what a non-functional buffoon he really is. The only problem there will come when the body bags start arriving home and most will belong to the sons and daughters of fools who voted for him last time.
What’s interesting is that Trump doesn’t really want war, with anyone. Trump is basically a coward as he proved during the Vietnam War when he scammed his way out of service with what was basically a hangnail.
The concept of actual war terrifies Trump even if he won’t be on the front lines. He has showed us that by his avoidance of all of our overseas bases except one.
But Trump is a true bully and as such he is driven to try to push around smaller, less heavily armed countries. He proves this by groveling to make friends with the leaders of those nations that have actual nuclear threats like Russia, North Korea and China. Trump doesn’t want a war with Iran but he will surely take Iran over the others so he tries to bully them. The only problem is that Iran won’t be bullied. They have already been pushed past any acceptable limits and they are ready to fight for their survival.
They don’t want to fight but they have very little choice. Our latest sanctions are killing their economy. Oil exports, their principal source of foreign income, have been reduced from 2.3 million barrels per day to around 900 thousand and it’s killing them.
The problem with the situation as it stands now is that it’s ripe for an accidental start of war. All these kids sitting around, holding loaded weapons is the perfect scenario for someone to pull the trigger at the wrong time and BOOM! A war.
Somehow the lackeys in the White House have to make Trump understand that this isn’t the place to experiment with his, so far failed, policies of pushing everyone to the brink and expecting them to cave rather than fight back. Everyone isn’t, like him, a coward.