Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). The latest announcements from Washington, D.C. about imminent days-long bombing raids against alleged Iranian targets outside Iran would put a new fuse on the powder keg of the Middle East, even if Iranian territory were spared US attacks.
Neoconservative hawks in the US and Israel have been working hard for this war for many years. Now their dream of a major war by the rogue state USA against Iran appears to be about to be realised.
According to unnamed US government officials, the US news networks NBC and CBS reported on Thursday evening Central European Time that the Biden administration is planning to launch a days- or even possibly weeks-long bombing campaign against Iranian facilities across the Middle East in the near future. However, according to these US officials, there are no plans to attack Iran directly on its own territory.
The US attacks would reportedly focus on “Iranian targets” in Syria and Iraq. They are intended as retaliation and supposed deterrence or reaction to the drone attack at the weekend, in which three US soldiers were allegedly killed at a base (Tower 22) in Jordan near the Syrian border and dozens injured. The US attacks could be directed against Iranian warships as well as attacks on Iranian personnel or “Iranian-backed militias” in Syria and Iraq, according to the reports.
While on the one hand the US Pentagon claims that the attack on the Jordanian base at Tower 22 allegedly bears the “fingerprints” of “Kata’ib Hezbollah”, i.e. the so-called Hezbollah brigades as a Shiite resistance group in Iraq, on the other hand no guilty perpetrator has been officially and definitively named by independent sources. Moreover, US officials have admitted that they have no evidence that Iran was behind the attack. According to US reports, the drone used in the attack is now said to have been manufactured in Iran. But if the weapon’s manufacturing location is to be used as justification for a US attack on Iran, then Washington is setting a precedent for Russian attacks on the NATO countries that manufacture the missiles, which are fired from Ukraine deep into Russia.
The New York Times, however, acknowledged that – despite the well-known knowledge that Tehran is arming and funding the main Shiite militias in Iraq – there is no evidence that Tehran is “calling the shots” there or can issue orders to local militias to do this and refrain from doing that when it comes to, say, attacks on US personnel in Syria or Iraq.
The chorus of US officials now “telegraphing” the scale of imminent attacks against Iranian targets to the global media could serve a purely propagandistic purpose as a precursor to the days- or weeks-long waves of attacks by US bombers, but it could equally be a propaganda ploy to intimidate the Iranian leadership into backing down.
“The first thing you see will not be the last.” This was how US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby described the announced US attacks. He added that the operation would not be a “one-off action”, as has been customary in the past with such US bomb attacks to intimidate other states.
On the other hand, even the last idiot in the US government should realise that the longer the bombing continues, the greater the likelihood that things will get out of control and possibly develop into a major hot war against Iran, which the Biden administration has said it wants to avoid at all costs.
At the same time, Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations Amir Saeid Irwani has stated that the “Islamic Republic of Iran will respond firmly to any attack on the country and its interests and nationals, under any pretext whatsoever”.
The attacks announced in Washington against Iranian personnel outside the country, for example in Iraq, Syria or Yemen, or US attacks against ships of the Iranian navy, would automatically escalate into a major US war against the regional superpower Iran, with far-reaching consequences, especially for the Western world. After all, it should be clear to all those involved in this matter that a war with Iran would mean the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large part of the West’s energy supply is still transported today.
Closing the “Strait of Hormuz” would send the already ailing economies of the Western world into a tailspin, accompanied by extreme price increases and – in parallel – interest rate hikes that would drive even more banks, which had been heavily involved in the property business at low interest rates, into bankruptcy. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie from Kentucky seems to have had all this in mind on Wednesday, 31 January, when he publicly threatened US President Biden and his regime with impeachment proceedings against Biden if he started a war against Iran. Massie published a video on X (formerly Twitter) from 2007 in which then Senator Joe Biden threatened then US President George W. Bush with impeachment if he started a war against Iran without the approval of Congress.
“I have made it clear to the President (Bush) that I will make it my business to impeach him if he takes this nation to war with Iran without the consent of Congress,” Biden had said on camera at the time.
In his post, Massie wrote: “In 2007, Senator Biden told the President (George W. Bush) that he would impeach him for going to war with Iran without congressional approval. President Biden, consider this a warning.”
Amid tensions over a possible imminent war against Iran, another comment against Biden has surfaced, this time from Biden against Trump.
Let's be clear: Donald Trump does not have the authority to take us into war with Iran without Congressional approval. A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 6, 2020
On 6 January 2020, a few days after Trump gave the order to kill Iranian General Qassem Soleimani with a drone strike during his visit to Baghdad, Joe Biden warned US President Donald Trump against an escalation against Iran:
“Let’s be clear: Donald Trump does not have the authority to take us to war with Iran without the consent of Congress. A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”
Because Biden had already ordered airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen without the approval of Congress, he had already been criticised by some members of Congress. But he nevertheless continued the attacks on the country. We are facing “interesting times”!
