I do not think Russia and China will stand back whilst a key BRICS partner is neutralised. India has betrayed the cause by allowing air access to USA aircraft. The Regime Change pressures from Israel and the West must be a none starter for the majority of the Iranian population. Regime change to what? The son of the last Shah waiting in the USA wings. A return to an opulent life style for the favoured few, where torture and execution are an everyday event with provision of Black Sites for MI5 and the CIA. Sounds a bit like Saudi Arabia with the torture and butchering of Koshoggi , a few weeks after his slaughter our Foreign Secretary was exchanging smiles with the Crown Prince responsible for his death. As in Cuba the only folk clamouring for Regime Change are the dispossessed elite being the Batista relatives and collaborators. I see no trappings of wealth amongst the present Iranian regime. Appearances seem to be rather frugal compared to Western Leaders opulence. It is now quite obvious the West has decided to give Israel a free hand to do what they like. The Palestinian State is out the window. The Palestinians will either be forced out of all of their lands or killed. Labour politician Gerald Kaufman was a Jew. He declared on numerous occasions that Israel was a Terrorist State. He was correct. The UN decision to recognise the State of Israel was an evil act backed by the Colonialist West who were and still are the enemy of all indigenous populations in the Southern Hemisphere. Adherence to International Laws is only forced on the weak oppressed countries whilst the four main villains, the USA, the UK, France and Israel are a law unto themselves. There needs be a day of reckoning. We need a list of all who are complicit in the annihilation of the Palestinians and the theft of their lands. We also need a list of TV and Press media presenters and Journalists who have denied almost any coverage or platforms for debate which included knowledgeable Palestinian representation. The British public are ignorant of the true historical facts about the 100 plus years of suffering they have endured through the deliberate policies of the Pro-Zionist British Media in which we are now all engulfed.
This is going to become painfully clear to the USA, the UK and the EU over the next few months and years. This madness will not go unanswered by Russia and China, no matter what the US President, the Congress, the Intelligence "experts and their propaganda media spews in public.
The whole buster bombing caper was a ruse. Trump gave them a heads-up about the bombing just like Iran alerted Trump regarding the attack on a U.S. Navy base. The whole thing was performative from start to finish because all sides have run out of run way to conduct this war. Israel is calling it a rap because they are out of air defense missiles, Trump can't broker a deal, and Iran isn't going anywhere. The BB attack made some big holes, but everything had already been moved. Not one click on a geiger counter afterwards meaning that all the enriched Uranium is safe and sound. Chalk it up to rare earths. China clamped down so the West can't build anymore high tech weapons. Game over.
For Israel the game was one strike and done. For America, it was one strike and none. For Iran, it was payback is fun.
Trump seems to only have one plan, which is to do everything to make himself and his buddies wealthier. When he promised the Golden Age to the Americans, he should have attached the list of names for whom he was going to bring about the said Golden Age because he certainly didn't mean all ordinary Americans!
The ceasefire is a massive defeat for Israeli - they were clearly stressed and almost out of defence. But they will be back - otherwise it's curtains for Netanyahu.
Brilliant point about regime change - it is Culture Change. Iran is a completely different culkture to 'the west'. Where have all our decent FO people gone?
They have burned their bridges with the vast majority of the global population.
I think I heard the following from Jeffrey Sachs (who is himself Jewish, well, of a fashion, judging by his family name): that war criminal Netanyahu is closely connected to a certain rabbi who believes that Israel had to do something so horrific that the rest of the world would decide to rain hell down on Israel as punishment, which would set off the return of the Messiah (to save them?) in the year 2027, because that was the prophecy from thousands of years ago. I can't quite remember what Sachs said. But it's clearly mad.
I presume the "do something so horrific that the rest of the world would decide to rain hell down on Israel as punishment" is Gaza? Or causing a nuclear 'incident' inside Iran?
This is the problem with Israel. It is run by people who are so evil and so dangerous that frankly locking them up in an institution isn't sufficient. They should just be 'got rid of'.
I submitted the comment below elsewhere before listening to the video. But in among a great deal of feet on the ground good sense I noted a sentence that I believe summed up what I regard as the Trump dilemma:-
"Foreign policy always starts and finishes with domestic policy."
And I believe that Trump's seemingly chaotic and unfocused approach does make more sense if one takes account of the serious splits that are in evidence both in his own support base and in the American political establishment. If he is to avoid a setback in the midterms he has somehow to neutralise or reconcile a whole range of opposing factions.
So Trump's foreign policy is not some carefully crafted plan to which he is working. It's a series of catch as catch can improvisations with the sole aim of placing him well for the midterms. Does it make sense looked at like that? So I assume in the comment copied here.
...................................
Ceasefire in the Iranian/Israeli war, they say. If so, well done Trump! Hope his odd series of manoeuvres has drawn the teeth of the Washington neocons. Doubt it though. And Trump has failed to stop the atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Plus whatever the proxy regime in Syria is doing by way of atrocity. So a heavily qualified well done at that, even allowing for the ceasefire looking so frail.
The Israelis have ditched themselves and the West along with them. After the Western support for the Gaza atrocities, the US/ UK and Germany in the forefront, the diplomatic and moral credibility of the West, shaky before, is now gone. We Westerners now have to live in a world the majority of which now regards us as pariah states. Oderint dum metuant is the only foreign policy we have left.
That worked when the Western countries were the the predominant and maybe the only serious military powers. Now we're not, all we have left is US nuclear and David Ignatius' "dirty war". When Merz said recently the Israelis are doing the dirty work for us he probably didn't realise he was condemning himself more than them. What they call the "Global South" did and that does for any lingering pretence that we're upholding a "rules based international order".
That reads straight across to the conflict now drawing to its end in Ukraine. The assassinations in the then self-declared republics and the later assassinations in Russia itself are now admitted even in the Western press to have been run out of bases set up by the West for that purpose from 2014 on. Run by "our babies" as they were termed. Those assassinations mirrored by the assassinations in the Middle East, also now openly admitted.
In addition we can now count four attempts to sabotage nuclear power plants - some also admitted to by the Western press and by the Ukrainians - plus the attempts to seize NPP's and use them as bargaining counters. And the use of container drones or pre-placed drones has been seen against both Iran and Russia. Not one-offs from unaccountable terrorist groups but long planned operations conducted by Western countries. This is "dirty war" at its maximum and there is no longer any pretence that the Israelis or the Ukrainians do it all by themselves.
Also long gone is any pretence that the Ukrainians have been running their war over there. Just as with the Iranian war, we've been up to our necks in that war as well. Western countries, mainly the US and UK, micromanaged that war and did so with a merciless disregard for the proxies. The "Summer Offensive", Krinky, the Kursk offensive, to name three of the worst, were operations planned by our General staffs often against the better judgement of the Ukrainian General Staff. Had any NATO General thrown away the lives of NATO troops like that he would, as was remarked at the time, have been cashiered. But it was only the proxies so the Milley/Cavoli/Radakin trio got away with it. The Ukrainian PBI didn't and the way we threw their lives away in suicidal operations that had not the ghost of a chance of success was a war crime in itself.
"Dirty war", incompetent war, sacrificial war, both in the Middle East and in Ukraine, that's the mess Trump's been left with.
There are observers and analysts, respectable analysts at that and not the information warriors who peddle their "analyses" in the degraded Western press, not the Lees or the Kofmans or the ISW, who assert that Trump is merely another face of a predatory and ruthless Western political establishment. Brian Berletic has been foremost amongst those warning us of that. Berletic's got so much right over the years, and that when few others did, that it's maybe over-optimistic to hope he's got that wrong. But I believe it's still possible to argue that Trump, and very many of those supporting Trump, do not see these endless forever wars as the mission. The mission is to rescue the US from the state of near terminal decline it's got itself into. Forever wars are in the way of that.
So it might be legitimate to see Trump as opposed to the powerful war factions in the US rather than as merely another face for those factions. With the midterms looming he doesn't have much choice but to attempt to placate or outmanoeuvre those factions. It doesn't look pretty but maybe he's doing it the only way it can be done.
Merz's comments left me very very angry, him implying that Israel is carrying out mass murder of Iranian civilians on our behalf, describing it as "dirty work". He's a 'throwback'.
They love a euphemism don't they, our Western 'leaders'. So when assassinations are carried out by anyone else, it's 'terrorism', but when they're carried out by the West or via its proxies, they are described instead as "dirty work" or "dirty war". No, it's terrorism.
Nobody is acting on my behalf when, in order to kill an Iranian scientist, they fire a missile into his block of flats, murdering his wife, all his children, and a good many neighbours.
"NOT IN MY NAME!"
How many times are British citizens going to have to carry that bloody banner around?
As for Trump, those who support him (no matter what) seem to perpetually see some sort of method behind all his madness, and yes maybe he is the ultimate chess grandmaster and is running rings around everyone trying to understand what he's thinking, but is he that good an actor that he can just pretend he's that degree of erratic, but really isn't?
If you do see Trump as a kind of chaotic force for good (which I find hard to go along with), you'd enjoy Gilbert Doctorow's latest appearance on Glenn Diesen's channel. Doctorow suggests Trump has totally outwitted the Israelis and shut down their little war.
See my comments below that video, if you think Trump is THAT smart. Could Operation Night Hammer have been a hoax? I mean, it happened, right, but maybe not how claimed.
Sladkovian - I share your dislike of the Merz remark. This is very definitely not the Germany I knew!
On the recent exchanges between the Americans and the Iranians I assume as a matter of course that the attack on Fordow etc was theatre. A rerun of Shayrat. That was also theatre that gave Trump some leeway with his opponents.
Same with the Iranian retaliatory attack on the Qatar airbase. The Iranians have done an attack like that on an American base before, after the killing of Soleimani. In that case too adequate warning was given. Or almost adequate. The Iranian missiles used were more powerful than had been anticipated so some of the American troops sheltering from the expected attack were concussed.
I did read your comment above. We're seeing another chapter of the tragedy that Gertrude Bell predicted even before Mandate Palestine came into being. Her take on the Balfour Declaration: "It's like a nightmare in which you foresee all the horrible things which are going to happen and can't stretch out your hand to prevent them." Bell saw the Armenian massacres so neither the Nakba nor the atrocities in Gaza would have come as any surprise to her.
Came as a surprise to me! The Israelis I knew and knew of would have been dead against what's being done in Gaza. Crooke explains what's happened in Israel near the start of this video:-
I don’t think Trump ( or rather his managers) will give up on doing a Syria on Iran. It is in such a key position geographically and would clear the way to China. Plus be a thorn in Russia’s underbelly. All this was laid out in the 2009 report from The Brookings Institute and it is playing out as described. I am no lover of despotic authoritarian regimes but US needs to stop interfering. Mind you England becomes more authoritarian and despotic under the Starmer regime. Do you think these are valid reasons why US will continue to pursue regime change or something else in Iran?
"Trump has no plan for Iran. . . ." So what is new? We have not had a constructive plan since the Marshall Plan at the end of the Second World War. George HW did not have a plan, Clinton did not have a plan, Little George had no plan, Obama had no plan, Biden certainly had no plan and Trump is just carrying on that great tradition of American Geo-political ignorance.
Every one of these men's "plan" was to bomb the shit out of some 3rd World country that they perceived as an "enemy'. One thing in common with these Presidents (and others before them) is the one thin they did have is the CIA.
The CIA has a "plan" of sorts. This "plan" has failed miserably for 75 years, yet they continue to revive and re-use the same shitty plan. The CIA plan is and has always been to destabilize and overthrow any government (democratically elected or not) that they deem "unfriendly to and uncooperative with the US hegemony" and install some tin-horned, often military despot in place of the legitimate government. I would ask anyone to provide an example of a successful CIA regime change under this moronic plan.
Every President since Truman has faced this same problem, and all have failed (more or less) to separate their foreign policy decisions from the CIA's "plan", or more appropriately called the "CIA's madness". One of these men was conveniently assassinated because he went too far in his critique of the CIA.
I'm guessing Steve is Cowley and the two Ians will have to fight over who is Bodie and Doyle?
–––
Seems like the Realists were about half a day behind events, but it's almost impossible to keep up with what's going on without it being livestreamed. The 'attack' on Qatar, with forewarning, can be added to the body of evidence that Iran is trying not to escalate but stick to tit-for-tat, leaving an off ramp. I've read that these were old missiles, in the scheme of things. If Iran were serious about hitting US bases they would use more modern missiles such as hypersonics.
It's an interesting 'attack', on Qatar, as it raises the level of paranoia among the Gulf States, putting pressure on them to pile even more demand on the depleted stock of Patriot defences, demand that the US is clearly unable to satisfy. You can almost see Putin's hand in the move. None of the Gulf States are going to let their precious stuff disappear off to Israel. Or Ukraine.
I do not think Russia and China will stand back whilst a key BRICS partner is neutralised. India has betrayed the cause by allowing air access to USA aircraft. The Regime Change pressures from Israel and the West must be a none starter for the majority of the Iranian population. Regime change to what? The son of the last Shah waiting in the USA wings. A return to an opulent life style for the favoured few, where torture and execution are an everyday event with provision of Black Sites for MI5 and the CIA. Sounds a bit like Saudi Arabia with the torture and butchering of Koshoggi , a few weeks after his slaughter our Foreign Secretary was exchanging smiles with the Crown Prince responsible for his death. As in Cuba the only folk clamouring for Regime Change are the dispossessed elite being the Batista relatives and collaborators. I see no trappings of wealth amongst the present Iranian regime. Appearances seem to be rather frugal compared to Western Leaders opulence. It is now quite obvious the West has decided to give Israel a free hand to do what they like. The Palestinian State is out the window. The Palestinians will either be forced out of all of their lands or killed. Labour politician Gerald Kaufman was a Jew. He declared on numerous occasions that Israel was a Terrorist State. He was correct. The UN decision to recognise the State of Israel was an evil act backed by the Colonialist West who were and still are the enemy of all indigenous populations in the Southern Hemisphere. Adherence to International Laws is only forced on the weak oppressed countries whilst the four main villains, the USA, the UK, France and Israel are a law unto themselves. There needs be a day of reckoning. We need a list of all who are complicit in the annihilation of the Palestinians and the theft of their lands. We also need a list of TV and Press media presenters and Journalists who have denied almost any coverage or platforms for debate which included knowledgeable Palestinian representation. The British public are ignorant of the true historical facts about the 100 plus years of suffering they have endured through the deliberate policies of the Pro-Zionist British Media in which we are now all engulfed.
Powerful stuff and hard to disagree.
This is going to become painfully clear to the USA, the UK and the EU over the next few months and years. This madness will not go unanswered by Russia and China, no matter what the US President, the Congress, the Intelligence "experts and their propaganda media spews in public.
The whole buster bombing caper was a ruse. Trump gave them a heads-up about the bombing just like Iran alerted Trump regarding the attack on a U.S. Navy base. The whole thing was performative from start to finish because all sides have run out of run way to conduct this war. Israel is calling it a rap because they are out of air defense missiles, Trump can't broker a deal, and Iran isn't going anywhere. The BB attack made some big holes, but everything had already been moved. Not one click on a geiger counter afterwards meaning that all the enriched Uranium is safe and sound. Chalk it up to rare earths. China clamped down so the West can't build anymore high tech weapons. Game over.
For Israel the game was one strike and done. For America, it was one strike and none. For Iran, it was payback is fun.
Well said
The Wizards of Oz.
Trump seems to only have one plan, which is to do everything to make himself and his buddies wealthier. When he promised the Golden Age to the Americans, he should have attached the list of names for whom he was going to bring about the said Golden Age because he certainly didn't mean all ordinary Americans!
The ceasefire is a massive defeat for Israeli - they were clearly stressed and almost out of defence. But they will be back - otherwise it's curtains for Netanyahu.
Brilliant point about regime change - it is Culture Change. Iran is a completely different culkture to 'the west'. Where have all our decent FO people gone?
Thank you. And I wish I knew!
I'm not sure what "Israel will be back" means.
They have burned their bridges with the vast majority of the global population.
I think I heard the following from Jeffrey Sachs (who is himself Jewish, well, of a fashion, judging by his family name): that war criminal Netanyahu is closely connected to a certain rabbi who believes that Israel had to do something so horrific that the rest of the world would decide to rain hell down on Israel as punishment, which would set off the return of the Messiah (to save them?) in the year 2027, because that was the prophecy from thousands of years ago. I can't quite remember what Sachs said. But it's clearly mad.
I presume the "do something so horrific that the rest of the world would decide to rain hell down on Israel as punishment" is Gaza? Or causing a nuclear 'incident' inside Iran?
This is the problem with Israel. It is run by people who are so evil and so dangerous that frankly locking them up in an institution isn't sufficient. They should just be 'got rid of'.
Warwick Powell on potential Oil Shock. It makes you understand that Trump and Co. are clueless.https://warwickpowell.substack.com/p/oil-shock-20?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1965102&post_id=166693264&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ed69z&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Warwick's a great guy - I trust his analysis
I submitted the comment below elsewhere before listening to the video. But in among a great deal of feet on the ground good sense I noted a sentence that I believe summed up what I regard as the Trump dilemma:-
"Foreign policy always starts and finishes with domestic policy."
And I believe that Trump's seemingly chaotic and unfocused approach does make more sense if one takes account of the serious splits that are in evidence both in his own support base and in the American political establishment. If he is to avoid a setback in the midterms he has somehow to neutralise or reconcile a whole range of opposing factions.
So Trump's foreign policy is not some carefully crafted plan to which he is working. It's a series of catch as catch can improvisations with the sole aim of placing him well for the midterms. Does it make sense looked at like that? So I assume in the comment copied here.
...................................
Ceasefire in the Iranian/Israeli war, they say. If so, well done Trump! Hope his odd series of manoeuvres has drawn the teeth of the Washington neocons. Doubt it though. And Trump has failed to stop the atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Plus whatever the proxy regime in Syria is doing by way of atrocity. So a heavily qualified well done at that, even allowing for the ceasefire looking so frail.
The Israelis have ditched themselves and the West along with them. After the Western support for the Gaza atrocities, the US/ UK and Germany in the forefront, the diplomatic and moral credibility of the West, shaky before, is now gone. We Westerners now have to live in a world the majority of which now regards us as pariah states. Oderint dum metuant is the only foreign policy we have left.
That worked when the Western countries were the the predominant and maybe the only serious military powers. Now we're not, all we have left is US nuclear and David Ignatius' "dirty war". When Merz said recently the Israelis are doing the dirty work for us he probably didn't realise he was condemning himself more than them. What they call the "Global South" did and that does for any lingering pretence that we're upholding a "rules based international order".
That reads straight across to the conflict now drawing to its end in Ukraine. The assassinations in the then self-declared republics and the later assassinations in Russia itself are now admitted even in the Western press to have been run out of bases set up by the West for that purpose from 2014 on. Run by "our babies" as they were termed. Those assassinations mirrored by the assassinations in the Middle East, also now openly admitted.
In addition we can now count four attempts to sabotage nuclear power plants - some also admitted to by the Western press and by the Ukrainians - plus the attempts to seize NPP's and use them as bargaining counters. And the use of container drones or pre-placed drones has been seen against both Iran and Russia. Not one-offs from unaccountable terrorist groups but long planned operations conducted by Western countries. This is "dirty war" at its maximum and there is no longer any pretence that the Israelis or the Ukrainians do it all by themselves.
Also long gone is any pretence that the Ukrainians have been running their war over there. Just as with the Iranian war, we've been up to our necks in that war as well. Western countries, mainly the US and UK, micromanaged that war and did so with a merciless disregard for the proxies. The "Summer Offensive", Krinky, the Kursk offensive, to name three of the worst, were operations planned by our General staffs often against the better judgement of the Ukrainian General Staff. Had any NATO General thrown away the lives of NATO troops like that he would, as was remarked at the time, have been cashiered. But it was only the proxies so the Milley/Cavoli/Radakin trio got away with it. The Ukrainian PBI didn't and the way we threw their lives away in suicidal operations that had not the ghost of a chance of success was a war crime in itself.
"Dirty war", incompetent war, sacrificial war, both in the Middle East and in Ukraine, that's the mess Trump's been left with.
There are observers and analysts, respectable analysts at that and not the information warriors who peddle their "analyses" in the degraded Western press, not the Lees or the Kofmans or the ISW, who assert that Trump is merely another face of a predatory and ruthless Western political establishment. Brian Berletic has been foremost amongst those warning us of that. Berletic's got so much right over the years, and that when few others did, that it's maybe over-optimistic to hope he's got that wrong. But I believe it's still possible to argue that Trump, and very many of those supporting Trump, do not see these endless forever wars as the mission. The mission is to rescue the US from the state of near terminal decline it's got itself into. Forever wars are in the way of that.
So it might be legitimate to see Trump as opposed to the powerful war factions in the US rather than as merely another face for those factions. With the midterms looming he doesn't have much choice but to attempt to placate or outmanoeuvre those factions. It doesn't look pretty but maybe he's doing it the only way it can be done.
Merz's comments left me very very angry, him implying that Israel is carrying out mass murder of Iranian civilians on our behalf, describing it as "dirty work". He's a 'throwback'.
They love a euphemism don't they, our Western 'leaders'. So when assassinations are carried out by anyone else, it's 'terrorism', but when they're carried out by the West or via its proxies, they are described instead as "dirty work" or "dirty war". No, it's terrorism.
Nobody is acting on my behalf when, in order to kill an Iranian scientist, they fire a missile into his block of flats, murdering his wife, all his children, and a good many neighbours.
"NOT IN MY NAME!"
How many times are British citizens going to have to carry that bloody banner around?
As for Trump, those who support him (no matter what) seem to perpetually see some sort of method behind all his madness, and yes maybe he is the ultimate chess grandmaster and is running rings around everyone trying to understand what he's thinking, but is he that good an actor that he can just pretend he's that degree of erratic, but really isn't?
If you do see Trump as a kind of chaotic force for good (which I find hard to go along with), you'd enjoy Gilbert Doctorow's latest appearance on Glenn Diesen's channel. Doctorow suggests Trump has totally outwitted the Israelis and shut down their little war.
See my comments below that video, if you think Trump is THAT smart. Could Operation Night Hammer have been a hoax? I mean, it happened, right, but maybe not how claimed.
Sladkovian - I share your dislike of the Merz remark. This is very definitely not the Germany I knew!
On the recent exchanges between the Americans and the Iranians I assume as a matter of course that the attack on Fordow etc was theatre. A rerun of Shayrat. That was also theatre that gave Trump some leeway with his opponents.
Same with the Iranian retaliatory attack on the Qatar airbase. The Iranians have done an attack like that on an American base before, after the killing of Soleimani. In that case too adequate warning was given. Or almost adequate. The Iranian missiles used were more powerful than had been anticipated so some of the American troops sheltering from the expected attack were concussed.
I did read your comment above. We're seeing another chapter of the tragedy that Gertrude Bell predicted even before Mandate Palestine came into being. Her take on the Balfour Declaration: "It's like a nightmare in which you foresee all the horrible things which are going to happen and can't stretch out your hand to prevent them." Bell saw the Armenian massacres so neither the Nakba nor the atrocities in Gaza would have come as any surprise to her.
Came as a surprise to me! The Israelis I knew and knew of would have been dead against what's being done in Gaza. Crooke explains what's happened in Israel near the start of this video:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3Vrf5c-umY&t=2s&ab_channel=CounterCurrents
The Realists doesn't work, I'm expecting to see Col. Daniel enjoy his day with you three, as I do
Cross my fingers that it was your chapter with Larry Johnson.
Your Patagonian-Spanish follower.
I don’t think Trump ( or rather his managers) will give up on doing a Syria on Iran. It is in such a key position geographically and would clear the way to China. Plus be a thorn in Russia’s underbelly. All this was laid out in the 2009 report from The Brookings Institute and it is playing out as described. I am no lover of despotic authoritarian regimes but US needs to stop interfering. Mind you England becomes more authoritarian and despotic under the Starmer regime. Do you think these are valid reasons why US will continue to pursue regime change or something else in Iran?
"Trump has no plan for Iran. . . ." So what is new? We have not had a constructive plan since the Marshall Plan at the end of the Second World War. George HW did not have a plan, Clinton did not have a plan, Little George had no plan, Obama had no plan, Biden certainly had no plan and Trump is just carrying on that great tradition of American Geo-political ignorance.
Every one of these men's "plan" was to bomb the shit out of some 3rd World country that they perceived as an "enemy'. One thing in common with these Presidents (and others before them) is the one thin they did have is the CIA.
The CIA has a "plan" of sorts. This "plan" has failed miserably for 75 years, yet they continue to revive and re-use the same shitty plan. The CIA plan is and has always been to destabilize and overthrow any government (democratically elected or not) that they deem "unfriendly to and uncooperative with the US hegemony" and install some tin-horned, often military despot in place of the legitimate government. I would ask anyone to provide an example of a successful CIA regime change under this moronic plan.
Every President since Truman has faced this same problem, and all have failed (more or less) to separate their foreign policy decisions from the CIA's "plan", or more appropriately called the "CIA's madness". One of these men was conveniently assassinated because he went too far in his critique of the CIA.
I'm guessing Steve is Cowley and the two Ians will have to fight over who is Bodie and Doyle?
–––
Seems like the Realists were about half a day behind events, but it's almost impossible to keep up with what's going on without it being livestreamed. The 'attack' on Qatar, with forewarning, can be added to the body of evidence that Iran is trying not to escalate but stick to tit-for-tat, leaving an off ramp. I've read that these were old missiles, in the scheme of things. If Iran were serious about hitting US bases they would use more modern missiles such as hypersonics.
It's an interesting 'attack', on Qatar, as it raises the level of paranoia among the Gulf States, putting pressure on them to pile even more demand on the depleted stock of Patriot defences, demand that the US is clearly unable to satisfy. You can almost see Putin's hand in the move. None of the Gulf States are going to let their precious stuff disappear off to Israel. Or Ukraine.