By Irwin, Jerome

The war drums of a World War III in 2020 continue to beat louder and louder since President Trump’s illegal assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani in Tehran. The escalation of each new day’s recklessly-outrageous pronouncements by Trump and his political allies, that speak out for the imminent need to remove the present government in Iran, feels more and more like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, while each new increasingly more aggressive threat made against Iran’s current government feels more and more like the threats the Austrian Hungarian government once made against Serbia that finally lite the fatal fuse of another earlier century’s Armageddon. The international conflict that in 1914-18 embroiled most of the world’s nations, and led to unprecedented slaughter, carnage and destruction once again feels as if it could happen only disastrously more so.

But where are the outcries by the world’s leaders for an immediate International Criminal Court war crime investigation of President Trump’s blatant violation of international law committed in the willful murder of the official of another government that the current War Powers Act of the United States authorizes the President to take such war-threatening actions.

PROPAGANDA DISGUISED AS NEWS

The World’s corporate press instead has gone out of its way to portray the late General Soleimani as simply another “bad guy” or “terrorist” that the world is now simply better off ever since Trump, acting as if he is the world’s new self-declared loose cannon sheriff, is prepared to take out in the future whomever he deems another ‘bad guy’.

For years, corporate and military think tanks in the US and Israel have been discussing war plans to bring about some kind of regime change in Iran. But China and Russia already are conducting war games in the Gulf of Oman to reinforce the fact that if the US, Israel or any other power in the Middle East is intent upon provoking another world war in the region Iran is not isolated.

A PLA Navy destroyer, an Iranian Navy frigate, and a Russian frigate during joint naval drills in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman. Photo provided by the Iranian Army office on December 28, 2019. Photo: AFP / Iranian Army office

Ever since Trump was elected into office he has been playing ruthless geopolitics with Iran the pawn in a dangerous attempt for world domination. Trump’s actions in Iran and in the Middle East not only continues to threaten China’s new state-of-the-art port at Gwadar but half of its oil supply from the Persian Gulf where the US Navy now controls the sea lanes. Iran represents a major block of any full blockade of the Persian Gulf by the US Navy.

IRAN’S COMPLEX ROLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST & EURASIAN REGIONS

But America’s Saudi Arabia ally and other smaller Gulf States who serve as protectors of the oil-rich Persian Gulf, in effect render it an internal sea of U.S. geo-global and military control. Trump’s reckless saber-rattling, were he ever to act upon it, would seriously upset China’s Belt and Silk Road (BRI) Eurasian integration plan. But Iran is a key geographic node for the BRI-SCO-Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) integration plan. To complicate matters with any attempted overthrow by Trump of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the fact that Iran is also one of the observer states along with Afghanistan, Belarus, and Mongolia who are part of the little known eight members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an Erusian political, economic and security alliance that also includes China, Russia, Indian and Pakistan, all major nuclear powers that would complicate any future military conflict between the US and Iran. SCO, along with the economic BCIM (Bangladesh, China, Indian, Myanmar), with eventual full membership for Turkey and Iran, represents a major integration of the Eurasian region. Trump’s erratic actions therefore represent a serious risk to the stability in the region and world as a whole.

But ever since Trump was elected he immediately showed his right wing, warmongering hand when he condemned the 2015 Iranian Joint Compehensive Plan for Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal, devisively charging that it was “a giant fiction that cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb”. Trump then re-imposed harsh punitive sanctions against Iran’s government and its people. Trump’s immediate perception of Iran from the get-go was one of hostility because he only saw the Islamic Republic s as anti-semitic, religious radical’s who supported terrorists.

AN AS YET UNRESOLVED PRO-JEWISH ANTI-ISLAMIC BIAS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Trump and his administration from the outset have held to a pro-Jewish, anti-Islamic philosophy. Most if not all past Republican and Democratic administrations, in fact, have long held to the same philosophy as have Americans themselves. A glaring example of that inherent bias is reflected by the usual condemning response given to any attempt to ever advocate a pro-Palestinian position regarding the long-standing dire fate of Palestine and Palestine as instead being anti-Semitic rather than pro-Palestinian.

IN WORLD GEO-POLITICS IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT THE OIL STUPID

This dominant attitude by US policy makers and America’s desire for world domination of the region’s oil reserves and the deceit, lies and war crimes that it has committed to obtain that domination can be traced back to the early days when The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was first founded in 1908, following the discovery of a large oil field in Masjed Soleiman, Iran. The first company to use the oil reserves of the Middle East, APOC was renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in 1935, and eventually became the British Petroleum Company (BP) in 1954, and remains one root of BP today.

Before the existence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, for over half a century APOC reneged on every agreement ever made with Iran’s government officials, technicians and engineers; with Iranians paid considerably less than whatever colonial Western interests with profits flowing primarily into European hands. Not only did the British government own a majority share but whatever paltry revenues Iran did ever receive were used to re-pay back debts owed to European creditors, which earlier shahs had incurred. Other cheap concessions in Iran were also obtained by Europeans, to their constant benefit at the ire of Iran’s expense.

But the attempt to further steal Iran’s oil resources began in earnest in 1953 with the overthrow of Iran’s popularly-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeg who, once he tried to nationalize the company, was deposed by right wing elements in the country and, along with a CIA plot, was imprisoned by the Shah Pavalvi, who was put in power by the CIA who placed Mossadeg in prison and then under house arrest until his death in 1957.

AGE-OLD TENSIONS BETWEEN ISLAM AND THE UNITED STATES

Iran’s subsequent alienation from the West finally culminated in 1979 with the election of the current Revolutionary islam Government that was fed up with the constant US meddling in Iranian affairs and, in protest, took over the U.S. Embassy and its 52 workers for 444 days.

With President Trump’s recently planned and perpetrated assassination of Iran’s top General Ossam Soleimini, the most prominent head of Iran’s elite Quds (IRGC) forces, in a US raid at Baghdad’s International Airport, Iran’s Major General Mousavi rightly declared it to once again be “A clear sign of the U.S Government’s terrorist temperament”. The American government’s terrorist-colonial temperament towards Iran can be traced back to those same early days in the 1950’s and the fact that the US has continued to slander Iran’s current rulers, not as the heads of a  bonafide ‘Nation’ but only as temporary, lesser members of a ‘regime’.

The degree to which the unfair prosperity of the former colonial Western powers have been gained up to the present day at the expense of the Iranian people and the theft of their natural resources still awaits a United Nation’s that has yet to address itself to true justice and a fairer distribution of revenues.

Historically, the United States, in conjunction with other Western country’s, has long carried out terrorist activities for whatever self-serving political, corporate, financial interests. Another case, besides the American-CIA led coup that blatantly toppled Iran’s first democratically-elected government, headed by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, was when the US armed the government of Iraq for the purpose of invading Iran and replacing it as the dominant Persian Gulf state that was more to the liking of the United States.

The blatant animosity that the US felt for Iran’s PM Mossadegh an d its democratice form of government was never more apparent when barely only nine days after Mossadegh’s election and his declaration to order a government takeover of the then Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (i.e. British Petroleum (BP), the U.S. government, with the tacit approval of the exiled fascist-leaning Shah, returned the Shah to power who then basically became a puppet of American oil imperialism and, with the aid of the SAVAK, the Shah’s hated ruthless secret police, ruthlessly cracked down on all dissidents and became one of the most hated fascist organizations in Iran, that imprisoned, tortured and killed many political oponents who voiced loud opposition to the SAVAK.

THE UNITED STATES CONSTANT MEDDLING IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Years later, in 1980, American geo-global imperialists heavily armed Iraq and, with the further aid of the CIA’s clandestine activities behind the scenes, continued to arm and conjole Iraq to invade Iran with the idea of eventually replacing Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state more to the liking of the United States. That bloody, savage war continued for eight years before finally ending in a stalemate in 1988.

The same fate has befallen every other developing world government’s democratic leader that ever since has sought to assume to take on the same opposing, dissenting role to Western globilization on behalf of their people, be it: Ecuador’s President’s lenin Moreno or Rafael Correa; Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide; Bolivia’s Evo Morales, or; Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi, to name but a few of the many who have ever tried.

So if the world is ever able to avoid a World War III in 2020 or beyond the past doesn’t bode well anywhere for the world’s democratically-elected developing world governments.


Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American activist-writer who, for decades, has sought to call world attention to problems of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by excessive mega-development and the host of related environmental-ecological-spiritual issues that exist between the conflicting philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Irwin is the author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a spiritual sojurn among the native peoples of North America, and has produced numerous articles pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; native peoples Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC, Israel & U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement; the historic Battle for Palestine & Siege of Gaza, as well as; innumerable accounts of the violations constantly waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda interests against the World’s Collective Soul