-by Frank Macdonald
The most disturbing aspect of US president Donald Trump’s decision to kill Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is trying to understand where the advice to do so came from.
The Ayatollah has been one of the powerful political leaders plaguing this century. But so are the two power-maddened people responsible for pushing our world closer to its closure, to becoming a lifeless orb circling the sun. They are president Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But this was a Washington decision (undoubtedly in consultation with Israel). Since Trump’s second coming, cruelty, indifference, and commercial betrayals have made that nation globally distrusted. And for good reason.
As president, Trump has become the world’s most powerful person, a position he has coveted, and campaign-lied his way into a second term to become just that. As president of the United States of America he became commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world.
Among his first acts of stupidity was to gut the experienced leadership of that military. He fired or dismissed scores of generals and admirals and other officers, intelligent, sane men and women, the people needed to lead a nation that had been credited with, or has taken credit for, acting only in the interests of peace on this troubled planet.
What Trump was left with was what the president wanted. He replaced those well-informed advisors and military and department with a gathering of “yes men” and flunkies, men and women drunk with the power he bestowed upon them. They would do his bidding, bend the knee, as they say, which is to genuflect as Christians, at least Catholics, do when before God.
A few months ago, The United States had begun talks with Iran about containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The talks may or may not have been going anywhere, but what other nations observed was that Iran was not anywhere close to building either nuclear weapons nor developing long-range missiles to deliver them to North America.
So why now?!
Well, according to Secretary of State, speaking like an elementary school child, Marco Rubio told the press, “Israel made us do it!”
Still, so why now?!
The sheer pettiness of Trump draws my attention to the current headlines dominating US media for several weeks, the Epstein Files. Congress, a once powerful arm of the US government, is now nothing but a gelding whose gold-plated balls hang in the Oval Office. It has abdicated its constitutional and elected role, including the one that empowers it to sanction a president who is about to go to war. Not in Trump’s one-man show, obviously.
Yet, pushed by the minority of Democrats, Congress has been going through the motions of investigating those people who have been clients or friends or customers of Jeffrey Epstein, pimp to the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. The list of names has been a shocking revelation to most Americans, as well as the rest of the western world. Among those files, according to investigative sources, Donald Trump’s name appears 38,000 times. (But not once does his name appear in any of the files released so far to the public.)
But the investigation has been pushing ahead, thanks to those Democrats in Congress. Witnesses brought in for questioning have reached much higher into the upper echelons of the American caste system than anticipated.
Last week, former President Bill Clinton appeared before the investigative committee. He didn’t add much to the interview, but what he did do with his willingness to come before the committee was send the message that presidents were not immune from accounting for themselves and/or their behavior regarding Epstein’s parties, populated by young, sometimes very, very young women and girls.
It was just one day after Clinton’s appearance before the investigating committee that Trump, blaming Israel, decided to shift the public’s attention away from the Epstein Files by bombarding Iran, killing Ali Khamenei. (And murdering 115 students in a girls’ school in the process.)
Meanwhile, in Iran, that country had been experiencing massive protests against its government, a government which in turn killed thousands of protestors, according to reports. But how many of those protestors whom Trump gave lip-service support did the Trump/Netanyahu attack kill?
Even the film footage of Iran’s crackdown on its protestors that managed to reach global news agencies bore a strong reminder of the daily news we have been seeing out of the United States; news footage of ICE agents in Minneapolis, also shooting American citizens. (Which raises an aside question: How many of those 1,500 January 6th convicts pardoned by Trump have joined ICE? Just a wonder.)
A few months ago, following the bombardment of Iran’s supposed nuclear development sites, Trump got away with a 12-day fight in Iran. This time, though, Iran’s reaction has broadened to the entire Middle East, their missiles and drones striking several neighbouring Middle Eastern countries.
Where will this Iranian reaction lead? Canada has considerable experience fighting wildfires, has experienced the frequent futility of such that can result in countless lost acres, communities, resources. Reminiscent of those wild fires, current maps of the Middle East show dangerous eruptions capable of spreading across huge parts of the globe.
Understanding that, I hope that as when Canada said no to President George Bush’s idiot invasion of Iraq, that we as a nation are prepared to say no once again.
To follow that ship of fools from the White House into a war led by a senile old man and his amateur genuflectors would be a mistake that gambles with the lives of far too many young Canadians.
As for president Trump, when that war is over, if it is ever over, the Epstein Files will still be waiting to reveal their secrets.