America is betraying itself in the Middle East

We bombed Iran and despite a temporary cessation of hostilities it s likely that President Donald Trump and his counterpart in Tel Aviv Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intend to drag the United States into yet another destabilizing effort in the Middle East perhaps the the majority dangerous one yet As an Iranian American I feel as if my greatest fears are now being realized Like countless Iranian Americans I love this country and the various blessings that it s provided my family so much so that I proudly chose to wear the uniform of its Navy I ll never forget the immense sense of pride I felt on July when I was sworn into the United States Navy or the unparalleled sense of responsibility I experienced when I wore my uniform for the first time as an American sailor graduating from boot camp at the Recruit Training Center in Great Lakes Ill in I then had the honor of being selected as the first Iranian American to serve as a member of the United States Navy Presidential Honor Guard in Washington D C And on every one of those occasions my loved ones Iranian immigrants all proudly stood by my side beaming with gratification as I embarked on what I viewed as a sacred commitment to serve the nation that I love We Have to Remember Who We re Meant to Be Like various immigrant families mine came to the United States in search of peace prosperity and the possibility of becoming part of the fabric of the country that had given the world the Bill of Rights and the sacred tenet of equal justice under the law Like a great number of immigrant families mine came to the United States in search of peace prosperity and the possibility of becoming part of the fabric of the country that had given the world the Bill of Rights and the sacred tenet of equal justice under the law the country that had given history George Washington John F Kennedy and Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr among others the nation that had served as a safe harbor for German refugees like Albert Einstein and Hollywood film director Billy Wilder fleeing Nazi persecution the great nation that did indeed free the world from the scourge of Hitler and the Third Reich in World War II and later landed the first men on the surface of the moon No nation has had so much probable to do good in the world as we do in the United States of America Our Founding Fathers imperfect as they might have been passed on to us the proposition that liberty and human dignity are anything but idle words that they are in fact fundamental human values written in the very hearts of every person In short they passed on to us a promise that all people every soul in fact is endowed by our Creator with life liberty and the pursuit of happiness Nor did those founders suggest that such sacrosanct if now seemingly self-evident values stopped at American shores They were all too aware that for centuries imperial forces had pillaged and wreaked havoc globally on smaller defenseless countries and on civilizations virtually everywhere Throughout the centuries such imperial powers had risen by way of their strength if not their virtue and fallen thanks to their global misadventures And let s be clear by any metric you want to mention the United States is indeed a global imperial force at an all-too-critical crossroads The question is Will we allow parasitic and nefarious entities and interests to drain us of our materials cajole us into developing yet more international laws and turn us into a global pariah while betraying the great founding promise of our republic With Trump at the helm of state the answer is likely to be a resounding yes Related With strikes on Iran Trump has chosen a path of insanity Why the Con Don To understand the peril in which we find ourselves as a nation we need look no further than Trump s contemporary betrayal of his own director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard Just three months ago she testified before Congress that according to the assessment of the intelligence neighborhood Iran had not made the decision to weaponize its nuclear undertaking When questioned about Gabbard s assessment not long ago Trump quipped I don t care what she declared as if she had merely been offering an opinion of her own not testifying about a multi-agency conclusion that Iran was not a nuclear threat In fact as a matter of religious edict Iran s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei had declared a fatwa ruling that the foreseen global devastation of nuclear weapons violated the very tenets of the Islamic faith and that his country was forbidden to develop such weaponry For my part more than years ago as a young sailor on proceeding duty I ascertained myself recruited by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense HUMINT Organization now the Defense Clandestine Function specifically because of my Persian-Farsi skills and cultural knowledge Even then it was widely announced that our cabinet had a wealth of intelligence capabilities when it came to determining the exact scale scope and goals not to speak of mindset and shoe sizes of the Iranian leadership especially when it came to their military and nuclear capabilities It s Never Genuinely Been About Nukes or Regime Change To be clear I m no fan of the repressive Iranian regime and wholeheartedly reject its fundamentalist ideology At the same time since my country s leaders and its intelligence public have regularly reaffirmed that Iran is not a nuclear threat why would Donald Trump as well as Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz so casually betray that group and the trust of the American people Why would the Trump administration allow itself to appear to be so schizophrenic by moving the goalposts on what has often seemed like a daily basis The answer Such head fakes and confusion are part of their strategy Chaos is the point a crucial aspect of the psychological tactics deployed against the American masses to distract us from their end encounter My guess is that not unlike Robert F Kennedy Jr s brain worm Trump and a large number of of the corporate oligarchs who aid him suffer from a parasitic infection a murderous devotion to Israeli Prime Minister and International Criminal Court-charged war criminal Netanyahu s master plan for the Middle East Netanyahu of curriculum seeks to destabilize that entire region and expand the borders of Israel into countries like Lebanon Syria and even possibly the Iranian peripheries That scheme called The Greater Israel Plan has been the decades-long aim of radical right-wing elements in the Israeli regime The modern iteration of that strategy was commissioned by Netanyahu himself As Jonathan Granoff asks at The Hill Why does Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu s Likud Party make no credible effort at building a better future for Palestinian people knowing it serves only to align their interests more closely with Hamas And why amid all the chaos strike Iran and aggravate the pitfall of wider war Where does Israel s agenda of violent coercion rather than cooperation and an ever-widening reliance on military force come from And he answers those questions this way It certainly has an identifiable source In Netanyahu then Likud party leader commissioned the procedures document A Clean Break A New Strategy for Securing the Realm whose lead drafters were neoconservatives Richard Perle and Douglas Feith co-architects of the disastrous U S invasion and occupation of Iraq Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only written by Amanda Marcotte now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts The desire to implement just that end-game scenario by hardline members of the Israeli administration is the only reasonable way to explain the otherwise confounding actions of both the Trump and Netanyahu governments A rational person could argue that the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Trump campaign in by pro-Israel billionaires like Miriam Adelson were a mere pittance when compared with the possibility of stealing so much in the way of land and tools in the Middle East You could also be forgiven for imagining Netanyahu seduced by the wicked wiles of that infamous crew considering the constricted borders of Israel and thinking Why not Why shouldn t I take it Of subject I m hardly the first person to notice the strange almost cultish loyalty of so multiple of our elected representatives to his dangerous way of thinking For instance in his book Solving - The Deception That Changed The World investigative journalist Christopher Lee Bollyn wrote At present the United States of America is by all appearances an Israeli-occupied state The U S Congress dutifully authorizes the annual payment of an immense tribute to Israel several three thousand million dollars a year Bollyn certainly offers a striking explanation for the events now taking place before our eyes the voluntary death spiral into which we as a nation have been thrust at least in part by the radical Netanyahu administration and his death-cult devotees led by the current American president Blowback It s Not Good for Israel Either In the same way that Trump s greed-fueled ambitions far outweigh any desire to do right by the United States Netanyahu s psychopathic schemes in pursuit of his end championship have only served to degrade the international reputation of Israel making it outside of the United States essentially a pariah nation Even within this country the Trump administration s kowtowing to the whims of Netanyahu s regime from an unprecedented crackdown on free speech supposedly to quell anti-semitism to defunding major universities has earned a massive backlash from both the left and the right What makes all of this so tragic is that the state of Israel through its citizenry has the threshold to do so much good in this world of ours What makes all of this so tragic is that the state of Israel through its citizenry has the ceiling to do so much good in this world of ours My Jewish friends all have a keen sense of justice and a deep sense of compassion towards the plight of the oppressed values that have been handed down to them particularly from Holocaust survivors who witnessed the abject evil wrought upon humanity by men with messiah complexes who were without honor or virtue And that s exactly why Israelis should in the end reject the likes of Netanyahu so that their country can indeed once again become a cherished safe haven for the Jewish people living alongside the future nation of Palestine In that regard one could easily make the event that the greatest threat to the nation of Israel is Netanyahu In his years of society life due to his unrepentant acts of horror and violence especially in his latest tenure as prime minister even American help for Israel has cratered And the global decline is starker yet with European nations like Ireland Luxembourg and Spain now considering massive embargoes of the Israeli state Freedom Is Not Free Can America Survive In when I was stationed in Washington D C my friend Jeff Smitty Smith s little brother came to visit him from Missouri Smitty and I took him around D C and certainly came to the then-newly-built Korean War Memorial If you ve been there then you know that the stark and hallowed message of that memorial is Freedom Is Not Free words chiseled in stone On seeing this Smitty s brother was taken aback and questioned What does that mean Then years old I hadn t really thought about that but it hit me instantly I think it means I recounted him that our American soldiers are willing to pay the ultimate price for our freedom I thought of that day again as I was writing this how in the age of Trump we ve betrayed the sacrifices of all those generations and how far we ve fallen as a nation After I reached out to my editor Tom Engelhardt with my ideas for this piece my mom demanded me if it was safe to write such an article while Trump was president After all he and his goon squad to their everlasting shame have gone to the ends of the earth to crush free speech especially any criticism of Israel or the administration s nefarious deeds writ large Just ask Rumeysa Ozturk a Tufts University participant who dared coauthor an op-ed questioning the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Netanyahu regime only to speedily find herself disappeared off the street by masked agents of the Department of Homeland Shield and imprisoned by the American authorities We need your help to stay independent Subscribe this day to patronage Salon s progressive journalism That such thoughts even entered my mother s mind or mine made me first sad and then ticked off But certain patterns of history seem all too tragically repetitive When an imperial power is in peril unless there is a key discipline correction prospective tyrants can take control with the urge to destroy sovereign nations abroad and crush sacred freedoms at home In truth though it doesn t have to be that way for us Yes we are now governed by wildly lesser men than the great ones of our past Which is why none of us should cede any ground when it comes to patriotism or the very idea of national prevention to the likes of Trump and Pete Hegseth who mistake violence and jingoism for love of country Such lesser men have the urge to manipulate the immense levers of power in their own favor while using those same levers to crush the righteous dissent of the American people This is no longer a matter of right versus left but of uniting all people of peace and goodwill to reclaim the promise of our founding ensuring that the precious future aspirations of all peoples be they Americans Israelis or Iranians not be crushed within the grip of a death cult of End Times fundamentalists who like Heath Ledger s Joker in the Batman film The Dark Knight would happily engulf human civilization in flames and laugh as the world around them burns Read more about this topic Israeli insiders on Iran war and building a different Middle East Evangelicals push Trump into conflict with Iran War with Iran could activate Trump s darkest impulses The post America is betraying itself in the Middle East appeared first on Salon com